Plans for Disney’s metaverse strategy remained sketchy a year after the division was created, although the company had hinted that the new technology might have applications in fantasy sports, theme-park attractions and other consumer experiences.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-eliminates-its-metaverse-division-as-part-of-companys-layoffs-plan-94b03650?st=zjf2xhx97s52p1e
Category Archives: video games
Museums in the Future as Depicted in Popular Videogames: Looking Forward to Visit or Better Run-run Away?
This article relates to the role of museums in popular videogames as a possible indicator of how museums will be (or not) in the future. It aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the future of museums in the physical and the digital world. We focus on how the future of museum is represented in popular videogames. The spark of inspiration for this article was a presentation done by the authors for the “The Future Museum in the Future City” (authors, 2021) in Qatar, 2021. It is part of an ongoing research project on museums in popular videogames (MPVG), run by the Museology Research Laboratory of the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece.
https://jfsdigital.org/articles-and-essays/2023-2/museums-in-the-future-as-depicted-in-popular-videogames-looking-forward-to-visit-or-better-run-run-away/
This is Meta’s AR/VR hardware roadmap for the next four years
During an internal presentation, Meta execs laid out plans for three new Quest headsets, AR glasses in 2027, and a ‘neural interface’ smartwatch.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23619730/meta-vr-oculus-ar-glasses-smartwatch-plans
Pro-Gamers Tackle Virtual Clothing Waste with Vanish ‘ReSkin’ Challenge
Vanish, the Reckitt garment care brand committed to encouraging consumers to re-wear their clothes and raising awareness of clothing waste, has partnered with some of Europe’s biggest gamers and streamers to expand its #ReWear message into the world of gaming – hacking the virtual ‘fast fashion’ trend to drive awareness of the real-life clothing crisis in new and super-engaged audiences.
#ReSkinChallenge sees high-profile gamers including CaptainPuffy, ShivFPS, FreyzPlayz and fifakillvizualz – who combined boast more than 4.4m Twitch subscribers and are known for their frenzied consumption of the latest skins and in-game clothes – uncharacteristically revert to a basic, default skin for a whole week. If this didn’t raise enough questions from their communities – and it did – they also wore the same physical outfit on their streams for the duration of the challenge, starting conversations among their fans.
https://www.lbbonline.com/news/pro-gamers-tackle-virtual-clothing-waste-with-vanish-reskin-challenge
Roblox Is Bringing Generative AI to Its Gaming Universe
Technology dubbed generative AI has captured attention and investment over the past year by showing that algorithms can produce seemingly coherent text and aesthetically pleasing images when given a short text prompt. The technology relies on AI models trained with lots of data, in the form of text or images scraped from the web, and is also at work in the viral chatbot ChatGPT. Some AI researchers are experimenting with similar techniques for generating video and 3D content, but this is mostly at an early stage.
https://www-wired-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.wired.com/story/roblox-generative-ai-gaming-universe/amp
Out-Game Flowers
Out-Game Flowers’ digital bouquets—15 large with audio and 150 small bouquets—are composed of flowers from the world’s most popular video games, including The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Minecraft, and more. Jill Magid traveled through these iconic digital worlds, plucking stems from each virtual landscape to craft her first NFT-backed artwork. In their respective worlds, these pixelated plants and photo-realistic flowers are tied to complex economies that drive their value in-game and out.
Magid’s work shines a light on the power structures that create and monetize these items. Extracted from their walled gardens and assembled into a bouquet, she introduces the flowers into another closed system—a digital artwork with a secured provenance through blockchain technology. By assigning each flower an out-game value based on its worth in-game, she challenges us to define our own metrics of worth — based not just on economics, beauty, and utility, but also on nostalgia, speculation, and taste.
https://www.artwrld.com/projects/out-game-flowers
Dove Pushes for Diversity of Beauty in Female Game Characters
Dubbed “Real Virtual Beauty,” the initiative launched last week, underpinned by Dove research that shows 60 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion women and girl gamers feel marginalized by the current lack of diverse avatars.
https://musebycl.io/gaming/dove-pushes-diversity-beauty-female-game-characters
The Metaphysical War For The Metaverse We’re Already Losing
Virtual worlds should be as much of an expression of the people designing and living in them as possible. With the creator tools we already have and semi-open platforms like Roblox or Minecraft we can build pretty much anything within them. You could argue that even Minecraft obeys a little too much to the laws of the physical world but it wasn’t built as a metaverse platform so you can forgive it a little.
https://medium.com/@theo/the-metaphysical-war-for-the-metaverse-were-already-losing-ba576339a3e2
The Gamification of Humanity
When did daily life come to feel so much like a competition? In “You’ve Been Played,” Adrian Hon traces how and why gamification — the application of video-game principles like experience points, streaks, leader boards, badges and special challenges — has come to suffuse nearly every aspect of human existence in the digital era. Examples range from exercise (Nike, Strava), housework (Chore Wars) and brushing your teeth (Pokémon Smile), to — more disturbingly — going to school (ClassDojo) or work (Amazon warehouses’ PicksInSpace).
Hon slips easily between the perspectives of expert, enthusiast and critic. An education in neuroscience informs his explanation of the behaviorist underpinnings of gamification. And in his capacity leading the games company behind the popular running app Zombies, Run!, much of his working life is spent tussling with these issues. Some of the book’s most insightful moments come when Hon discusses how his team considers ethics and user experience when deciding how much to use gamification tricks in their own work.
https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/books/review/youve-been-played-adrian-hon.amp.html
Chief Metaverse Officers Are Getting Million-Dollar Paydays. So What Do They Do All Day?
Pressure to keep up with tech trends has spawned new C-suite titles for decades. The 1980s saw the rise of the chief information officer, who understood the inner workings of IT and how it applied to broader business strategy. Later, chief technology officers emerged as big-picture thinkers who could evaluate developing technologies and how they might be used in the long term. More recently, chief digital officers have sought to modernize outdated business practices so companies don’t get “Amazoned,” or steamrolled by a nimbler, more tech-savvy rival.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-22/what-is-a-chief-metaverse-officer-and-do-you-need-one
Analyzing Trends with Tim Stock 