What are you looking for?

March 31, 2022 by Jon Jaehnig

• Friday saw the opening of the Peace Pavillion within Spatial. Launched in collaboration with artist community The Polycount Newsfeed, the pavilion is a gallery of NFTs with proceeds going to benefit charities in the Ukraine.

• If that didn’t get you excited about the virtual world of NFTs, virtual gallery experience Mona partnered with Ready Player Me this week for an even more personal experience with digital art.

• Realtime product visualizer Zakeke recently announced virtual try-on capabilities optimized for eyewear. The company, which creates 2D, 3D, and XR models, has also announced that Italian eyewear retailer Nau! is the first client to showcase the tech.
  
  
  • One company announcing virtual try-on may not seem like a big win for XR in general, but Zakeke is used by a number of online retailers on both desktop and mobile interfaces. As a result, this news means that XR models are going to be placed on a lot more faces in the near future.

• Also in immersive retail news, MetaVRse is opening reservations for “TheMall” – an XR-enabled virtual shopping center.

• In other webXR news, hardware-agnostic XR authoring and publishing tool 8^th Wall recently announced absolute scale, a feature that uses simultaneous localization and mapping to place virtual objects in the physical world at a predetermined size allowing for even more realistic models.

• AltspaceVR announced a number of events taking place in the coming weeks including the “Metaverse premiere” of the political thriller Red Pill, and new VR talk show The Jus Nick Show. For a full list of AltspaceVR events, you can always checkout their full events page.

• Also happening in AltspaceVR this morning, the Metaverse Citizens Forum, one of a series of recurring events hosted by the XR Safety Initiative and MKAI, an organization pursuing the ethical development and implementation of artificial intelligence.
  
  
  • While you may not think of AI as having much to do with XR, AI will be involved in human-computer interactions as well as building immersive worlds and other complex tasks in the metaverse. This and future events are great opportunities to learn more and contribute to the conversation.

• Altspace isn’t the only venue for immersive events. “Enterprise Metaverse” platform Virbela has hosted a number of immersive conferences and events including always-on virtual office spaces for clients but this week held the first event of its own, the “Hands In Summit.”
  
  
  • The summit celebrated Virbela’s tenth anniversary, hosted panel discussions and workshops, and announced updates to the platform including a new-and-improved campus, a retooled rendering engine, and a more customizable avatar creator.

• Virbela’s beta browser platform FRAME also announced updates at Hands In, including a progressive mobile app, integration with Microsoft Teams, and an upcoming partnership with cross-platform avatar generator Ready Player Me.

• In other company news, VR game developer nDreams announced a $35M investment from the Aonic Group. The funding will help to facilitate innovative and boundry-pushing games from the studio known for Phantom: Covert Opps.

• In other funding news, design company Autodesk announced acquisition of The Wild, a company specializing in VR remote collaboration.

This week’s news is largely about cross-over – from physical objects that can be viewed virtually, to virtual objects (and people!) finding new homes in immersive environments, to immersive environments increasingly finding ways to work together in more practical and cohesive experiences.