Facebook launches the social virtual reality thing Facebook Spaces. It seems to include Messenger (friends who don’t have an expensive Oculus Rift) can join through “windows”), 360 degrees video, real life pictures and Snapchat-like filters. Very mixed reality, but of course there are some challenges here: – It’s based on… Continue reading
Snapchat introduces World Lenses, cute 3D objects which can fit in about everywhere. In the meantime Facebook announced during its F8 Developer Conference that augmented reality is ready to go mainstream. One obvious point to note is that Facebook is just following Snapchat here. The other: the clever guys at… Continue reading
I’m reading the book Homo Deus these days, written by Yuval Noah Harari, the author of another bestselling book,Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Homo Deus is about “a brief history of tomorrow”, it goes back to the hunter-gatherers and leaps into a largely unknown future of a possible successor… Continue reading
A bit late, I had a busy week in the newsroom, but here is futurist, cyberpunk author, design-specialist, journalist Bruce Sterling at the closing of SXSW 2017: [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/312762034″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /] What does he say about virtual reality and augmented reality? I quote (9:30): I totally adore… Continue reading
My fellow journalist Dorien Luyckx visited VR Arcades in Belgium. She made a video, interviewing Quinten Horemans, founder of BeVirtual in Ghent. The interview is in Dutch – Quinten explains that an arcade enables people to try VR, together with friends and family. The advantage is the social dimension. For… Continue reading
Sansar, the virtual reality worlds platform of Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) will be in open beta this Spring. Keywords are “social” and “collaborative creation”. The video shows fascinating worlds – Sansar seems to be not one virtual world, but a platform where one can create interconnected worlds… Continue reading
Silicon Valley investor Sunny Dhillon launched a new interview series, and the first episode is about AR, MR and VR with futurist Robert Scoble and VR investor Tipatat Chennavasin. Scoble shared his information about Apple and more specifically about the three new iPhones which will be released this year and they will… Continue reading
I vividly remember how fascinated I was by Julian Dibbell‘s book “Play Money: or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot” (2006). The subject was gold farming, a practice described by Wikipedia as such: In the 1990s and 2000s, gold farming was the practice of… Continue reading
I launched a page on Facebook about the same subjects I cover here on this blog: virtual worlds, virtual reality, augmented and mixed reality. On MixedRealitiesMusings I’ll post links to this blog but also to posts and videos on other blogs and sites. The very first visitor to post on… Continue reading
Snap, owner of Snapchat, is doing very well on its market debut. Maybe, just maybe, one could consider it as a success for Augmented Reality. On C|net Joan E. Solsman calls Snapchat and it’s Specs (the camera sunglasses) “your secret AR ‘gateway drug‘”. That may sound strange since Snap itself… Continue reading