Hi there, Spatialists, welcome to the fourth edition of Spatial News™. As the Finnish saying goes, and this is obviously a translation, “If the cat doesn’t hold its own tail up, no one will” (which is a pretty ironic saying coming from the modest Finns). 10 points to the first non-Finn to tell me what it actually means in the comments.
"Web3 is here!",
Petri Kajander declares in his full steam ahead primer on the decentralized aspects of Web3 (I added the quotes and the exclamation point for effect). So what should we do about it?
“The best way to start experiencing the new world is to do something. Just hodling your cryptocurrencies is a bit boring and not really much of an effort either. Just point your browser to Coinbase, Bitstamp or Binance and get started.”
There it is.
The Metaverse – a genuine opportunity or over-hyped?
While we’re sailing towards that new world, we should still be wary of the currents. Here is a grounded take on the metaverse by true AR and VR veteran (not like a 5-year ‘veteran’ but like an almost-four-decades-in veteran) Professor Bob Stone.
“The XR sector has experienced a roller coaster ride of success and failure, hype and reality, since the early 1990s, on approximately an eight-year cycle. The Metaverse will not escape a similar ride."
Inquisitive minds would like to know, where are we in this current 8-year XR cycle? And where are we in the metaverse cycle (it might not be so obvious)?
Future Technologies Usage Survey 2021
This past Wednesday and the third day of the Exthereal: Fashion in Extended Reality event Spatial8 launched a new survey to try and understand the current and potential usage of new and future technologies related to Web3/the metaverse. Fill it out, spatial reader, for a chance to get some random NFTs!
And speaking about Exthereal…
Enter Exthereality
What a marathon! My legs are like gummy worms. We had 3 days of super tight, don’t-take-a-bio-break-or-go-for-a-snack-or-you’ll-miss-something-relevant programming. The keynotes weren’t the only note, though. The Exthereal team (Krista Jäntti, Olesja Hännikäinen, Teemu Ollilainen, and me) had decided from the very beginning of planning that if we were going to talk about immersive experiences then we had to let the audience experience the immersive as well. So if we had talks about social AR, then we had to give the audience a chance to try an exclusive Exthereal face filter (created by Maxim Velichkin).
If we had talks about virtual showrooms and digital fashion then we needed to showcase digital garments in a VR pavilion. For this, we were able to collaborate with a world-class XR team from one of the world’s most successful companies to create a VR pavilion in AltspaceVR. The XR team lead by Dr. Fadi Chehimi squeezed every pixel out of the platform and created a dreamy, one-of-a-kind virtual space. Not only that, the team also managed to import some of the world’s best examples of digital fashion (such as from DressX and 3MBASSY) into the pavilion so that they looked as they were intended (no easy feat). This was all while making everything tie together in an aesthetically pleasing way. I can safely say that Exthereal’s VR pavilion sets the bar high for VR pavilions in Altspace and virtual showrooms in general. (You can experience it for yourself on AltspaceVR, where you can see the pavilion featured, till the end of the month, access code WUD731.)
Here’s a screenshot.
Our first idea for an immersive experience was actually the virtual fashion show. Here is a loose recreation of how that collective conversation went: “Let’s have a fashion in virtual Helsinki! We can have real models from the top modelling agency in Finland model the clothing and accessories of the best fashion designers and fashion brands Finland has to offer. We can produce it in one of the best green screen studios in Finland and have an award-winning virtual studio import the models into their iconic, virtual Finnish environments like Lapland and Helsinki’s Senate Square and handle post-production. Let’s make Helsinki ‘the virtual fashion capital of the world’…”
One of the problems we noticed was that fashion movies, virtual or otherwise, are one and done. You watch it, you’re like “woooow”, but then what? So with the help of our partners at the VR studio Zoan, we decided to create an immersive website along with the fashion show so that the audience could explore the designers’ and brands’ designs at their own pace and in a spatial way.
Exthereality isn’t only the website though. It’s what we at Exthereal call our vision of how fashion and retail could be brought into the metaverse.
A year go, Teemu and I saw that there was something big happening in digital fashion, and we wanted Spatial8 to be a part of it and even impact it in some way. There’s no doubt that Exthereal could have done some things differently at the event, but Exthereal: Fashion in Extended Reality was a good start. While we’re not sure how we stack up against online fashion weeks yet, our numbers suggest that from day one of the event, we had the largest attendance for an online XR event in Finland, the Nordics, Europe, the… (I think I might break the cat’s metaphorical tail with that one). You could say I’m proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. Special thanks to all of the partners that helped make it happen! Stay tuned for more!
This Spatial News™ was packed with the jam! I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Please share your feedback with us so we can improve the quality of our newsletter. We’d also appreciate feedback about the Exthereal event (if you were able to attend), the VR pavilion, the virtual fashion show, and/or the immersive website. Thank you for reading, and, remember, you are spatial!