This week we focus on wearable sensors, ChatGPT & Generative AI, FOV Ventures, metaverse harassment, crime in Roblox, gaming startup principles, Futureverse, & more!
Happy 2023! Welcome to Spatial News™ 44, the friendly giant of emerging tech newsletters! “You can get excited about the future. The past won’t mind.” — Hillary DePiano, playwright and author
Here’s a new topic for the new year.
“Wearable sensors are integrated analytical devices that combine typical characteristics of point-of-care systems with mobile connectivity in autonomously operating, self-contained units. Such devices allow for the continuous monitoring of the biometrics of an individual in a non-invasive or minimally invasive manner, enabling the detection of small physiological changes from baseline values over time[…] Yet, there remain numerous challenges and areas for development to realize the full potential of wearable sensing devices.” [Privacy and security *cough, hack*]
Follow the link to read the entire academic article to find out what has been, what is, and what’s coming to the world of wearables.
Fig. 2: The decision-making unit and its working principles. (Image from the study.)
(Thanks to Jan Beger for sharing.)
While 2nd gen wearable tech with its more invasive forms (is it ‘wearable’ if its inside of your body?) already sounds like being/becoming a cyborg, it seems to me that using your Walkman to have music adjust (or maintain) your mood, for example, was already putting us on that path.
And this has been another segment of “My Two Pennies with Joh Orengo”.
Gen. AI for the AI Gen:
And because I’m prone to throwing the kitchen sink at the newsletter and I haven’t written one of these in almost a month, here’s some more ChatGPT/Generative AI news.
Last year, I shared that Teemu actually uses ChatGPT to tell bedtime stories to his daughters. Well, he isn’t the only one. Ethan Levy, podcast host at Deconstructor of Fun, shared his AI generated storybook experiment using ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
Take a look.
Continuing on, Dr. Joerg Storm shares
One of which I already tried out.
Here’s a 51st or rather an entire
to keep kids from being lazy and cheating but also to find creative ways to adopt the emerging technology for both teachers and students shared by Instructional Designer Amany AlKhayat.
Did she say creating your own “Choose Your Own Adventure” story…? <Add heart eyes smiley face emoji>
Enjoy this YouTube video for you to learn how to create or punch up your web designs by using other’s people’s designs (sure, I had a Ronald McDonald smile when I saw my Superman chihuahua idea visualized back in SN #037, but how else can I put it?).
Let the Generative AI arms race begin…
Edit Ballai presents 'NO AI', an AI watermark generator visible to AI bots scraping the Net for images that belong to other people, (because repetition is the mother wolf of learning or something like that) to train with.
Oh yeah, and OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) is getting like 10 billroonies from Microsoft who might just stick the AI tool into Office.
Your move, other side of the arms race.
Metaverse, Metaverse, Metaverse:
New kid metaverse investment fund, FOV Ventures: 2022 Review
Dave Haynes reviews his and Petri Rajahalme’s first year at FOV Ventures.
They started the fund this past March and have already thrown 2.5 millroonies at 9 companies, including Spatial8 ecosystem member, Port 6 (congrats!).
They also launched the DVRSTY initiative “to help accelerate female founders in creating ambitious new companies within the Metaverse and Web3”.
And for 2023 they have their field of view on Generative AI, the Industrial Metaverse, and VR Gaming.
I spy a number of Spatial8 ecosystem members in the graphic below including Immersal and Anarky Labs (both of which exited), BODYSWAPS, MeetinVR, Sense of Space, and, of course, Port 6.
From investMENt to harassMENt… (Did Joh just get woke for 2023? <Insert ‘Not the bees!’ meme here>)
“[H]arassment takes many forms, and physicality is not a key differentiator.”
So how can users protect themselves? Tom Ffiske sets out three approaches:
Empowerment via tools (like being able to block people easily)
Prevention via education (letting folks know how they might harm others in this medium)
Elimination via administration (like booting bad actors who break a platform’s policies).
“The problem steps beyond simple technological fixes or blogs. It's a structural problem, and bold steps in the real world may seep into virtual ones as well.”
(That speaks to my sociological side.)
The same can be said for issues besides harassment. Take a “proto-metaverse” like Roblox whose business model, according to the article below, incentivizes crime. (Though they aren’t the only one as Fortnite and Counterstrike are also shouted out.)
This isn’t the first time Roblox has greased our pages. In SN #037 we shared an article that covered how young devs on the platform claimed they have been financially exploited, threatened, and sexually harassed. This article crawls further along the slimy, criminal underbelly of
Read the full article to see how the little criminals do it.
“This is the reality that faces Roblox Corporation, and any publisher who is cooking up a decentralized, microtransaction-laden parallel universe. [Despite all of the failsafes in place to protect accounts from bad actors, they all bear] witness to the scams, the swindles, and the racketeering, all adding up to a robust criminal underworld that thrives outside of their limited jurisdiction. Roblox needs to reign in these contingencies, because video games should never make anyone grow up too fast.”
But if you’re going to pick up the gauntlet and create a video game company (hopefully one that seriously takes into account the possible side effects of its choices), here are
written by successful gaming entrepreneur and investor Joakim Achrén. Since most of the proto-metaverse companies are sandboxes or MMOs these principles apply (heck, they can apply to startups in general as well).
Here’s one way to kick off a metaverse.
I haven’t heard much about them since this article, but it seems like the New Zealand-based company is trying to keep a low pro. Interesting strategy.
Here’s another strategy: keep saying it until it appears like “Beetlejuice”. (Someone around my age probably already used this one.)
On LinkedIn Diego Borgo shared Credit Suisse’s
Metaverse: A Guide to the Next-Gen Internet?
(I added the question mark.) You could read the report if you’d like, but if you’ve read one of these kind of reports then you’ve read them all really. What I want to highlight here is Dragan Stiglic’s comment.
“Why Metaverse IS NOT ‘Next-Gen Internet’? Simply because: > Internet is Technological Infrastructure, and > Metaverse is (supposed to be) the New Medium It's logical that: A) New medium (content) can never ‘evolve’ into an infrastructure! : ) (Because internet - as infrastructure - is just network of computers). B) Also - an infrastructure - internet can't be ‘immersive’ or ‘3D’. These terms should be associated only with visual content. [Can’t audio also be immersive or 3D? -Joh] To get back to the title, semantically corrected one should read: ’Metaverse: A Guide to the Next Gen Web’[…] ’Web’ is usually used for content on/over internet (infrastructure). Therefore - using ‘Web’ instead of ‘internet’ - would be Ok.
Can I just say ‘this’? I can also stick the ‘Internet vs. Web’ piece I did back in SN #031 here, too, as a refresher. (Or you can just call it the ‘Interwebs’ like Teemu does.)
Dragan continues in a follow up comment,
“I'd additionally propose that there will be no single ‘Metaverse'. Simply because - 'one' of anything - enables centralized structure. To have future structure of this new medium decentralized - there can be only many 'metaverses' - Extended Realities. Many 'small ones' of something different, are always better than 'one big one' - where everything is the same!”
Put this way, saying the Metaverse doesn’t sound very Web3. While saying ‘metaverses’ doesn’t sound very Snow Crash. Maybe we can jettison the word metaverse/s altogether and use ‘virtual worlds’ again since that’s basically what we’re talking about. (Hey, who hit me?) *Sigh* Here’s to another year of trying to pin the tail on the donkey.
Ahh, XR, now there’s a term with a clear definition.
Announcements:
Spatial News™ Pod
You can now binge all six episodes of the first season of Spatial News™ Pod(cast) eXploRing the world of AR smartglasses!
Welcome to AWE Nite Northern XR: Live from the XPAND Conference (Jyväskylä) Thursday January 19th from 18-20:00 EET (Finnish time)! This event will be a hybrid event (livestreamed via awe.live, so you’ll need to register). The live portion will be from Jamk's XPAND Conference (info in Finnish) held at the Digi & Game Center in Jyväskylä, Finland and will focus on the XR ecosystem of Jyväskylä and the business benefits of XR.
Follow the link for more details.
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The Immersive Wire
Want to be briefed on the metaverse each week, with analysis? Check out a concise summary with the Immersive Wire, the newsletter curated by Tom Ffiske every Wednesday and Sunday and enjoyed by thousands of professionals.
Want to try before you ‘buy’? Actually you just did above if you read about metaverse harassment.
Sponsored by The Immersive Wire
Belated Holiday Greetings from flyAR Augmented Reality Studio!
It seems like we have been naughty and a bunch of Santalings have infested our webAR-office, please help us eliminate the little buggers! Scan the round target-image with your device camera and the webAR-experience will load and anchor to it. Ideally, this would be a printed greeting you would hold in your hand or on a tabletop, but now you will need to view it in this sub-optimal way of looking at one screen through another (sorry about that!).
You can also spawn Santalings of your own using this Instagram-filter link or by scanning the attached separate Santaling QR code.
Sponsored by flyAR Augmented Reality Studio
The IP Driven Start-up
Check out the newly released e-book published by leading IP law firm Marks & Clerk and written by M&C’s Robert Lind.
The book highlights the first steps founders of start-ups need to take to secure their IP assets and ensure that maximum value is gained when exiting. The book also looks at the best ways to manage growth and avoid IP assets slipping through the net.
Sponsored by Marks & Clerk
Here’s to a great start to 2023, Spatialists! See you in a couple.