The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) celebrated its 70th year of operation this year. In recent years, the festival has been expanding to include extended reality (XR) content. This year marked MIFF’s most ambitious XR offering to date, with twelve XR pieces presented both in-person and in a digital recreation of Melbourne’s iconic art-deco Capitol…
According to Mark Zuckerberg, the “metaverse” – which the Meta founder describes as “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content – you are in it” – will radically change our lives. So far, Meta’s main metaverse product is a virtual reality playground called Horizon Worlds. When Zuckerberg announced his company’s 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.
Gender in extended reality Kate Euphemia Clark, Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston Gender-based discrimination in mixed reality is a pernicious problem, both at the level of experiencing gameplay, and more deeply at the level of the technology itself. This will only become more pervasive as metaverse products become more entwined in our work and social…
It’s been over 20 years since the original release of Pokémon Red and Green for the Gameboy, in which players travel the virtual environment to catch virtual creatures called Pokémon. Unlike the Gameboy game, where this encounter with Pokémon takes place in the virtual space resembling the Japanese region of Kantō, players of Pokémon Go…