Showing all posts tagged: metaverse

As the Metaverse flounders, Second Life turns twenty

13 June 2023

Virtual community Second Life turns twenty this month, and continues to deliver what it always promised: a second life that’s sometimes better than the first:

While in cities like New York or London you might never own a flat, in Second Life you could design, build and inhabit a mansion.

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The metaverse, you can log out anytime, but you can never leave

2 December 2021

The Metaverse as seen by Sydney based writer and musician, Penny Flanagan:

Call me paranoid, but I’m starting to think that Zuckerberg’s end game is to stop all of us from existing physically in the real world. I think he wants to “make the time spent on the internet better” so that he can turn us all into 24/7 flubby, docile sources of advertising revenue. In truth, his ideal for the metaverse is a world where the internet is so satisfying, you won’t want or need to leave it for the real world.

I can see where Flanagan’s coming from, particularly in light of the recent lockdowns that have forced many of us to participate in an elemental iteration of the Metaverse. If you, that is, consider the likes of Zoom, Slack, Facetime, et al, to be a prototype of the virtual environment Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg proposes creating.

And while there’s little doubt Zuckerberg is eyeing potential revenue, I see benefits in some of the ideas on the table. I’m also not doubting some people could become completely immersed in this new virtual realm in time, but I think we’re some long-way off from seeing the Metaverse eventuate in the way Zuckerberg envisages it.

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Twenty-four hours in the 2021 Metaverse

15 November 2021

Wall Street Journal technology columnist Joanna Stern spent twenty-four hours in the Metaverse – such that is presently – and compiled the highlights in this video clip. Though somewhat functional, it’s fair to say the concept as shown to us a few weeks ago by Mark Zuckerberg is some way off.

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The Metaverse, one step closer to the Holodeck

1 November 2021

Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the social network company he co-founded in 2004 will be known as Meta. Later, in his keynote presentation at the company Connect event, he unveiled a raft of technologies in development that have the potential to change the way we live and work.

The Star Trek geek in me could not help but make comparisons to the Holodeck, a room on the Enterprise that allowed the crew to realistically create, or re-create, almost any situation they could imagine. If you have a spare eighty or so minutes, check out Zuckerberg’s keynote. Tech analyst Ben Thompson interviewed the Facebook CEO shortly before the keynote, and if you have another forty-five minutes to spare, it’s a conversation well worth listening to. It’s a fascinating time for those of us with an oblong obsession.

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