Tag: Virtual Reality

Epic Games CEO Defends Metaverse

by Blockchain News

In a recent tweet, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney pushed back against a recent article from Business Insider that claimed the Metaverse was “dead.” The article, written by PR firm CEO Ed Zitron, argued that virtual worlds had been abandoned by the business world, citing Meta’s Horizon Worlds, Decentraland, and Yuga Labs’ Otherside as examples of metaverses that had failed to live up to their hype.

Sweeney, however, was quick to point out that there are currently 600 million users across virtual world platforms like Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, The Sandbox, and VR Chat. In his tweet, Sweeney sarcastically suggested that the Metaverse was dead and that it was time to organize an online wake for the 600 million monthly active users across these platforms to mourn its passing.

This isn’t the first time that Sweeney has spoken out in defense of the Metaverse. In April 2022, Epic Games announced a $2 billion funding round aimed at accelerating the company’s plans for the Metaverse. The investment included a $1 billion investment from Sony Group and KIRKBI, the holding company behind the LEGO Group.

Shortly after the funding round, Epic Games and LEGO Group announced a long-term partnership to build a “family-friendly” Metaverse. While neither company has revealed any concrete details about the collaboration, LEGO Group CEO Niels Christiansen told the Financial Times earlier this year that the company was looking to announce more details soon.

Sweeney’s defense of the Metaverse is understandable, given that Epic Games is heavily invested in the technology. As the creator of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, two major players in the virtual world space, Epic Games is well-positioned to take advantage of the growing interest in the Metaverse.

It remains to be seen whether the Metaverse will live up to its hype, but with major players like Epic Games and LEGO Group investing billions of dollars in the technology, it’s clear that the concept is not going away anytime soon. As more and more people turn to virtual worlds for work, play, and socializing, it’s possible that the Metaverse will become an integral part of our daily lives.

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Meta’s Virtual Reality Programmers Earn $1 Million

by Blockchain News

In recent years, Meta, the parent corporation of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has indicated interest in expanding into the metaverse. This interest comes as a result of the rapid growth of all three of these platforms. Even though the company’s section responsible for developing the metaverse, Reality Labs, is projected to incur enormous losses of $13.7 billion over the period of 2022, Facebook’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, is unwavering in his dedication to the company’s long-term ambition.

In spite of the company’s financial woes, a recent article published in The Wall Street Journal revealed that total remuneration for Meta’s virtual reality programmers may reach up to one million dollars. According to the claim, which cites unnamed persons with knowledge of the situation as its source, salary packages for metaverse developers at Meta vary from around $600,000 to roughly one million dollars annually.

The intentions that Meta has for the metaverse have been greeted with opposition from several parties, including the Federal Trade Commission, which has filed a lawsuit against Meta in an effort to prevent the latter from acquiring a virtual reality firm. Because of the “serious risks” involved and the potential for damage, two senators from the United States have also asked Zuckerberg not to provide teens access to the metaverse platform Horizon Worlds.

In spite of the difficulties, Meta is carrying out its ambitions in the same manner as before. A court in the United States gave the business in question permission to go through with the purchase in February of 2023. Additionally, on March 13, the head of commerce and finance technologies at Meta made an announcement that the company will be discontinuing its support for nonfungible tokens on Facebook and Instagram for the time being. This decision was made in order for the company to concentrate on finding alternative methods to promote artists, individuals, and companies.

The fact that Meta is so focused on the metaverse brings a variety of possibilities and difficulties to the table for the organization. The company’s high compensation for virtual reality programmers may raise doubts about the company’s spending priorities, given the enormous losses that have been incurred in the company’s metaverse-building section. Despite this, it seems that Meta is resolved to go through with its plans for the metaverse in spite of Zuckerberg’s unflinching commitment to the long-term vision.

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Original Snow Crash Manuscript Goes Up for Auction

by Blockchain News

According to a page that can be found on the official website of Sotheby’s, the original manuscript of Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the novel that is credited with coining the phrase “metaverse,” will be put up for sale. The auction is a part of a series dubbed “Infocalypse” that will take place on February 23. The series will feature both physical and digital goods linked to the well-known novel.

Lot 2 of the series contains the original manuscript that was written. It is “wrapped in original Xerox 4200 Paper,” it is sealed with masking tape, and it has “corrections and notations throughout written in blue ink by Neal Stephenson in his hand.” Additionally, the author has inscribed the title of the book on the spine of the book using a sharpie marker.

In addition, there is a “updated typesetting document” up for auction in Lot 4 of the sale. This is a later version that was revised and supplemented by the author with extra handwritten notations and alterations.

Other real-world items are also being sold at auction as part of this series. These include the original painting that was used as the cover art for the 1993 mass-market paperback edition of the book; a leather jacket that was going to be used in a video promotion for the graphic novel; slides that were used for the concept of the graphic novel; and a real sword that was inspired by the one that the book’s protagonist wielded.

In addition to these tangible artifacts, the series will also include non-fiction tales (NFTs) of digital art that were created in response to the graphic book idea that came before Snow Crash.

The dystopian novel Snow Crash was first released in 1992 and takes place in a world where the majority of people reside in cramped storage facilities. The main character, Hiro, is a pizza delivery worker who needs to battle robbers in order to deliver pizzas to customers. The story chronicles his adventures. Hiro doesn’t have much of a social life since he spends all of his free time in a virtual world known as “the Metaverse,” which is a place where people go to get away from the stress of ordinary life. The inhabitants of the Metaverse, however, are transformed into “nothing more than a jittering cloud of negative digital karma” due to a computer virus. The journey that Hiro takes through the book to discover a cure for the virus is the driving force behind the story’s action.

According to the Washington Post, the book has racked up sales of more than one million copies on the continent of North America alone. Since the publication of the book, enthusiasts of virtual reality have been increasingly using Stephenson’s term “metaverse” to describe the developing virtual world that is being created by virtual reality technology. In recent years, the term has become a buzzword that is frequently searched for online.

The growth of the metaverse has provided some people with new job prospects and has contributed to the transformation of Web3 gaming.

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Donald Trump’s NFT Trading Card Collection

by Blockchain News

In recent days, there has been a significant uptick in the daily sales volume of nonfungible token (NFT) trading cards belonging to the former President of the United States, Donald Trump.

According to market analytics aggregator Cryptoslam, sales volumes on January 18 and January 19 saw surges of 800% and 600% respectively when compared to sales volumes on January 17.

Following reports that the former president was seeking to rejoin Facebook and Twitter in advance of the 2024 presidential election campaign, some experts believe that the rekindled interest could be due to his imminent return to social media networks. This speculation comes after it was reported that the former president was seeking to rejoin these networks.

On December 15th, a collection of 45,000 self-themed trading cards was released, and the price of each card was originally set at $99 USD.

Customers who purchased the collection were instantly placed into a sweepstakes with “thousands of prizes,” some of which included one-on-one meals, zoom calls, and games of golf with the previous President.

They sold out very rapidly and achieved daily sales volumes of more than $3.5 million, but after that, their sales volume sank to a baseline of around $26,000 by the end of 2022.

Yuga Labs, the company that created Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), has blocked the secondary trade of its “Sewer Pass” non-fungible tokens on markets that do not provide full support for creator royalties.

It is possible to mint the Sewer Pass, which serves as an admission pass to its new skill-based non-flip-to-win game called Dookey Dash, but only for those who are members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club or the Mutant Ape Yacht Club.

According to the statistics provided by NFT Price Floor, The Sewer Pass has had a large amount of transactions on secondary markets, with a floor price of 1.81 ETH (which is equivalent to $2,809) and sales volumes of 15,627 ETH (which is equivalent to $24,267,411).

Secondary sales of the collection have already brought in more than $1.2 million in income for Yuga Labs, which is based on a 5% creator royalty charge for the collection.

According to the announcement, “Neopets Metaverse” will be a play-and-earn virtual pet game based on the original, and it would enable users to “grow, care for, personalise, and combat with their Neopets” on the blockchain. The game will be based on the original “Neopets.”

Neopets was established in 1999, and its parent business has high hopes that its newest product, Neopets Metaverse, would reintroduce “the magic of Neopets in a wonderfully fresh light to old-time gamers, as well as recruiting and fostering a new generation of Neopians.”

The news has been received with a lacklustre reaction from the community, with some members speculating that the community’s earlier attempt to create a Neopets metaverse was unsuccessful.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a pair of haptic gloves that they hope will allow users to experience the feeling of touch in the metaverse.

The HaptGlove is an untethered and lightweight glove that will enable users of the metaverse to interact with virtual items in a manner that is much more realistic by communicating a sense of touch and grip. The innovation was developed by HaptLabs.

When users put on the HaptGlove, they are able to sense when their virtual avatar’s hand touches something, as well as tell how hard the object is and what shape it is. This is made possible by the HaptGlove restricting the user’s finger positions, which enables users to sense when their virtual avatar’s hand touches something.

According to NUS, the HaptGlove will also be valuable in other fields, such as education and medicine, since it will enable surgeons to practise their procedures in a “hyper-realistic environment” and will provide students with the opportunity to gain practical knowledge via hands-on practise.

Although the idea of haptic gloves is not new, as for example, Meta is now working on their own version of them, NUS say that theirs is capable of providing users with a far more realistic feeling of touch in comparison to other haptic gloves that are already on the market.

It has been suggested by those working on metaverse games that because virtual reality is such an immature technology, it is difficult to incorporate it into metaverse products. As a result, games like The Sandbox and Decentraland have not yet fully incorporated virtual reality clients into their gameplay.

Rarible, a marketplace for NFTs, made the announcement on January 18 that it was going to extend its marketplace builder to accommodate Polygon-based NFT collections.

The cryptocurrency exchange Binance made an announcement on January 19 that it would be tightening its rules for NFT listings. As part of the new regulations, the exchange will require sellers to complete Know Your Customer (KYC) verification and have at least two followers before they can list their NFTs on the platform.

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Renewed interest in the Metaverse sends Decentraland (MANA) price 75% higher

by Cointelegraph

The influence of blockchain technology on the ongoing digital revolution cannot be overstated as the rise of the Metaverse and the integration of virtual reality is transforming the way humans interact on a global scale. 

One project that is beginning to gain traction in its effort to bridge the old world with the new is Decentraland (MANA), a virtual reality (VR) ecosystem built on the Ethereum network that allows users to create, engage with and monetize digital content through a variety of interactive experiences.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that over the past two weeks, the price of MANA has climbed 70% from a low of $1.70 on Jan. 22 to a daily high of $2.90 on Feb. 1 as the wider crypto market struggled under bearish pressure.

MANA/USDT 1-day chart. Source: TradingView

Three reasons indicating a positive future for the Decentraland ecosystem include the integration of real-world companies into its virtual landscape, a growing ecosystem of celebrities and influencers that are building on the protocol and improvements to the user interface that help improve the overall users experience.

Merging physical and virtual worlds

“If you build it, they will come,” is a well-known phrase from the movie Field of Dreams and it appears as though the old adage has begun to work for Decentraland as its not just everyday users, but established, globally recognized brands that are laying claim to virtual real estate.

As nonfungible tokens (NFTs) exploded in popularity in 2021, some of the digital collectibles found their way into auctions at established auction houses like Sotheby’s where they fetched multi-million dollar bids.

Sotheby’s has now become a fixture in the digital crypto ecosystem by establishing a virtual auction house in Decentraland where they continue to break down the barrier between the physical and the digital world.

And it’s not just auction houses that are buying up virtual land, businesses from various sectors are following the trend to remain relevant with the younger generations as the Metaverse becomes a reality.

Celebrities and influencers embrace the Metaverse

Another reason to be bullish on the future of virtual land projects like Decentraland is the adoption of celebrities and influencers who are looking to establish their brands in VR.

As well-known artists and creators build out their presence in the virtual world, their fan base will be increasingly exposed to the possibilities of blockchain technology and VR which has the potential to usher in a new wave of adoption.

Proof of this comes from events like the Metaverse fashion week in Decentraland which attracted the attention of companies like Vogue Magazine for its ability to showcase the latest trends in fashion to audiences around the world.

Related: Rise of Web3: Metaverse tokens surge as Meta’s share price plunges

The “user experience” continues to improve

A third factor helping to attract users to Decentraland is improvements to the user experience  and and increasing number of cross platform integrations.

The protocol has also added a ‘My Store’ section that allows all users to manage and track their collection and build their personal brand.

According to the most recent update from the developers behind the project, some of the future updates for 2022 include the release of a desktop client, social and voice chat improvements, linked NFTs as wearables, tokenized emotes, smart wearables and a mobile app prototype VR client.”

VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for MANA on Jan. 22, prior to the recent price rise.

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro is also painting a bullish picture for MANA.

The VORTECS™ Score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historical and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points including market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. MANA price. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ Score for MANA hit a high of 81 on Jan. 22, around one hour before the price increased 70% over the next two weeks.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.