News
Q&A: Unity's AR chief Timoni West on the metaverse // FastCompany
Timoni West, VP of Augmented & Virtual Reality at Unity Technologies, knows a lot about what has been dubbed the "metaverse" in the past year. So this Q&A is a great opportunity to hear some of her insights into tech revolutions and how humans and tech still have a way to go before we're speaking the same language fluently.
Korean Gaming Giant Krafton Introduces AI-Powered Virtual Beings for New Metaverse Platform // Voicebot.ai
Krafton (most recently know for PUBG: Battlegrounds) revealed an impressive demo of how they have augmented Unreal Engine with their own AI technology to create virtual humans for their upcoming Metaverse projects. This article goes into some detail on how they made this happen, but if you just want to sit back and be impressed check out the video showing just what they have in store for the future.
Niantic and Sony Collaborate in Audio AR, Starting with Ingress // Niantic
We are so happy that companies are including spatial audio as an important factor in furthering immersive experiences, and this partnership between Niantic Labs (best known for Pokemon Go) and Sony makes us hopeful that AR and XR platforms of the future won't sound like 2000's era stereo headphones.
Event
Supporting the Speech Disabilities and Differences Community Using VR // Meetup
For those of us that make voice reactive experiences & haven't considered that there are over 234 million people worldwide with a speech disability you're leaving out a lot of people. On March 8th the Accessibility Virtual Reality Group (A11yVR) will have a meetup hosted by withVR, discussing how they have helped companies and organizations better serve people with diverse needs.
Research
Imagining the Future Is Just Another Form of Memory // The Atlantic
There are some things that you read and it makes sense in hindsight, and the notion that our ability to envision the future is driven by our memories. The same part of the brain where we imagine is where memories are stored. This may sound only philosophically relevant, but this reading recommendation goes further into why that is important for how we see and feel about the future.
People To Watch
Kingdom VR // YouTube
We found this channel a few weeks ago and have actually watched all of the VR video animations because they were so well done and very fun. If you're a fan of old-school Disney cartoons (Duck Tales, Darkwing Duck, etc.) then you're in for a big hit of nostalgia. If you do enjoy their work consider also joining their Patreon to help them create more experiences.
Learning
How to clean Oculus Quest 2 and head straps safely? Best cleaning and maintenance tips! // YouTube
If the guide wasn't thorough enough this video from Disco-VR goes through how to clean everything. We get that some of you may be visual learners and seeing the tasks you should be regularly doing to keep things clean is better than going through documentation.
Product care and best practices // Meta Quest
When was the last time you took an antibacterial wipe to your controllers? Does your dust cloth have its own layer of dust? You should probably check out the guide from Oculus on how they recommend taking care of your Quest to keep it clean and working well.
Development
Cubebrush - Curated digital assets & resources
Knowing when to build versus when to buy is a skill, but with Cubebrush we've actually found a talented community of artists that actually has us buying a lot more than building things to move our projects along. With great 3D Models, Game Assets, AR/VR ready models and more we're very happy with the quality of products in the marketplace and the pricing.
Commentary
Well. this is embarrassing. It looks like we didn't set the go live date for this week's issue properly and we a little late getting this out. So much for automation.
Thank you for reading and subscribing, and we'll see you next week!
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