In October 2022, Forbes reported that 100,000 people had stopped using Metaās social VR app, Horizon Worlds. This wasnāt surprising, given that Metaās employees apparently weren’t using it either. In internal memos, Vishal Shah, Metaās VP of Metaverse, reprimanded employees for not using (and not āfalling in loveā with) the app, arguing that āthe aggregate…
Most people who spend significant time with virtual reality become familiar with the queasiness that VR experiences can leave you with long after you remove the headset. In my case, I can locate this feeling in a very precise spot in my stomach: a knotted, vaguely poisoned sensation that sometimes takes hours to wear off….
Anyone who studies or talks about augmented reality and virtual reality technologies will inevitably get asked the question: but how is that augmented/mixed/virtual reality? Isnāt that more AR than VR? How one talks about these technologies is continually evolving. With every application/device that is released a version of this debate gets kicked up again, whether…
Inevitably, a big 2023 story will be Appleās release of their long-rumored XR headset. For years, news and tech websites have published minutiae of the project, quoting supply chain analystsā claims it will be āthe most complicated product Apple has ever designedā as well as āa game-changer for the headset industry.ā While fans may be…
Fifteen years ago, a grad student named danah doyd was finishing off her dissertation titled Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics exploring how teens were leveraging newly forming social media to live their lives in novel ways; boyd spotted people and publics coming of age in new ways. Itās useful to…
We have no way of knowing exactly what form the metaverse will eventually take but that doesnāt mean we canāt start regulating it. What we know about the metaverse The term metaverse might invoke visions of gaming platforms and virtual worlds in which people socialise in real time as unique digital avatars. Platforms such as…
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the āmetaverseā ā which the Meta founder describes as āan embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content ā you are in itā ā will radically change our lives. So far, Metaās main metaverse product is a virtual reality playground called Horizon Worlds. When Zuckerberg announced his companyās metaverse push in October 2021, the prevailing sentiment was that it was something nobody had asked for, nor particularly wanted.
A growing body of research has documented multiple challenges with commercial content moderation conducted by social media platforms today, from appalling working conditions for moderators who are overwhelmingly located in the Global South, to the issue of biased algorithms, and the lack of transparency and accountability in moderation decisions. Moderation is no doubt an incredibly difficult task.
It’s been over 20 years since the original release of PokĆ©mon Red and Green for the Gameboy, in which players travel the virtual environment to catch virtual creatures called PokĆ©mon. Unlike the Gameboy game, where this encounter with PokĆ©mon takes place in the virtual space resembling the Japanese region of KantÅ, players of PokĆ©mon Go…