Spatial News™ #034
This week we focus on social AR, AR for advertising, VR for education, spatial audio, touch & smell in virtual worlds, the metaverse, digital fashion & sustainability, MetaPhygital art, & more!
Welcome to Spatial News™ the 34th edition! It’s an explosion of the senses! “We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
― Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices
Spatial Spotlight: Morphy.Vision
Last week’s Spatial Spotlight featured one of Spatial8’s newest ecosystem partners, Morphy.Vision. They are a creative Augmented Reality studio from Ukraine that combines high-quality 3D graphics, social media capabilities, and marketing prowess to create new AR experiences for brands. They have mastered social AR. Follow the link to read more about them, their services, and their volunteer work.
Does AR advertising work?
In SN #031 we wrote about the uniqueness of AR for brand marketing. According to Dr. Joachim Scholz, AR works in even more ways than you might think. Some key takeaways from his LI post:
“AR advertising outperforms purely digital advertising formats on several key metrics, often by a considerable margin.
AR massively increases how much time and effort consumers spend on a brand’s advertisement.
AR outperforms purely digital media when encoding brand-related information into long-term memory.”
Read the article for more insights.
Educators in VR Research Library
Casie Millhouse shared Zotero EDVR XR Research Library open to the public with a growing collection of research references and resources for researchers, students, and educators. Out of sight!
Spatial audio and VR/AR: What’s the significance?
Let’s hear what Tom Ffiske’s Immersive Wire has to say:
“Spatial audio takes the next step and lets musicians and developers simulate sounds above and behind people [not just left and right like typical audio] as well[…]
How important is high-end audio for virtual reality? Immensely improtant[…]
[XR] improves immersion, but spatial audio finishes the package.”
The Future of Touch and Smell in Virtual Worlds
Check out the NBC news piece. (Thanks for sharing Erik Cooper and congrats with the well-deserved attention OVR is getting!)
In the comment section of Erik’s LI post Professor Bob comments:
“Smell stands MUCH MORE chance of enhancing so-called immersion than haptics (which is years and years away from delivering a credible believable experience). Impressed with what OVR has achieved ... as were members of the Plymouth public when they experienced our Virtual Mayflower and 1620s Barbican project.”
Follow the link above to experience it virtually! In the meantime, here’s a preview of the experience and some context:
Going by the looks of it, I’m pretty sure 1620’s Plymouth had a stench that reached to the heavens. One whiff and you’d never forget it. In my opinion, these kinds of virtual historical tours are some of the best use cases for VR.
Regulating the Metaverse: a Blueprint for the Future
I’ve been sharing Louis Rosenberg’s arguments for regulating the metaverse here on SN for months as they have developed. Here is the most recent paper he wrote capturing all of those points. Highly recommended.
The web is not our metaversal future
Anti-Web3 fire-spitter Rafael Brown is at it again. In response to the news that Meta is injecting code into websites to track users [Oh, Zuck…], he starts,
“Anyone who wants a reason for why the metaverse won't be built on the web (of any favorite, make-believe number you can append)? How about security?
Everyone knows that bad behavior abounds on the web and is facilitated by browsers, languages, scripts, and websites. We bypassed flash are suspicious of JavaScript. Beyond the web being a slow, non-performant mess that was optimized for 2D static images and text with later support added for audio and video that went off to cloud as fast as possible.
The web is not our metaversal future. That's laughable. We deserve better. The web is our shoddy, troubled past. The web is everything the metaverse needs to avoid, from Facebook tracking to Cryptocurrency gambling. The web is what Games and XR have avoided as we have built the proto metaverse examples that everyone refers to here [as] peak internet when they talk about the metaverse. Precursors on cloud, bypassing web.”
What? Not hot enough for you? Here’s some more water on the sauna rocks.
In a recent LI post from Theo Priestley about the irony of pro-decentralization Web3 using exchanges as middlemen, Damon Lenahan comments
“Blockchain technology is the exact opposite of decentralization.
In its expanded form it will take all known information and link it together. Here is where we will see and feel the full.power.of web3. Not more control in the hands of more people... but all the control in very few hands. Just wait till smart contracts run everyday life...”
How possible is it for blockchain tech to do this in a technical sense? If possible, how probable is this scenario?
<Insert pause here>
Wait… serious? You’re missing that real summer heat. Put the temperature all the way up?!
Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you…
Computer Security 161 Cryptocurrency Lecture
Sounds tame, right? Nope, even the very shilled out Matt Damon gets it in this one.
This is Clyde DeSouza’s favorite talk on the subject by world renowned expert Dr. Nicholas Weaver of UC Berkeley.
Are there rebuttals to any Dr. Weaver’s points out there? If so, please share.
Okay, let’s cool down this climate a bit.
How Digital Fashion Saves 97% of CO₂
Image courtesy of Scopus Studio
“Many fashion creators are not aware of how digital fashion can help with the sustainability and environmental footprint when it is implemented correctly. A digital garment can save up to 97% of CO₂ and water up to 4 000 liters per garment. Limitless reasons for how these numbers come into place, besides that it is up to 80% less costly than conventional fashion product development which enables more opportunities and possibilities. With the help of 3D visualization tools and material simulation, it is a matter of time before digital fashion will be the norm to develop and sell fashion products.”
You may not be able to feel digital garments, but nature does.
“BEYOND”: a MetaPhygital Art Experience
S001, “The first MetaPhygital artist” and one of Spatial8’s newest ecosystem members, will be having an extravaganza of an event early this September that will take place physically in DorsoDuro Venezia as well as in S0001’s own virtual space on Spatial.io where the audience can learn about the artist and interact with the art. The grand opening will be
Hosted by Milyae Park, Board Advisor of the Museum of London
Open the S001 MetaPhygital Art Experience with Simone Ranucci Brandimarte
Include 5 Speakers from Venezia and MetaVerse &
Sport a DJ Set!
The first day will be followed by a week of events and talks on different verticals (one night will be around VR/AR and the metaverse in collaboration with Spatial.io where I will be part of the panel)
50 guests at a time on the Spatial platform
Free access
Be the first to go BEYOND!
For more details visit www.s001.it
To join us RSVP: s@s001.it
Thanks for exploring the virtual senses with us, Spatialists! I can’t read minds, so sending me feedback is the only way I can know what works and what doesn’t.
Joh of Spatial8 has watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,¡Three Amigos!, Four Rooms, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense…
P.S. Don’t forget to take our Future Technologies Usage Survey 2022 for a chance to get some random NFTs!