News
How The Metaverse Is Changing Funding Models And Why It Could Be Bad News — Metapunk
The MMORPG Ember Sword conducted a virtual land sale to raise funds and earned more than $200 million in 21 days. For the metaverse to grow companies will need to find ways to sustain their initial development, but the short history of the metaverse has show some was of doing this favoring players over short term investors. This article does a great job sharing that history and putting things into context.
Why the World’s First Virtual Reality High School Changes Everything
Pre-college public education has primarily been limited to the neighborhood a child resides, and has governed the quality of resources and overall knowledge made available. Back in issue 18 of the newsletter we featured VictoryXR, a platform for hosting courses guided by teachers live in VR. It was only a matter of time before this moved beyond colleges using it, and a full curriculum is now available for attending high school in VR. Currently being piloted with children from the U.S. and the Caribbean, when this has been shown to be successful it could change how we educate children globally, offering access to a higher quality education. We're hoping to see the successful results next year when the first class completes a full year of learning.
Official: India Moves to Regulate Virtual Influencers
The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) recently became the first country whose advertising guidelines elevated virtual humans to abide by the same advertising and disclosure standards as any human entity presenting sponsored content on social media. The guidelines, similar to the American FTC influencer disclosure guidelines, clarify when and how content must be presented to disclose paid partnerships or other beneficial arrangements.
Experiences
Lady Gaga songs and videos - CEEK.com
We haven’t featured any content from CEEK before, but this short behind the scenes shot in 360• of the song 911 (see the video for the song on YouTube) by Lady Gaga seems like the right time to put them on your radar. What we’ve enjoyed about them was the large amount of international music performances they have live streamed that are available online for free. After you’ve seen the film it is worth checking out the rest of the library and seeing if you’ll find other artists whose work you’ll enjoy.
Development
Try the new LookDev Studio prototype today | Unity Blog
Unity LookDev Studio feels like the missing tool in the Unity asset production pipeline that other tools like Substance Painter solved, but wasn't as integrated as a team needs for rapid iteration and refinement of imported assets under different lighting scenarios. Check out a video overview on YouTube, and if this looks like a tool you'd like to use and help iterate by providing feedback check out the Unity3D forum thread or add an issue on the Github repo. We're very happy with the tool so far, and hope it gets additional features and make it a permanent tool for Unity.
One More Thing
Tranzient | Make Electronic Music in VR
@aliveintech has outdone themselves by bringing electronic music production into VR. This new experience is similar to their Ableton Live VR Controller by removing the need for Ableton Live and providing you all the tools, instruments, and effects you’ll need to get started. Tranzient Is available on Steam, Oculus Quest, and Oculus Rift but if you purchase this on the Oculus store this week there is a 30% discount.
Commentary
Facebook, Nvidia. and Apple aren't the only companies at the heart of the upcoming Metaverse, and it's good not to lose focus of that and keep an eye on a few of the other players from the software and experience side. Since no company will be at the center of a truly distributed and connected set of experiences, we should expect more of these purchases in the upcoming months and years. It's rare that one company would write all of the software, and buying a mature solution is much more efficient than investing in writing something from scratch.
In case you're not keeping track here are some acquisitions we've seen so far in 2021:
We'll be following this up with an article next issue (either one we write or one that another creator) laying out more of these acquisitions and how they add up to even better offerings for creating more immersive content options.
Thank you for reading and subscribing, and we'll see you next week!
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