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Tag: VR

  • Facebook’s Oculus acquisition turns 10 | TechCrunch

    Facebook’s Oculus acquisition turns 10 | TechCrunch

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    Every year, Time Magazine issues a list of the 200 best inventions of the past 12 months. Frankly, I don’t know how the editors do it. The dirty secret of this job is that true, game-changing inventions rarely cross your desk. In fact, you’re extraordinarily lucky if you average one a year.

    Oculus’ Rift prototype felt like just such a device when it first crossed my radar more than a decade ago. More than anything, the system resembled a hastily duct taped ski mask. It was a remarkable presentation, in hindsight – an all too rare glimpse into a plucky entrepreneurial tech spirit. It evokes a flood of romanticized images of Homebrew Computer Club nerds soldering together circuit boards in South Bay garages.

    A decade has now passed since Meta (née Facebook) announced plans to acquire the startup for $2 billion. A decade after the deal was announced, it’s safe to say that the VR headset hasn’t changed the world we live in. But there’s always that little-discussed middle ground between transforming the human condition and just an abject dumpster fire of failure. So, where, as April 2024, does the Facebook/Oculus deal rank?

    “Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won’t be changing and we hope to accelerate,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote at the time. “After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”

    Image Credits: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile / Getty Images

    Facebook’s founder referred to the Oculus Rift as a “new communication platform,” comparing it to computers, the internet and smartphones before it. He suggested that the “dream of science fiction” was now a reality – one that Facebook had suddenly cornered. It’s hard to overstate how transformative Zuckerberg believed the technology to be. It was, after all, the gateway to the metaverse.

    Should anyone doubt the company’s commitment to the concept, it rebranded itself as “Meta”, killing off the Oculus brand the same afternoon. Surely social media platforms wouldn’t dominate online discourse forever. They would eventually give way to something wholly new. In spite of the $500 billion rebrand, Zuckerberg and co. never did a particularly good job defining the metaverse. They simply insisted that it was an exciting thing that you should be excited about.

    Mark Zuckerberg avatar

    Image Credits: Facebook

    I suspect that – were you to perform a blind poll – the majority of people who are familiar with the term would describe something like Second Life (which has to be on its fifth or sixth life by now). Marc Zuckerberg is probably as guilty as any single person for perpetuating that perception, happily working his hardest to make the company’s Horizon Worlds platform synonymous with conceptions of the metaverse. Remember what a big deal it was when it finally got legs?

    So where are we now? It’s complicated, obviously. From a purely financial standpoint (the only language shareholders speak), things are bleak. Between the end of 2020 and the first quarter of 2024, the company’s metaverse division lost $42 billion. That’s roughly 21x the price it paid for Oculus, not adjusting for inflation. That’s a little over one-fourth a Zuckerberg (not adjusted for inflation – i.e. BJJ-related bulking).

    Why is Meta hemorrhaging that much money? The simple and cynical answer is, because it can. The corporation made $134 billion in revenue and $39.1 billion in net income last year. That’s not to say that having a division that’s $42 billion in the red over four years doesn’t impact its bottom line, of course. But Facebook believes it’s playing the long game here.

    Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro headsets

    Image Credits: Brian Heater

    It’s widely believed that Meta sells its Quest headsets at a loss. This is despite the fact that the company has easily the best manufacturing scale in the industry. It doesn’t take an MBA to understand that this is a terrible short-term strategy, but Meta believes it’s playing the long game. The end game is getting enough of these devices into people’s hands to reach a critical mass of adoption, word of mouth and developer content. If you can’t do that while turning a profit, well, you gotta spend money to make money, right?

    It continues to be a massive bet. How long the company is willing to play the long game here, however, largely comes down to how much patience Meta’s shareholders have. If Facebook can truly saturate the market and corner content, it will be better positioned to capitalize on mixed reality’s hypothetical exponential growth.

    It’s already had the impact of edging the competition out of the market and generally sucked the air out of the room. As an HTC Vive exec told me back in February at MWC, “I think Meta has adjusted the market perception of what this technology should cost.” Other companies can’t compete on price and content in the customer space, so the savviest of the bunch have moved over to enterprise, where clients have much deeper pockets.

    If you judge the company’s journey in terms of market share, it’s been a wild and unprecedented success. According to IDC, Meta had a 50.2% share as of Q2 2023. Of course, we’re not talking about smartphone figures here. As of early 2023, Meta was estimated to have sold 20 million headsets. At the end of the year, the Quest 2 was still outselling the Quest 3. One part of the Meta thesis has absolutely played out: people are looking for an inexpensive on-ramp to the technology.

    Image Credits: Brian Heater

    When Apple announced the Vision Pro at WWDC 2024, I received a flood of unsolicited comments from VR headset manufacturers all stating they saw the iPhone maker’s headset as validation for the space. You can cynically (and correctly) point out that everyone says some version of that when Apple enters their vertical, and many of them don’t make it out the other side in one piece.

    But I concur that Apple throwing its hat in the ring after decades of failed VR attempts does constitute validation. That’s absolutely the case for Meta. Zuckerberg happily used the opportunity to point out that his headsets were 1. Significantly less expensive and 2. didn’t require an external battery. Meta also had a large head start in terms of VR specific content. He also, naturally, insisted that his product was vastly superior in spite of the signifantly lower price point.

    “It seems like there are a lot of people who just assumed that Vision Pro would be higher quality because it’s Apple and it costs $3,000 more,” he noted in February, “but honestly, I’m pretty surprised that Quest is so much better for the vast majority of things that people use these headsets for, with that price differential.”

    Sorry, Zuck, the Vision Pro is the more impressive piece of technology. Whether it’s $3,000 more impressive is a different conversation. What I can tell you right now is that the pricing gulf puts these products into different categories. Apple is targeting business customers at that price point, while Meta is far more committed to democratizing access by – again – losing money on a per-unit basis.

    It’s still early days for Vision Pro – and, really, mixed reality in general. If it ever does truly become ubiquitous, it will be the result of countless hard-fought battles. As we mark a decade since the Oculus acquisition, I find myself returning to the above Zuckerberg comment, “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”

    Re-reading this from the vantage point of 2024, it strikes me that he was right about the content, but not necessarily the delivery mechanism. The past four years have dramatically impacted how we interact with each other, the world and day-to-day activities. The pandemic destigmatized so many virtual activities. But for the time being, no headsets are required.

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    Brian Heater

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  • Immersive gaming and fitness apps are the key to Vision Pro’s consumer appeal | TechCrunch

    Immersive gaming and fitness apps are the key to Vision Pro’s consumer appeal | TechCrunch

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    The foundational vocabulary of any new medium is inherited from that of its predecessor. Take, for instance, the early days of television, when so many shows were effectively radio programs caught on film. The new medium’s success is dependent on the development of its own vocabulary, distinguishing itself from earlier paradigms.

    In the case of Vision Pro, the connection to a predecessor couldn’t be more apparent. A major piece of Apple’s content strategy is the ability to run iPadOS apps on the headset. When searching the visionOS App Store, users choose between content developed specifically for the platform and that created for the tablet. It’s similar to the approach the company has taken to building out the Mac App Store, which draws from both iOS and iPadOS apps.

    While 600 is a good number of “optimized” apps for the launch of a first-gen product, the availability of iPadOS content really bolsters the essentials and gives developers some extra time to build something custom while bigger names like YouTube waffle on their objectives. As far as what constitutes “optimized,” we’re talking about a wide spectrum. That could mean something as simple as a change to the UX to reflect the Vision Pro’s hand tracking. It could also mean something far more immersive.

    I understand if you didn’t make it all the way through last week’s 6,000-word review, so here’s a bit of the TL;DR: the Vision Pro will live or die on the backs of developers. As I noted previously, the first iPhone was undoubtedly a revolutionary piece of hardware, but it was the iPhone 3G’s App Store that really blew the industry wide open. At this point we all fundamentally understand that a hardware platform is only as good as its content, and Apple only truly demonstrated how capable its smartphone was by opening it up to developers.

    Truly immersive experiences are very much in the minority in the Vision Pro’s current state. That’s not a surprise, really. While development has — to a certain extent — been open for months now, I’m sure many parties have been waiting for launch to gauge the true interest of both the public and their developers.

    This isn’t to say that immersion isn’t present in the current offering. For one thing, it’s big into Environments — a core feature of visionOS that serves as a kind of immersive desktop wallpaper, putting you on the moon, in a desert or at the edge a volcano. Experience Dinosaurs, meanwhile, does a fine job leveraging the knowledge of the Prehistoric Planet team to create one of Vision Pro’s most compelling demos. It’s content like this that demonstrates potential that can be exploited by future developers.

    One of the device’s initial creativity bottlenecks, however, is where Apple chose to focus its initial push. In my review, I hammered the idea of “infinite desktop,” a play on the phrase “infinite canvas” that gets to the heart of the “spatial computing” experience Tim Cook has pushed since day one. At its core, Apple sees the device as the next step in a journey that began with the Mac decades ago. For now, it’s designed to play nicely with desktops and laptops, but it’s easy to imagine a future where (should things play out the way the company hopes) Apple’s primary PC is one you strap to your face.

    This push was a surprise to many at last year’s WWDC. I suspect it also left plenty of fans cold. A 360 degree desktop is compelling to sum, but there’s a sense it which it’s almost a commoditization of the form factor that’s been sold to us as the future of entertainment for decades. A big part of this push is obvious: the first-gen product is $3,500. Enterprises have significantly deeper pockets than consumers. How do you sell to them?

    Training apps are a big piece. If a company believes it can save money on employee training down the road, it will happily shell out the upfront cost. Rendering is a piece as well — look to apps like JigSpace as an example of real-time 3D modeling. Imagine, for instance, building a 3D render of a car in 3D design software, exporting it and then being able to walk around it. The third key point is productivity. That’s where spatial computing comes in. This means products like Microsoft Word and applications like mind mapping, which are traditionally constrained by PC displays.

    Entertainment is here too, but it largely feels secondary to visionOS in its current form. Part of the answer can be found in the product’s name. Given Apple’s current product line structuring, “Vision Pro” implies the future existence of an “Apple Vision” — i.e. a headset for consumers priced well below $3,500. If you know anything about hardware, you know how much first-gen products absorb R&D costs, as well as smaller-scale manufacturing. The bleeding-edge components such as 4K eye displays way heavily on production costs until scale increases.

    So, you position the product as premium and you sell it to enterprises. Games and movies are present because they can’t not be. The idea of a “work machine” doesn’t exist the way it did decades ago. The iPhone played a huge role in blurring that line, for better or worse, making the productivity machine its own distraction device. If you bring your work laptop on a business trip, odds are pretty good you’ll fire up Netflix at some point.

    Perhaps the more accessible version of the product will find Apple shining more of a spotlight on immersive entertainment. As it stands, many of the experiences are iPadOS apps that are played on a virtual large screen, rather than something that takes advantage of immersion and hand tracking in a way that couldn’t be replicated in the medium that preceded it. For now, it seems, there’s a reason Apple doesn’t want people calling the Vision Pro “VR.”

    This morning, I played a few rounds of Synth Riders. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s also available on Meta Quest — that’s an easy enough port. In fact, many of the first immersive entertainment experiences will likely take this route. If you’re already developing for VR, why not tap into this burgeoning market? Synth Riders is a rhythm game not fundamentally dissimilar from Rock Band, wherein your hands (or controllers in the case of the Meta Quest) control two spheres that rack up points as you correctly move them to the beat of a synthwave track.

    I found it mesmerizing. It’s also the closest I’ve come to using a fitness app on the device. This is due to limitations with headset weight, price and that darn battery pack. The Vision Pro isn’t designed for you to jump around and get super sweaty in. This does, however, feel like a blind spot for a company so focused on the space through the Apple Watch and Fitness+ app. Maybe as Apple brings the weight down and finds a more manageable battery solution? Again, many of our Vision Pro conversations are very much focused on the first-gen hump.

    Ultimately, however, broader consumer appeal will hinge on two key things: 1) Bringing down the cost and 2) Content. Both will make or break future devices’ mainstream appeal, and whether Apple currently recognizes it or not, entertainment and fitness will need to play a key role in that journey.

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    Brian Heater

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  • Disney offers an elegant solution to VR’s movement problem | TechCrunch

    Disney offers an elegant solution to VR’s movement problem | TechCrunch

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    Remember the Virtuix Omni? I’ll never forget trying out an early version of the virtual reality treadmill in a hotel suite many E3s ago. The system, which features a concave platform and slippery shoes, was clever enough to influence Ready Player One’s take on the space. The electronics-free system finally started shipping earlier this year.

    One thing you can say about VR is that it’s inspiring a lot of creative solutions to different issues around the tech. Movement is a major one, of course. You lose some of that visceral sensation when your FPV avatar is cruising around while you’re just sat there on the couch.

    For the foreseeable future, however, all solutions will have some key drawbacks. Price is one in Omni’s case, and likely will be for a lion’s share of these sorts of peripherals. Other issues are size (it’s huge) and sound (it’s very noisy).

    HoloTile — which recently made its YouTube debut at the end of a video honoring Disney Research fellow, Lanny Smoot – is an extremely clever and honestly quite elegant solution to some of these issues.

    The system is comprised of hundreds of small, round “tiles” that look to be about the size of a silver dollar. Each serve as a kind of mini, omnidirectional treadmill. Working together, their only task is to stop the walker from leaving the pad.

    “I can walk on this omni directional floor in any direction I want,” Smoot says in the video. “It will automatically do whatever it needs to have me stay on the floor. And what’s amazing about this is multiple people can be on it and all walking independently. They can walk in virtual reality, and so many other things.”

    The ability to support multiple people is, perhaps, the most impressive bit of all of this. Of course, plenty of questions abound, including top speed (Smoot is moving very deliberately in the video) and how much weight they’re capable of sporting. The big caveat to all of this is that the HoloTile appears to very much be a research project at the moment.

    One also assumes that a system like this in its current form would be prohibitively expensive for home use. If it’s going to see the light of day, it seems likely that it will be as part of a Disney Parks VR experience.

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    Brian Heater

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  • The first annual VTuber Awards was a win for VR | TechCrunch

    The first annual VTuber Awards was a win for VR | TechCrunch

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    On stream, Filian took the stage at the center of a colossal arena, lit with violet spotlights and surrounded by crowds of fans holding lightsticks. The streamer opened the show dressed in a vivid purple skirt, magenta bow tie and high white boots that matched her jacket — a ritzy version of her avatar’s usual sailor-style school uniform.

    “Please be patient with us. This show has a lot of tech … it’s as live as it comes,” Filian said during her opening remarks. “It’s not rocket science, but it could be.”

    Filian, a streamer with over 766,000 Twitch followers, hosted the first annual VTuber Awards last weekend. Like many VTubers — a portmanteau of “virtual YouTuber” — Filian keeps her identity secret, and instead of showing her real face, streams using a digital model.

    Filian was physically hosting the ceremony from an enclosed green box in WePlay’s Los Angeles studio, a space typically used for esports events. The virtual reality awards show is one of the first of its kind — both for WePlay, a production company that has mainly focused on hosting and producing in-person gaming tournaments in its Los Angeles and Kyiv studios over the last decade, and for VTubing, which has grown from a niche streaming genre to a billion-dollar industry in recent years. 

    The show was a first for VTubers and WePlay, the company that produced the live VR event. Image Credits: The VTuber Awards

    The event blended WePlay’s physical production space with a VR stadium. Image Credits: The VTuber Awards

    VTubers have been broadly recognized in other shows; the Streamer Awards includes a category for “Best VTuber,” and at this year’s Game Awards, VTuber Ironmouse made history by being the first animated streamer to win Content Creator of the Year. But neither award show accounts for the skills unique to VTubing, like avatar design, technological innovation and hosting virtual events. 

    The award for best tech VTuber, for example, went to Vedal987, a streamer and programmer who developed the chatbot VTuber Neuro-sama, which uses text-to-speech and AI to play games and communicate with Twitch viewers. 

    “In every awards show, VTubers are often a footnote or sometimes treated as a unique, strange thing, and so the idea for these awards is like, ‘Why not have a show for ourselves?’” Filian told TechCrunch in an interview in the days leading up the show. 

    VTubers, who typically present with animal ears, exaggerated features or raunchy outfits, are often written off as lewd anime streamers. The genre started in Japan in the early 2010s as an offshoot of idol culture, and took off outside of Asia when VTuber production company Hololive debuted its first English-speaking streamers. Filian noted that the awards show also acknowledges VTuber viewers as much as individual content creators, since fans drove the genre’s breakthrough to mainstream recognition. In addition to the category for most dedicated fanbase, the VTuber Awards also includes a category for VTuber clippers, who clip, curate and post VTuber content online.

    “And so what these people would do is post to YouTube, and in many ways, they created a massive demand for VTubers,” Filian continued. “When VTubers finally came to the west, it was primed to explode. It can’t be overstated how important VTuber clippers are and were to VTubers being where they are today … In many ways, VTubers are typically a lot more involved with their fans than a lot of other creators are.” 

    The show was a technical feat as well. The five-hour event married WePlay’s physical production space with countless hours of engineering and design. Though WePlay has used augmented reality elements in previous live productions, the awards show was the first fully virtual event that the company has produced. WePlay’s Chief Marketing Officer Iryna Chuhai pointed out that for the film and video game industry, using this scale of mocap technology is an “ordinary event.” Incorporating it into a live production, however, is more challenging.

    Planned in partnership with Mythic Talent, a management company that represents VTubers including Filian, the event was initially going to take place on a physical stage with “screens and graphics” to accommodate VTubers, WePlay’s Chief Visionary Officer Maksym Bilonogov told TechCrunch before the show. 

    “But then we realized it’s not the way, it’s not the right philosophy,” Bilonogov said. “Because it’s VTubers, it should be a fully virtual space. So we started building the technology to make it real, so the real cameraman using the real camera can shoot the virtual world.” 

    Each physical camera could capture multiple angles in VR. Image Credits: WePlay Studios

    The stream depicted a vast arena, but Filian’s avatar was essentially confined to a smaller circular stage surrounded by screens, which was a virtually constructed version of WePlay’s physical production stage. In real life, camera operators controlled three cameras linked to virtual angles, so that each physical pan, tilt and focus pull was reflected in the virtual broadcast. The physical operators could switch between multiple different angles in the stadium using iPads connected to the cameras, so that the production appeared to use at least a dozen cameras instead of just three. The physical lights on the stage were connected to corresponding virtual lights, so that WePlay could control the stadium’s spotlights by activating the real ones. WePlay also connected Resolume, a software for live event visuals, to the virtual venue to control the graphics that played on the VR stage’s screens. 

    “From a visual perspective, from the technology, it’s fully new for us,” Bilonogov continued. “We’re learning a lot. I can say that it’s the hardest technological project for WePlay. It’s fully virtual reality with virtual cues.”

    Motion capture technology is not new to the film and video game industries, but incorporating it into a live streamed event was a challenge. Image Credits: WePlay Studios

    In the control room several feet away, crew members juggled dozens of screens, which depicted Filian’s avatar on the virtual stage, IRL Filian in her mocap suit and visuals of other VTubers, who called in throughout the stream to host the pre-show and present or accept awards. 

    VTubers who appeared in the pre-show or presented awards appeared to be at the venue on the stream. They pulled it off by co-streaming Filian’s broadcast and giving WePlay access to their streams so that their commentary could be seamlessly integrated into the show. VTubers who appeared on the stream to accept their awards appeared on screens above the virtual stage. WePlay organized behind-the-scenes logistics with other streamers using Discord — not for any unique platform feature, Chuhai said during a walkthrough of the studio, but because it’s already a “familiar tool for all these gamers.” 

    Like many VTubers, Filian is fiercely protective of her privacy. A crew member stood in for photos. Image Credits: WePlay Studios

    Filian, meanwhile, hosted from a separate green screen room containing only a teleprompter. Markers on Filian’s motion capture suit dotted her limbs and fingers, capturing her body movements, while an iPhone rigged to a headband strapped around her forehead tracked her facial expressions.

    There is no industry standard for VTuber software, but many VTubers including Filian use models designed in Unity. WePlay’s virtual stadium was built using Unreal Engine, which isn’t as commonly used by VTubers. The company ended up rebuilding Filian’s avatar from scratch. Small details that would take place during a physical awards broadcast, like a mid-show outfit change, were “hard lifts,” Filian said. Switching from one outfit to another, like Filian did during the stream, involved a whole new set of animations. A more voluminous skirt, like the one Filian wore at the start of the show, wouldn’t move the same way as a form-fitting gown. 

    A crew member standing in for Filian tests the mocap suit and helmet. Image Credits: WePlay Studios

    Like many VTubers, Filian is fiercely protective of her anonymity and did not want to be photographed, so a crew member stood in for behind-the-scenes photos of the motion capture getup. Although everyone involved in the production promised to maintain her anonymity, Filian said it was “really unusual” for her to perform as her VTuber persona in front of actual people. 

    “There’s a phrase from Elden Ring that’s called, ‘Touch grass,’ and I don’t do a lot of that. And I do even fewer interactions like, outside in general. And I especially don’t do interactions where I’m making content while there are people around me,” Filian said in a call a few days after the event. “When you’re an actual human acting like an anime character, it’s very awkward.” 

    Filian added that the crew kept their distance out of respect for her privacy, which assuaged the awkwardness. It also helped that the people who saw her real face and body were people that she trusted, because she spent the last week rehearsing with them. 

    Full-body streams aren’t new to Filian, who started out making content in VRChat. Granted, WePlay setup is significantly more sophisticated than the one Filian uses for her streams, which involves a few inexpensive Vive trackers and cameras in the corners of her room. Unlike her home streams, hosting the VTuber Awards was particularly grueling because she couldn’t take many breaks. 

    Image Credits: The VTuber Awards

    To host the event, she stayed in the mocap suit for more than seven hours (including day-of rehearsals) and was afforded two bathroom breaks total, which each took at least 20 minutes of getting in and out of the suit. She stretched between hosting, and at one point during a short segment about the history of VTubing, housed a sandwich and shake to “keep the energy up.” Filian was exhausted when the show wrapped, and she said that she nearly fell asleep on camera when she tried to stream the day after. 

    “It felt a lot less intimidating to be in that box than it would have been to stand in front of thousands of people,” Filian said. “So if anything it was a bit uncomfortable, I guess, but it was just me, a teleprompter and a screen showing the actual stream, and it made it a lot easier because of that. 

    The first VTuber Awards was a major success, much to the relief of Bilonogov, who described the project as a “huge experiment” for WePlay days before the event. As Filian welcomed viewers to the surreal virtual stadium on Saturday, Bilonogov marveled at the TV streaming the show in WePlay’s lobby. He wasn’t sure how else the technology could be used, he said, but he was sure that it’s the future of live events. WePlay plans to continue experimenting with live VR events; Chuhai said that next year, the company is opening another studio across the street from its Los Angeles space specifically for VR productions. 

    “VTtubing, it’s like rock and roll or jazz. It’s an entire industry. It has a significant community. It’s a future of entertainment,” Bilonogov said. “I think the awards show is just the beginning.”

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    Morgan Sung

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  • Cruise ceases robotaxi operations, the Apple Watch gets a new feature and Carta tries to head off bad press | TechCrunch

    Cruise ceases robotaxi operations, the Apple Watch gets a new feature and Carta tries to head off bad press | TechCrunch

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    Hello, ghouls and goblins, and welcome to this Halloween Weekend edition of Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s weekly tech recap in newsletter form. For our U.S.-based readers (and this reporter), ’tis the time for mid-autumn merrymaking — time-tested traditions like jack-o’-lantern carving, costuming and apple picking. May we all make the most of it.

    In this issue of WiR, we cover the California DMV suspending Cruise’s robotaxi permit, doing expenses in VR, the Apple Watch’s best new feature going live and an e-commerce startup founded by an ex-PayPal exec that aims to give customers more control over their shopping data. Elsewhere, we spotlight the victims of Okta’s latest hack, Carta’s CEO trying to head off bad press, the latest from the FTX trial and Rivian winning the longest off-road competition in the U.S.

    It’s a lot to get through, so let’s not delay. But first, a reminder to sign up here to receive WiR in your inbox every Saturday if you haven’t already done so.

    Most read

    Cruising no more: The California Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday suspended Cruise’s deployment and driverless testing permits, ending the GM self-driving car subsidiary’s robotaxi operations in San Francisco. Subsequently, Cruise announced that it would pause all of its robotaxi operations, including in Austin, Houston, Phoenix and Miami, to “rebuild public trust.”

    Expensing meets VR: Intrepid TC editor Darrell Etherington did his expensing in Concur using Meta’s latest headset, the Quest 3. So how’d it go? Concur “still sucks super hard in VR,” Darrell writes — but surprisingly, Concur didn’t suck any more than it does in more conventional computing environments, and he actually enjoyed doing most of the related, “normal computer” things on Quest 3.

    Double tap that: With this week’s watchOS 10.1 drop, Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 owners now have access to one of the smartwatches’ more exciting features. Double Tap, which adds gesture-based interactions through tapping one’s index finger and thumb together twice, is a clever new way to interact with the wearable when your other hand is full, Brian writes.

    Retail your way: Mary Ann writes about I Own My Data (IOMD), a startup founded by an ex-PayPal exec aiming to eliminate a tedious step for customers: creating an account every time you purchase something from an online store. With IOMD, all of a user’s private information, such as past purchases, cards, addresses and preferences, are stored on their own device — so transactions can be completed instantly with a click, tap or touch anywhere on the web.

    Okta hack fallout: Network and security giant Cloudflare and password manager maker 1Password said hackers briefly targeted their systems following a recent breach of Okta’s support unit. Both Cloudflare and 1Password said their intrusions were linked to the hack of Okta, the identity and access management platform, but that the incidents didn’t affect customer systems or user data.

    Carta fights back: In an attempt at damage control, Henry Ward, the CEO of the equity management startup Carta, this week emailed customers, telling them that if they’re concerned about “negative press” tied to the outfit, they should read a recent Medium post of his. In the post, Ward outlines conversations he’s had with Carta employees about numerous stories surrounding the company, including stories about lawsuits around allegations of sexual abuse on the part of executives, a toxic “boy’s club culture” and indecent exposure, among other things.

    FTX execs likely escape jail: Gary Wang, co-founder and CTO of failed crypto exchange FTX; Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda, FTX’s sister company; and Nishad Singh, FTX head of engineering, have all pleaded guilty to charges after the exchange and Alameda’s dramatic downfall in November 2022. But an ex-Southern District of New York (SDNY) prosecutor, speaking to TechCrunch’s blockchain reporter Jacquelyn Melinek, says that Ellison, Wang and Singh probably won’t get jail time, as they’ve been cooperating witnesses.

    Rivian comes out ahead: In a win for Rivian, the Amazon-backed startup’s R1T is the first EV to win the longest off-road competition in the U.S., the Rebelle Rally. The race — now in its eighth year — requires teams to complete a 2,120-kilometer course using only paper maps, compasses and plotters, Kirsten writes.

    Audio

    Looking for background listening material as you make costume alterations, paint pumpkins and restock the candy jar? TechCrunch has you covered — as always.

    On Equity, the crew covered a few deals of the week, including news from I Own My Data and AgentSync. Other big-ticket items included Carta’s comms snafu, the recent roadblock for Cruise driverless taxis (and why Waymo appears to be winning) and notes on Alphabet’s and Microsoft’s recent earnings.

    Found spoke with Jonas Torland from 7Analytics, a Norwegian company that’s built a data platform that powers tools and products for sustainable risk management. Their models predict the paths of floodwaters, which allow them to predict and map the damage that results.

    And Chain Reaction interviewed Josh Naftalis, partner at law firm Pallas Partners. Naftalis is a longtime attorney who represents companies, boards and executives in cases for white-collar criminal defense, regulatory enforcement matters, internal investigations, crisis management and more.

    TechCrunch+

    TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys — which you know if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not, consider signing up. Here are a few highlights from this week:

    Spam gets worse: Haje writes about how AI-powered tools are making sales emails, phishing and spam worse for all of us — particularly tools that plug into social media to build a picture of what might be happening in their targets’ lives.

    AI-boosted ads: Alex and Anna write that Big Tech firms with big reach have been raking in big ad bucks, lately — particularly those with AI chops, which has made their ability to pull in advertising dollars even stronger.

    Seed deals become pricey: Why are seed deals so expensive these days? Alex writes that rapid growth is to blame; late-stage deals are becoming rarer and smaller and cheaper today, conversely.

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    Kyle Wiggers

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  • How Global Digitization is Transforming Sports

    How Global Digitization is Transforming Sports

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Web2, Web3 and AI have allowed sports to move into a more digital space, and now they are completely changing how fans, athletes and coaches enjoy it.

    While the industry was already on a path toward more sophisticated tech, the isolation of the pandemic accelerated the need for better data collection and analysis tools for athletes and coaches. Now, sports tech has evolved far beyond simple wearables, utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) for newer, better ways to play, practice and enjoy sports.

    Enter the metaverse: from practice to gameday, we’ll be playing online

    We can divide sports into four main categories: learn, play, watch and wear.

    Traditionally, learning comes from either one-on-one training sessions with a coach, mentor or instructor or through team practices. Those who don’t have access to teams or pickup games often hone their skills at home or in a community center gym, using whatever tools they have available.

    Playing encompasses everything from casual pickup games with neighborhood friends to amateur and professional leagues. The “watch” and “wear” categories apply to athletes and fans. Here, we’re talking about going to sporting events, watching live streams, playing in fantasy leagues, wearing team jerseys and purchasing sports equipment.

    Related: 8 Industries Being Disrupted by Virtual Reality

    In all four categories, a massive shift toward digitization is happening thanks to AR and VR technology, plus the growing popularity of AI and Web3.

    Now, athletes can train better with AI coaches. Apps like Level Up utilize ChatGPT to create helpful, accessible AI coaching, and artificial intelligence analytics tools like Athlete’s AI provide better performance analysis for more effective training.

    In addition, the evolution and growth of the metaverse are opening up new possibilities for a global athletic community that can play and compete together from anywhere in the world. It is also paving the way for brand-new sporting event experiences like future metaverse broadcasts, AR minigames in-stadium and, hopefully, immersive 3D viewing packages.

    Related: Why Apple is Primed to Take a Bite Out of Live Sports

    Better AI means better athletes

    Professional coaches and leagues have been using AI and ML to assist with training for years. However, the broader availability of AI tech means that amateur athletes and school-level coaches and trainers can leverage this technology to sharpen their practices and analyze player performance data even more effectively.

    In particular, augmented reality is an exciting new tool from which athletes can benefit considerably. For example, the ability to overlay objects (such as computer-generated players) onto a real-world court or field can help players who have to train alone.

    Other AR applications allow data to be incorporated into a real-world environment or pre-recorded videos so players and trainers can better understand play styles, movement patterns and potential mistakes in real time.

    For amateur leagues and coaches, VR and AR overlays can be used to study opposing teams’ footage to plan better defensive strategies before game day.

    Related: How Big-Name Sneaker Brands Are Racing Into the Metaverse

    Global digitization means global competition for amateur players

    In today’s world, younger generations have all grown up with smartphones and sophisticated technology since before they could walk. This means they are totally connected to the internet, and things like social validation and “leveling up” are essential parts of their lives.

    Rather than trying to change this, the digital shift helps society lean into these near-universal traits. Now, apps and communities exist globally so that people anywhere in the world can connect by playing or watching their favorite sports.

    Athletes can make progress posts or participate in competitive leaderboards and receive likes, comments and validation from other athletes. Fans can participate in group watch parties or live streams no matter where they live.

    This level of social validation is a critical component of the growth and evolution of the global sports community.

    Sports fans are also a vital part of the industry, and AR is already transforming how fans engage with their favorite sports. Most significant sports broadcasts are already embedding 3D graphics and using real-time AR overlays to provide better commentary and game analysis.

    Finally, fantasy sports have gained major traction recently, especially during the lockdown. Fantasy sports apps have already begun incorporating augmented reality to create more exciting experiences. The most popular company for this is AR Sports, which has a patented interactive experience reminiscent of other games like Pokemon Go.

    Related: Qatar-Based Sponix Tech Is Transforming How People Engage With Largescale Sporting Events

    Digital transformation helps sports tech unlock new and exciting achievements

    Web3 may still be in its earliest stages of development, but it is already expanding our minds and stretching the bounds of what we believed was possible.

    In sports tech, the uses for AI, ML and Web3 technologies like blockchain and the metaverse are nearly limitless. Whether you are an avid sports fan, an amateur player or a professional hopeful, team sports are becoming more digital and exciting than ever.

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    Eugene Lisovskiy

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  • New Smell Tech Could Make VR Therapies More Powerful

    New Smell Tech Could Make VR Therapies More Powerful

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    Jan. 19, 2023 — An emerging trend in virtual reality – incorporating smell – could be exciting news not just for gaming but for health care as well.

    A growing number of hospitals across the country are using virtual reality to help patients manage pain, overcome phobias, and calm anxiety. Providers and patients report mostly good results, save for the high price tag. And VR therapies may start to become more common, particularly if insurers begin to cover the cost. 

    But despite its potential in health care, VR continues to fall short in one way: We still can’t smell it. 

    “[Smell] hasn’t been explored enough in virtual reality, but it deserves to be,” says Judith Amores, PhD, senior researcher at Microsoft Research and research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab. “The potential benefits are incredible.”

    Amores has researched connecting VR with smell to enhance a person’s response. In one experiment, she had participants wear a VR headset that depicted calming nature scenes and a smart necklace she developed capable of releasing lavender scent. When bursts of lavender were added to the VR, the participants reported feeling 26% more relaxed than they had without the scent. A device that monitors brain activity confirmed it: The participants’ physiological response had increased by 25% when scent was added. 

    The study was small (just 12 people), but Amores says it represents a direction that demands to be explored with more people in peer-reviewed research. A 2022 systematic review of research on virtual reality using multiple senses backs her up: “Smell and taste are still underexplored,” the review says, “and they can bring significant value to VR applications” – including health. 

    When we smell something, receptor cells in the nose message the olfactory bulb at the base of the brain. That information is shuttled to the amygdala and hippocampus, brain areas responsible for processing memory and emotion, Amores explains. 

    “Your sense of smell goes directly into the emotional center of the brain,” says Amores. “That means you can literally change how you feel based on what you’re smelling.” 

    Thus, smell has the power to immerse us deeper into virtual reality, which could make VR treatments faster and more effective, Amores says.

    New Smell Technology Could Drive Research Forward

    While medical research in this area may be slow, the entertainment industry’s efforts could help push it forward. No VR systems that incorporate smell are available yet, Amores says, but that may change as soon as this year. 

    At the international Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held earlier this month, Vermont-based OVR Technology unveiled a headset with eight primary aromas that can be combined to create thousands of scents. The ION3, as it’s called, is scheduled to be released later this year.

    Meanwhile, a study published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies describes an odor machine that was tested with a virtual reality headset from tech giant HTC. The researchers suggest such technology could, among other uses, help enhance “smell training” for those who’ve lost their sense of smell due to COVID-19. 

    Boosting VR Therapies With Smell

    Smell-enhanced VR therapies could be explored for all kinds of clinical uses, Amores says, like to treat anxiety, sleep disorders, or even Alzheimer’s disease (smell is linked to memory). 

    VR “exposure therapy” has already been used to treat PTSD in military veterans, immersing them into a virtual environment that triggers a traumatic memory, desensitizing them to the memory so they learn their thoughts are safe. A 2021 article in Brain Research noted that incorporating smell into such therapy is “critically needed,” since odors can trigger traumatic memories, in some cases more fiercely than sounds. A distressing scent (like diesel fuel or the smell of something burning) could be followed by, or layered with, a relaxing scent such as pine, eucalyptus, or cinnamon in a gradual way to reduce or even eliminate smell triggers, according to the paper.

    Those with addictions may benefit from VR exposure therapy too, learning to manage or resist cravings triggered by certain cues, some research suggests. VR has the power to transport them anywhere – to a bar or a party, say – and the scent of wine or cigarettes may add to the realism needed to elicit cravings. 

    Another application could be surgery prep, Amores says. A patient has a VR session complete with relaxing smells – walking through a forest and breathing in the scents of pine and moss, for example – lowering anxiety before the procedure, and potentially reducing the amount of pain medication needed and improving outcomes. 

    Those smells could be deployed again during hospitalization or recovery — with or without the VR — to quickly return the patient to a calm state. It’s a kind of Pavlovian conditioning that would be easy to replicate, says Amores.

    At Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, VR is being researched and used to help patients alleviate pain across a variety of conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome and chronic lower back pain. 

    Melissa Wong, MD,  an OB/GYN specializing in maternal-fetal medicine at Cedars-Sinai, has studied VR for pain and stress relief during labor and childbirth, possibly delaying the use of an epidural.  

    “There is absolutely something about the mind-body connection when it comes to pain,” says Wong, “and the use of VR could tap into that.” Making it more immersive by adding scent would likely amplify those effects, she adds.

    As research continues to highlight the power of smell, we’ll likely see the sense being implemented more and more in clinical treatment, Amores predicts. It may not be long before “Smell-o-Vision” comes to a hospital near you.

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  • Smart Dong School is a New EduTech Company That is Developing Educational Programs and Services

    Smart Dong School is a New EduTech Company That is Developing Educational Programs and Services

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    Press Release
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    Nov 21, 2022 13:45 EST


    CYPRESS, Calif., November 21, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Smart Dong School is an EduTech company that provides support to society and individuals. Various educational programs and services are being developed by combining information and communication technology with education. These programs and services are designed to make the learning experience fun like a game. Major services include various lecture sites such as Haiti Dong School, Qualification Dong School, and English Dong School. Recently, it developed Dot Timer, a timer productivity management application based on metaverse and big data, together with Dot Planner and launched overseas. Also, Dot Biz, a cloud service, is also in service.

    The development team is formed with some of the best technicians in the country who have won the grand prize at Samsung Electronics and IBM Hackathon in the past.

    When Samsung Electronics launched its first smartwatch, Smart Dong School participated as a key partner in charge of education. On the day when the smartwatch was unveiled at Samsung Electronics’ headquarters, the company was introduced as a partner company along with leading IT companies such as Naver and Kakao. They also participated in a cooperation program with Google Korea when development for Google Korea’s Androidware was in process. As one can see, the company is formed with many experts with technical skills and experience to carry out large scale projects.

    The company developed and released a prototype of the Dot Timer smartwatch version this year. Now the user’s behavior and time are recorded through a smartphone. However, in the future, devices such as smartwatches will automatically recognize all of the user’s behavior as they become more developed.

    These days, smartwatches recognize and analyze healthcare information. It measures things like blood pressure and body fat. When swimming, it automatically distinguishes whether it is the backstroke or freestyle and they even record how much the wearer has moved. If the performance of these devices improve, it is expected to develop into a device that manages lifelogs through time tracking of users.

    The Dot Timer app was created with such a future in mind. Although it is not quite there yet, it is planning to enter the medical field such as healthcare as well as education by utilizing big data and artificial intelligence technologies based on lifelog.

    http://winninglab.com

    Source: SmartDong School

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  • Learning by Playing Games; Make Learning Fun With ‘My School’ Which Combines Education and Games Based on the Metaverse

    Learning by Playing Games; Make Learning Fun With ‘My School’ Which Combines Education and Games Based on the Metaverse

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    Press Release
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    Nov 21, 2022


    CYPRESS, Calif., November 21, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    MySchool, a communication-oriented metaverse platform that combines education and games, will be officially released soon by Inventis Co.

    In the past few years, the paradigm of education has changed significantly due to the pandemic caused by COVID-19. Non-face-to-face online education was activated, and a more comfortable learning environment was formed regardless of location.

    According to this learning trend and educational demand, “My school”, which is an educational program on a metaverse platform, was created.

    This program is a metaverse system that combines education and games using non-contact classes, English classes, quest-type gamification, realistic content, avatars, and a pet system.

    “My School” helps promote programming skills and logical thinking through the block coding class. In addition, the striking feature is that it is possible to establish the economic system and the revenue model that users can proactively produce and consume.

    Furthermore, it provides a customized service based on LMS data analysis not only for students but also for teachers and parents, and it can be used with any device easily by supporting various multi-device and OS.

    The reason why metaverse is used for this program is that learning effect and participation can be significantly increased through games on the  metaverse and it increases learning quality as well.

    Students can develop their ability to think and problem-solving skills through various types of content and the process of solving quests. 

    Official service of “My School”, created by Inventis Co., will be released in November 2022.

    Contact: sangyoon53@kseeder.co

    Source: Inventis

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  • Superbean, a Company Digitalizing the Education of the Digital Powerhouse Country Korea, Provides a Realistic Cultural Education for Youth in XR

    Superbean, a Company Digitalizing the Education of the Digital Powerhouse Country Korea, Provides a Realistic Cultural Education for Youth in XR

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    Press Release
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    Nov 21, 2022


    CYPRESS, Calif., November 21, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    The education system is changing according to the environment. Super Bean is a company that aims to digitalize the process of education to match the standards of rapidly developing technology. Super Bean Co., Ltd. added an educational curriculum to the content technology it produces and made it possible to acquire a textbook curriculum through video. Super Bean started as a video production company in 2009 and has been expanding its field to public content production, promotion, conference, and awards ceremonies.

    The digital education evaluation market is expected to grow rapidly and reach approximately $43.5 billion USD by 2025. Based on the technical foundation, educational content and platforms that match the technology are necessary.

    Accordingly, the Korean Ministry of Education plans to enhance SW AI education in line with the digital era and provide more opportunities for digital education to students.

    The Ministry of Education expects to create a digital talent training system and contribute to closing the gap in digital education.

    SW AI education instructors, schools, and universities will be deployed to accumulate educational capabilities in the field and create a digital talent training system that connects elementary and secondary education to universities.

    Also, since 2019, with the changes in the public sector, it has produced programs that contain more than 200 curricula, to revitalize survival education in the University Swimming Federation. Because of this, in 2021, it was made possible to stream to any medium in a digital environment by building a swimming education XR streaming server.

    Lee Ju-Won, CEO of Super Bean Co., Ltd., said, “The program contains a variety of educational information that is easy for people to acquire. Through the visual education curriculum that uses content production technology, we are working with the government to make ‘school education’ possible through the metaverse and online as a realistic cultural education for youth in XR.”

    His story shows he is trying to expand the Korean Wave in the EduTech field through a new concept of education which is an XR program service suitable for various platforms.

    It is also expected that with the policy of the Ministry of Education and the education industry in Korea will once again leap forward in line with the digital era.

    Contact: http://superbean.tv/

    Source: Super Bean

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  • Ucon Creative Showcases EduCore, an Educational Metaverse Platform and JobTeacher, a VR Repetitive Training for Children With Developmental Disabilities

    Ucon Creative Showcases EduCore, an Educational Metaverse Platform and JobTeacher, a VR Repetitive Training for Children With Developmental Disabilities

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    Press Release
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    updated: Nov 21, 2022


    CYPRESS, Calif., November 21, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Recently, as online services have been spotlighted in the wake of the rapid development of IT technology and the COVID-19 virus, the metaverse market is also growing rapidly. Among them, more and more attempts are being made to apply metaverse technology in the education field. It is because, through metaverse technology, users can indirectly experience education, such as experiments that are difficult to experience in reality.

    However, there is still a view of concern about the introduction of metaverse technology in the education field. The problem is the supply of equipment for metaverse education, as well as the differences in the direct and indirect experience of education that exists.

    Ucon Creative pays attention to these problems to reduce the heterogeneity of metaverse education and link existing online education contents to EduCore, and ultimately maximize the advantages of metaverse education beyond time and space to solve the educational gap between regions and income.

    In addition, in order to overcome the limitations of existing online education that is only one-way communication, EduCore is implementing a self-directed learning design through 24-hour two-way communication 365 days using AI instructors. Also, the company is active as a leading company in the development of domestic standards (KS) for educational metaverse services along with the Korea Standards Association (KSA), and is determined to make efforts to develop international standards (ISO).

    Metaverse EduCore, an educational metaverse platform, was selected in the IT/SW category for 2022 digital innovation organized by the Hankook Ilbo and the Ministry of Science and ICT.

    Ucon Creative was also selected as a K-Metaverse global capacity-building company supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Information and Communication Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) and participated in the 2022 Mobile World Congress (MWC2022) held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from September 28th to the 30th.

    Kang Jong-Jin, Ceo of Ucon Creative, said, “As the society develops, Metaverse will be applied to all aspects of the world, including politics, economy, society, and culture,” adding, “We want to contribute to a successful establishment of Metavers in the education industry that forms the basis of our society.”

    https://uconcreative.modoo.at

    Source: Ucon Creative

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  • Treating MS Pain With Virtual Reality

    Treating MS Pain With Virtual Reality

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    By Leigh Charvet, PhD, clinical neuropsychologist, as told to Alyson Powell Key

    Charvet and Martin Malik co-presented the study “Virtual Reality as an Intervention for Chronic Pain in Multiple Sclerosis” at the American Academy of Neurology’s 73rd Annual Meeting, April 17-22, 2021, where scientists discuss the latest research in MS and other brain and nerve conditions.

    VR is developing rapidly, both from the technology aspect and its use in all kinds of health care applications. It provides a 3D environment that you’re psychologically immersed in, including all sensory experiences. It’s like a full 3D movie environment.

    VR is being also used quite a bit now for medical education, allowing doctors to go into the heart, walk through the brain, or see diseases. It’s also being used in rehabilitation to make exercise more enjoyable and give feedback that can help with recovery.

    Treating MS Pain With Virtual Reality

    We’re very interested in the rehabilitation space and using VR for its sensory psychological benefits. It was first used in the research world for people who had acute burns, such as military veterans.

    The basic idea is that the more immersed you are in VR, the less your brain can pay attention to other stimuli like pain signals. When the pain is overwhelming, you can go into a different world. That was the basis of our interest in using it for MS-related pain.  Does VR strengthen the mind’s ability to harness attention away from pain or discomfort signals?

    Most of our patients live with the burden of day-to-day pain. So we took a specific angle to see if repeated VR sessions can allow the mind to lower pain signal noise and provide an escape, both within and outside of the VR environment, over time.

    Eight patients were enrolled in the study based on having high long-term pain related to their MS. We designed the intervention as 8 separate days of 35-minute VR sessions. The larger study is designed to compare different VR content. We categorized it as active, where you’re seated but move your hands and actively navigate the environment, versus passive, where you watch an emotionally neutral or pleasant video.

    All participants were seated.  For the “interactive” content, participants used hand controllers to move through a virtual 3D space. They navigated through virtual environments and did simple activities such as virtually catching or throwing a ball.  For the “passive” content, they viewed the 3D space without any interactive navigation or activity. Instead, they viewed neutral and enjoyable VR videos such as tours through natural settings. In both conditions, all participants completed a guided VR mindfulness experience, viewing a relaxing VR environment with peaceful breathing prompts.

    We measured pain ratings before and after each session. People had a significant reduction in how much pain they experienced at that time. The second thing we found is that patients’ chronic pain ratings dropped after back-to-back, repeated VR immersion. And everyone who completed the study reported that they enjoyed the VR sessions.

    The Future of VR for Pain Management

    VR technology is such a rapidly moving space, and now there’s at-home VR. It’s appealing because it’s not medication and could be on demand. The next step is to try home delivery and developing it to reach larger sample sizes. We want to compare and refine the content to identify what would be most helpful for the person. There’s interest in offering VR as a treatment for patients with different conditions.

    There’s a lot of power in how we can apply it; it just needs to be studied to optimize the benefits.

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  • Echo Healthcare Releases New Immersive Studio Software

    Echo Healthcare Releases New Immersive Studio Software

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    Immersive Interactive provides virtual learning spaces that are fully interactive and multisensory, engaging learners through sight, sound and touch – allowing for interactive learning throughout healthcare, education and all industry sectors.

    Press Release
    –

    Nov 7, 2022 10:00 EST


    SARASOTA, Fla., November 7, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Echo Healthcare, Inc., a global leader in high-reality simulation and a worldwide leader in immersive spaces and educational software, announced today the release of their newest software platform operating their Immersive Interactive technology, Immersive Studio. With the release of this new software, Echo Healthcare continues to be on the forefront, providing the most realistic and limitless virtual spaces for all industries.

    Echo Healthcare‘s Immersive Interactive system provides virtual learning spaces that are fully interactive and multisensory, engaging learners through sight, sound and touch. It provides high-quality projections that allow learners to feel like they are in that exact environment. With the use of high-quality speakers, relevant sounds can be heard during their training, providing further stressors and truly engaging the learners. Educators no longer have to suspend disbelief and can now put their learners through any training exercise in any environment, all from a single room or multiple rooms. Immersive Interactive’s user-friendly, cloud-based software operates off of a tablet, allowing faculty and educators to easily control and change the learning environment with a few clicks.

    The release of the Immersive Studio software allows users the ability to create their own content and share content amongst a wide variety of user groups. The system comes pre-loaded with thousands of backgrounds, exercises and scenes available to all users. And with Immersive Studio, users will now receive a 360-degree camera they can use to easily record and upload their own local content in a cloud-based environment from anywhere. This added functionality allows learners to be able to train in engaging immersive spaces that mimic their local roads, nursing homes, shopping plazas, classrooms and military training environments – it’s truly limitless.

    “We are so excited for Immersive Studio to be rolled out. It further enhances the Immersive Interactive system and allows users to truly tailor all aspects of the immersive space(s) to their local environment. Users will have the ability to collaborate and gain access to a worldwide community of like-minded experts. It also allows faculty and educators to mimic training environments that their leaners will be subjected to and takes interprofessional education and training to the next level,” says Kevin King, CEO of Echo Healthcare.

    Founded in 2012 and acquired by Echo Healthcare in 2022, Immersive Interactive continues to partner with leading healthcare simulation, educational institutions and various industry sectors to deliver the most effective immersive experiences. With over 400 installations worldwide, Immersive Interactive remains at the forefront as a global leader and provider of interactive classrooms and virtual simulation spaces. Echo Healthcare is a worldwide leader offering a diverse product line consisting of realistic medical training manikins and monitoring equipment, immersive virtual spaces and an entire portfolio geared towards enhancing realism in patient simulation.

    Source: Echo Healthcare

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  • MACE Virtual Labs Teams Up With IOPEX LLC, Touro University CA and Shiny Box Interactive, Providing Fully Immersive Large-Scale Distributed VR Experimentation & Simulations

    MACE Virtual Labs Teams Up With IOPEX LLC, Touro University CA and Shiny Box Interactive, Providing Fully Immersive Large-Scale Distributed VR Experimentation & Simulations

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    MACE Virtual Labs, IOPEX LLC, Touro University CA and Shiny Box Interactive have partnered to bring to market a fully immersive, full-body, hardware and software solution enabling large-scale experimentation and simulations

    Press Release
    –

    Nov 3, 2022 10:00 EDT


    HOUSTON, November 3, 2022 (Newswire.com)
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    VR and AR expert solutions provider MACE Virtual Labs recently announced its partnership with startup IOPEX LLC, Touro University California, and metaverse builder Shiny Box Interactive. This powerful partnership creates an integrated hardware and software platform, Full-Dive VR Units (FDVU), enabling organizations to create fully immersive, large-scale, distributed VR experiences for running experiments and simulations. 

    MACE provides the integrated hardware platform, pulling together haptics, omni-directional treadmills, and retina scale visuals from MACE’s industry-leading product partners such as HaptX, Teslasuit, Varjo, Ultraleap, and Virtuix. Shiny Box Interactive has created an engaging cloud-powered metaverse operating environment that leverages the capabilities of the integrated hardware platform, cloud computing, and analytics. IOPEX and Touro University CA bring decades of experience in building experimentation and simulation programs for civilian and military first-responders. This new partnership will bring a comprehensive turnkey solution to fully immersive VR hardware and the virtual environments needed to support large-scale distributed experimentation and simulation.

     “This is a very exciting partnership for the industry as a whole,” said James Dear, founder and President of IOPEX LLC. “MACE is an incredibly forward-thinking company with key product partnerships, and our IOPEX clients will benefit greatly from their ability to develop and provide integrated VR solutions for multiple scenarios.” 

    “This groundbreaking simulation training and evaluation platform will fundamentally change the way both civilian and military medical providers approach disaster medicine, team training, and medical education for the future,” said Dr. Nevins, Touro University CA’s project lead who brings 25 years of experience in medical and simulation education, along with 22 years serving in the military. “We have an amazing collaborative team, and we are fortunate to have MACE leading the technical effort.”

    “We are extremely excited to bring together this group of capabilities that will fill a gap in the VR industry, bringing the vision of Ready Player One closer to reality,” said Edgar Acosta, Managing Partner at MACE.

    “As a studio, we are constantly seeking new challenges in emerging technology, and this partnership with IOPEX LLC, Touro University CA, and MACE provides exactly that. The chance to provide a connected immersive experience using some of the newest hardware in our industry is exciting, and we couldn’t ask for better partners,” said Todd Daniel, Managing Partner, Shiny Box Interactive.

    Acosta expressed how seamless this partnership with this group has been thus far as they are so closely aligned in their approach. He is looking forward to what they will accomplish together in the future. 

    This collaboration will demonstrate its first proof of concept in November of 2022 through a series of technical and operational tests on the campus of Houston Community College. To learn more, visit http://macevl.com/iopex.  

    About Shiny Box Interactive

    Shiny Box Interactive creates industry-leading XR (AR, VR, and Mixed Reality) solutions, leveraging more than a decade of AAA game development experience. Partnering with industry-leading companies to create Immersive XR Training platforms has placed its team at the forefront of enterprise technology adoption and integration. To view some of the company’s work and learn more, visit https://www.shinyboxinteractive.com.

    About IOPEX LLC

    IOPEX LLC produces and manages Immersive Operational Experiments (IOPEXs)™. IOPEXs create for clients and operators an environment for experiencing and resolving crises in an alternate virtual reality … to anticipate and prevent or limit their occurrence in the real world. IOPEX LLC will employ the Azure cloud to conduct distributed IOPEXs while using FDVUs to enhance the participant experience. Visit https://iopexllc.net for more information.

    About Touro University California

    About the Touro College and University System: Touro University California is a Jewish nonprofit, independent graduate institution of higher learning founded in 1997 on three Judaic values: social justice, the pursuit of knowledge, and service to humanity. The University, home to 1,400 students, has professional programs in osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, physician assistant studies, public health, nursing, and education. Faculty, staff, and students have a powerful commitment to academic excellence, evidence-based professional practice, inter-professional collaboration, and active engagement with a global community. To learn more, visit www.tu.edu or call 707-638-5200.

    About MACE Virtual Labs

    MACE Virtual Labs is a team of authoritative VR and AR experts that curate the breadth and depth of immersive technology to provide turnkey commercial solutions for customers in training, government, research, medical, and entertainment. MACE sells individual products and complete solution packages. It is the one-stop shop for commercial VR and AR solutions, from trial programs all the way up to scalable enterprise solutions. To learn more about MACE, visit https://www.macevl.com/.

    Source: MACE Virtual Labs

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  • This Week In XR: Stability AI Raises $101 Million, VITURE Raises $10 Million For Wearable Hi Def Video

    This Week In XR: Stability AI Raises $101 Million, VITURE Raises $10 Million For Wearable Hi Def Video

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    The post-Connect skewering of Meta continues unabated. The press was not impressed with the kind of Metaverse Meta showed us last week. It dominated the headlines for most of the week. No wonder Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he feels like he’s being punched in the stomach when he opens his phone in the morning. It’s so easy to pile on it’s hard to resist. Meta sets the record for unforced errors. Nonetheless, we are piling on a company taking an historic business risk. For these reasons, I’m now grouping my coverage of Meta’s coverage into a new section, which you’ll find at the end of the column. For now, I’m calling it “This Week in Schadenfreude.”

    Stability AI Raises $101M Stable Diffusion, an open source text-to-image AI program, announced a $101M seed round at Techcrunch Disrupt in San Francisco yesterday. You tell the app what you want it to create in text and it returns art, usually a mash up that passes. With this round, led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Stability AI should be able to pay its massive annual ~$50M AWS hosting fees for a couple of years. The investment values the company at $1 billion post-money. Stability AI’s open source system that has been downloaded over 200,000 times.

    VITURE Raises $10M For Headworn Media Viewer The VITURE One XR Glasses are like a portable projector for your face that connects to a compatible smartphone, laptop, or game console. The HD OLED displays simulate a 120” screen. The Series A funding round was led by BAI Capital and Verity Ventures. It will help the company mass produce its VITURE One glasses.

    Tilia Secures Strategic Investment From J.P. Morgan, Spins Out Of Linden Lab On Wednesday, Linden Lab announced the spin off of its proprietary finance engine Tilia.. Tilia’s solution, built for game, virtual world and mobile application developers handles payment processing, in-game transactions, as well as payouts to creators by converting in-world tokens to fiat currency including USD serving as the backbone of any functioning virtual economy. Oh, and JP Morgan is the world’s biggest bank. Last year Second Life generated $86M in revenue using Tilia. Now the two companies will share the revenue, which Tilia hopes to do with many other game worlds.

    Shapeyard Raises $2 Million To Bring 3D Content Interoperability To The Metaverse The 3D modeling app for iPads compares with Blender, Maya, +3ds Max which are available only on desktop. The app is currently available in alpha stage on iOS.

    Pico 4 VR Headset Review: Meta Quest 2 Has Competition​ Scott Stein of CNet took the new headset for a spin and concluded it’s pretty much the same, “a possible sign that standalone VR headsets in the next few years may see more hardware options. But it still may not be a better choice. At least, not for me.” The Pico 4 isn’t available in the US yet. Blogger Tony “Skarred Ghost” Vitillo took a even deeper dive at AWE Europe in Lisbon this week.

    Dapp Radar Says There’s Almost No One in Decentraland or Sandbox, and according to The Verge and Bloomberg, it may be true. Decentraland, Sandbox Virtual Land in Metaverse Is Cheap and Very Risky writes Carly Wanna in Bloomberg. Decentraland has a $1 billion valuation but only 8,000 daily users says The Verge’s Richard Lawler.

    Rec Room launches “House of Terror” Halloween experience. Rec Room players enter “The House of Terror” through the all-new Haunt Society themed room. Haunt Society is a well-regarded directory of Haunted Houses. The experience itself is a journey through a maze which leads to an abandoned space station haunted by ghosts. ”House of Terror is both single player and multipalyer immersive experience that runs for a minimum of 15 minutes, and can be accessed by visiting Rec Room’s new “Haunt Society” room.

    Valkyrie EIR armbands simulate muscle resistance in VR fitness games The company announced that it has opened preorders for Valkyrie EIR, a set of haptic armbands that provides unprecedented interactive resistance for the arm muscles. The armbands pair with EIR Training, the first VR training experience that takes full advantage of the hardware. The armbands will start shipping summer 2023.

    This Week in XR is also a podcast hosted by the author of this column and Ted Schilowitz, Head of Future Technologies at Paramount Global. This week our guest is Caspar Thykier, co-founder and CEO of Zappar, an XR agency with several lines of business: Zappar.com, a no code web based AR content creation tool, and its smartphone HMD, Zapbox. We can be found here Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.

    *NEW* This Week in Schadenfreude

    It’s painful how hellbent Mark Zuckerberg is on convincing us that VR is a thing (Darrell Etherington/Techcrunch)

    What If the Metaverse Is Better Without Virtual Reality? (Steven Levy/Wired)

    Facebook’s Metaverse Is Apparently Filled With Mostly Empty ‘Sad’ Worlds (Zack Zwiezen/Kotaku)

    Meta’s flagship metaverse Horizon Worlds struggling to attract and retain users (James Batchelor/GameIndustry.biz)

    UK Regulators Forcing Meta to Sell Giphy (Sara Morrison/Vox)

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    Charlie Fink, Contributor

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  • LandMentor – Neighborhood Design Technology & Education to Increase Living Standards, Reduce Costs, & Environmental Impact – Now Free

    LandMentor – Neighborhood Design Technology & Education to Increase Living Standards, Reduce Costs, & Environmental Impact – Now Free

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    LandMentor is a market-proven solution in innovative design, surveying, architecture & engineering methods with technology to solve growth problems.

    Press Release
    –

    Jun 27, 2022


    MINNEAPOLIS, June 27, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    With today’s escalating construction costs and increased interest rates, the LandMentor System is being offered for free to those involved on the private and government side of growth and redevelopment.   

    Neighborhood Innovations, LLC is gifting this free system on July 1, 2022, to developers, builders, consultants and municipalities. It will increase living standards, greenspace, values, and connectivity – while decreasing costs and environmental impacts.

    LandMentor is a ‘System‘ that blends technology with an education in advanced market-proven design methods. It should decrease the infrastructure needed to develop land between 5 and 40 percent compared to conventional development patterns. This has obvious economic and environmental benefits.

    It was time to share the system:

    Neighborhood Innovations, LLC wanted to make a gift to the world to solve problems facing growth, from the regulatory (government) side and the design (consulting) side. With over 1,500 developments in 48 states and 18 nations designed with LandMentor, the firm felt it was time we spread the knowledge and share its technical advantage to the world.

    How can LandMentor improve the world’s growth? 

    CAD & GIS software companies serving the growth industry automate geometric relationships that have been in place for centuries.  

    Other software offerings boast that hundred lots can be designed and calculated in a few minutes, producing cookie-cutter subdivisions, but not likely a great place to live and raise a family. How could it be, with a minute of thought behind it?  

    To address this, LandMentor introduces an industry-first – a software packaged with a holistic industry education. For example, does Microsoft Word instantly make a great author? Obviously, no. But what if it was packaged with a complete education in storytelling or technical writing?

    Reducing (or eliminating) the dependence on CAD:

    LandMentor has no commands, and its patented graphic & video prompts make all tasks easier, quick to learn, and enjoyable.

    A ‘Surface Based’ solution:

    The world consists of surfaces – not lines and curves, and those surfaces have environmental and economic consequences. LandMentor reports surface impacts with easy-to-understand charts. Designers can take action to reduce waste, and cities can communicate the waste to the developer. 

    Changing the Way the Industry Communicates:

    LandMentor ‘video gaming’ interactive 3D is easily created from normal planning, surveying, and engineering tasks. Most users today will be familiar with video gaming. Thus, no learning curve. Its ‘plug & play’ VR headset support transports users into a meta virtual environment.  

    What’s Included? 

    All is needed is to download the ‘system’ from www.landmentor.com and dedicate the time (about a week or two) to go through the included initial training (video and PowerPoint with examples) as well as the internal textbooks under the Help menu. LandMentor reverts to a subscription model in 2024. Pricing is to be based on the volume of users (projected to be 10% to 20% the cost of CAD).

    About LandMentor.com:

    LandMentor was developed by Neighborhood Innovations, LLC, a software spin-off of Rick Harrison Site Design Studio which is a Land Planning research firm to discover new methods of design, engineering, surveying, and architecture. Its profits funded the software development.

    Richard Harrison, President

    763-545-0216

    rharrison@landmentor.com

    Source: Neighborhood Innovations, LLC

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  • With Facebook Becoming Meta, Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz Says, ‘We’re Not Running From Anything’

    With Facebook Becoming Meta, Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz Says, ‘We’re Not Running From Anything’

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    Facebook Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz knows what you’re thinking: Is Facebook’s decision to rebrand itself as “Meta” an attempt to distract the public from weeks of blistering whistle-blower revelations about its alleged handling of misinformation, hate speech and research indicating a negative impact on young users?

    His answer, of course, is not at all. “The fact that we’re doing the rebrand this week shows that we’re not running from anything,” Schultz—who is now CMO of Meta—told Forbes in an interview about the rebrand. “It’s the worst week to run away from anything.”

    The announcement on October 28 by Meta CEO and Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg came during a time of tumult for the company, which has been in the headlines for weeks with stories based on leaked files from former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen.

    Facebook’s sudden focus on the so-called metaverse is leaving many to wonder whether it’s an attempt to reset the Meta narrative while also distancing its future visions from its current problems. The move to Meta is also just two years after the company’s 2019 brand refresh that featured a new corporate logo that doubled down on Facebook as the flagship. However, the decision to make Meta the parent company for Facebook and its subsidiary apps, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, is not without precedent.

    According to Schultz, Facebook began the naming process in March, which took a month or two before they developed a short list in May and in July finalized Meta. Although Facebook chose to do the majority of the naming internally to keep it confidential, it still worked with other partners on marketing.

    To go along with the Meta rollout, the company created a high-production presentation to give people a glimpse of everything that the company is building for the Metaverse—a term derived from the 1992 hit sci-fi novel Snow Crash that lately has become somewhat of a catch-all term for everything from VR and augmented reality to NFTs and cryptocurrency. And on Friday, Facebook removed its famous thumbs-up sign from in front of its Silicon Valley headquarters, replacing it with a new logo that looks more like infinity symbol.

    “To Mark, it was important, and to my predecessors, we’re not going to run away, we’re proud of our history,” Schultz said. “We’re super proud of what we’ve done with social, and it’s critical to our next phase as well. So we don’t want to run away from anything, and three years ago we didn’t have something clear to run toward. It was all social media.”

    The news came a week after Facebook announced plans to invest $50 million to hire 10,000 employees in Europe over the next five years to work on technologies such as VR headsets, neural wristbands and the recently announced augmented reality glasses made with Ray-Ban.

    “This is, I think, a successful rebrand if we’re clearly running toward something,” he said. “And I think two years ago—well, so the two years ago rebrand was really three years ago—our investment in VR really wasn’t what it is today. We didn’t have the hit that we do now with Quest that has good product market fit, millions of people using it.”

    Meta is already building out its marketing strategy. On Tuesday, it announced Spark Foundry—a subsidiary of the advertising giant Publicis Groupe—as Meta’s new global planning and buying partner to market Meta and its subsidiaries. (According to some estimates, Facebook spent more than a half billion on advertising last year, which others say could top $1 billion this next year.)

    According to Facebook’s third-quarter earnings, the company spent $3.6 billion on marketing and sales compared to $3.3 billion in the previous quarter and $2.7 billion during third-quarter 2020. An upcoming Meta campaign was made by the advertising agency Droga5, which also worked on Facebook’s Olympics ads over the summer. Schultz said it was also because “it’s a very personal thing, so we’re not trying to come up with some classic corporate name.”

    “We’re not trying to run away from anything. This isn’t that kind of a rebrand.”

    Alex Schultz, Meta chief marketing officer

    Facebook isn’t the first company to rebrand during a time of crisis. Two decades ago, British Petroleum famously rebranded itself as BP as the company attempted to pivot more into renewable energies despite revenues still leaning heavily on the product it was named after. And in 2003, Tobacco giant Phillip Morris changed its name to Altria as evidence mounted for the harms caused by cigarettes. That same year, Blackwater—a private military company—changed its name to Xe Services to mitigate some of the bad press it was getting while working in Iraq.

    There are other examples of tech rebrands, too. Countless startups have undergone rebrands after being acquired or as a way to reposition the company. However, the most notable major company to change its name is Google, which in 2015 restructured the company to become Alphabet—with Google remaining as a subsidiary and its main revenue driver—as the company began facing questions about antitrust issues.

    Asked about other comparisons like BP, Altria and Alphabet, Schultz said the company was trying to reflect the level of investment it’s making in the metaverse and “not be in a place where we’re trying to do a paint job.”

    “I think the key thing is clear is brand names—you can’t change a company’s reputation with a brand name,” he said. “Brand names have to represent something. And I think a lot of those didn’t necessarily represent something substantive and so even some were mocked.”

    So why not wait until the headlines die down? Schultz said going forward with the announcement amid all the controversy makes it “very clear” that the company isn’t trying to use the Meta news as a distraction. He added that the Facebook Connect was already planned and the company didn’t want to reschedule it.

    “Every single story mentions what’s been going on in the last few weeks pretty much, and you know, that’s okay,” he said. “We’re not trying to run away from anything. This isn’t that kind of a rebrand. The second thing is we had planned out this week a long time in advance, and I think it’s really important that this is heard with the substance it is supposed to back up.”

    Many question the name itself. Some think it’s far too different while others feel like it hits a little too close to home. For example, is it fair to call itself “Meta” when everyone else is using “metaverse”?

    Shultz said it’s a “nod and a wink” to the metaverse, adding that others like Epic, Roblox, Unity and Minecraft have been using the term all the time already. Instead, he said it’ll bring more investment to the overall sector. (Schultz said he had advocated for the distinction three years ago, but would have been more subtle with it, suggesting perhaps going with “FB” or “Facebook Corp.”)

    Is the Meta name a nod, or a head fake? While Schultz points out that the name isn’t exactly metaverse, the company is going public on December 1 under the new stock ticker MVRS—which sounds a whole lot like another word people are using lately.

    The new name also helps to differentiate various existing platforms, Schultz said, explaining that saying “Instagram by Facebook” is a lot more confusing than saying it’s by some other entity. The goal is also to take Facebook Reality Labs—which the company’s VR efforts have fit until now—and more closely associate it with the parent company.

    “We have to category make,” he said. “We have to bring the metaverse concept to global awareness and to be in people’s minds and have them asking what this is.”

    To market the metaverse, Schultz said the company will focus major promotional campaigns around games to draw people in. However, he said the majority of people are already using its VR platform primarily for social gatherings.

    “When they have friends, they use it more,” Schultz said. “It was our thesis that the metaverse would be a social place, but the data is now backing us up, which gives me more confident to lean into the marketing that this is going to be a social place and that it is the future of social interaction.”

    So why focus on VR right now when critics and evangelists have said for years that it’s still too early for mainstream adoption? While spending time years ago with analytics teams at Oculus to better understand various VR headsets like Rift and its predecessors, Gear and Go, Schultz said it was clear that Rift didn’t have a product market fit because it was too expensive. However, other cheaper and simpler headsets like Gear and Go were things that people wanted to try, but that didn’t gain traction because there weren’t enough features.

    Whether the rebrand actually changes the way an increasingly skeptical public views one of the world’s largest social networks remains to be seen. However, a recent Forrester survey of more than 700 people—conducted before the Meta name was announced—found that 86% of respondents in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. didn’t think a rebrand would affect Facebook’s reputation. Meanwhile, 45% reported feeling neutral about Facebook’s plans to become a metaverse company. 

    “Even if the new Meta brand is met with wildly positive reviews, the controversy and issues related to the Facebook brand will continue to persist.”

    Chris Ross, Gartner analyst

    As Gartner analyst Chris Ross noted, a name change alone is unlikely to make much impact on overall brand issues. “Even if the new Meta brand is met with wildly positive reviews, the controversy and issues related to the Facebook brand will continue to persist,” he said. “The negative media coverage and social, security and privacy problems that plague the company will still continue to be front and center. It seems unlikely the rebrand is going to create any distance between Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook leaders and the litany of high-profile PR problems.”

    When asked whether Meta is building the future instead of fixing the present, Schultz said the company is trying to approach the metaverse in a different way than it did with the original Facebook developer platform in 2007. He cited newly announced plans to work with experts along with lawmakers and others to make sure Meta doesn’t repeat the same mistakes as Facebook.

    Meta will also have to convince not just consumers but also VR developers of its vision. While some are already getting on board: Last week it acquired Within, a VR company founded by VR pioneer Chris Milk that’s already made hit VR fitness app Supernatural. However, others are already are worried whether Meta might also open the door for people to be even concerned about surveillance, hate speech and whether the giant will will have too much control over society’s virtual future. One VR/AR startup founder called it “an aggressive land grab over a nascent and exciting new space,” while another said Meta is “the new printing press. . . . There’s no stopping it.”

    “Nobody should own or lay claim to the metaverse,” said Gabo Arora, who’s made VR and AR projects with the United Nations, the Nobel Peace Prize committee and the Shoah Foundation, which tells the stories of Holocaust survivors. “And Facebook just fired the first shot in what will be ‘the great game’ of the 21st century. Whoever controls the metaverse will control us. And we should all be horrified that Facebook has this ambition.”

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    Marty Swant, Forbes Staff

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  • One-of-a-Kind Party Game, With Augmented Reality Option, is Now Live on Kickstarter

    One-of-a-Kind Party Game, With Augmented Reality Option, is Now Live on Kickstarter

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    Press Release
    –


    updated: Mar 2, 2021


    TAMPA, Fla., March 2, 2021 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Llamasters, the first-of-its-kind party game that utilizes augmented reality, has been launched today on Kickstarter. Llamasters is a party game for between two to five players that sets opponents on a mission to become the one and only Llama Master. 

    The Kickstarter campaign features several investment packages to appeal to both early birds and high donors, including a personalized llama card; there is also an investment package limited to a maximum of 24 people.

    While party games themselves may be nothing new, Llamasters features a unique augmented reality option to take gameplay to new levels. Players have an option to start the game in two different modes and the objective for players is to take care of their llama king or queen, using strategy to outwit their opponents, to become the ultimate Llama Master. 

    The game has been devised by George Thomas and Eli Fodor, both of whom were fans of both on and offline gaming. Lockdown made them both realize how much they missed playing board games together with their friends, and so Llamasters was born. The team members both appreciate the adage that “laughter is the best medicine” and so a game that was fun and exciting for all ages was imperative to them. Llamasters delivers just that and utilizes augmented reality to connect friends and families together. Shortly after Maja Kazazic and Gabriel Kiss saw the fun and potential of the game, they quickly joined the team.  

    The Llamasters Kickstarter campaign hopes to raise revenues of $10,000USD to develop more features in the app and to manufacture the first 5,000 pieces. The campaign runs from March 1-31. Future plans for Llamasters include adding new features and animations to the app and reaching out to a global gaming audience.

    George Thomas, Llamasters, said, “Everyone loves physical party games and most people are equally happy gaming on their phones. With Llamasters, we wanted to come up with a unique game that would combine the two. What makes Llamasters that much more special is how players can pick up the physical game on their phones, with no interruption to gameplay, thanks to its AR technology. We want to provide our backers and players with a fun gaming experience that can be enjoyed online, offline or a combination of the two using a play format that brings laughter to all. Who doesn’t love a llama?”

    To contribute to the Llamasters Kickstarter campaign, please visit https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/llamasters/llamasters-the-card-game-with-augmented-reality.

    Production status: 100 full decks of Llamasters are already manufactured and have been focus-group tested and used to make further gaming refinements. The Augmented Reality framework for iOS and Android has also been built and fully tested. The Kickstarter campaign is to manufacture more Llamasters decks and further develop the games’ AR technology. 

    Backer rewards: A $45 ($39 for early bird investors) investment gives Kickstarter patrons their own full deck of 85 Llamasters cards, ready to play. 

    Backers expected to receive their rewards in: June 2021

    Time per game: 10-30 mins

    Age: 14+ 

    About Llamasters: Created by four friends whose intent is to bring some joy and shared laughter to the world, Llamasters is a multiplayer party game that takes users on a mission to become the ultimate Llama Master. The game utilizes Augmented Reality in a unique playing format. The game is suitable for players aged 14 and above.  

    For more information, please contact: press@llamasters.com

    Website: https://llamasters.com/

    Images, Videos & Branding: https://llamasters.com/media/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/Llamasters1/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/llamasters/

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/llamasters/

    Source: Llamasters

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