Spatial News™ #041

This week we focus on 3D marketing costs, HMD positioning map, cybersickness study, eye tracking, Web3, laws in the metaverse, wholesale vs retail CBDCs, Nordic VR Forum & MatchXR recaps, & more!

Nov 17, 2022

Spatial News™ is 1 year old! <Whistling, clapping, banners, confetti, emoji storm> “Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!” -Dr. Seuss in “Happy Birthday to You”. Warning: this edition is the size of a one-year old child.

No pre-amble, let’s jump in like double dutch, shall we?

The customer wants to know,

How much does 3D marketing cost?

In the article Artem Chyhyrynskyi of ADVIN begins,

“3D marketing is the use of digital content in the creation and promotion of a product. Digital content is 2D or 3D graphics that help, entertain and keep the consumer's attention on the product in a simple way. This creates a new form of added value and a great opportunity to attract new customers.”

He then goes into the creative and technical road map of a project and the 3D marketing tools such as AR, metaverse, and NFTs as well as their associated costs (in money terms not mental and physical well-being).

I’d love to hear what XR Nation (Spatial8’s XR community) ecosystem partners think of this. How would you break this down?

I bet many customers would also like to know where consumers are looking.

While

“[e]ye tracking usually means to estimate a person’s gaze direction, inferring the object a person is looking at at any given moment[…]

there are

Advanced uses of eye tracking technologies

Beyond gaze detection” one can

“[E]stimate the position of the user’s eyes in physical worlds in relation to the display”
Measure pupil diameter to determine cognitive load, emotional arousal, and more
Measure blinking rates which can also be used to measure emotional arousal like nervousness as well as work load

Eye tracking sensors can be utilized in all types of ocular devices from microscopes to binoculars to AR smart glasses and VR headsets which can be used to assist in microsurgery and training doctors to better finding targets to assisting in manufacturing operations remotely. Read the article (and past articles) from Spatial8 ecosystem partner SeeTrue Technologies to see more.

“Demographic and Behavioral Correlates of Cybersickness” study

An important new, in-the-wild study on cybersickness in VR by the Sensing, Interaction & Perception Lab out of Zürich is out in the wild. Here are some highlights:

“Female users and participants with low VR experience experienced higher cybersickness[…]
[They] found a positive link between low sickness and increased amounts of head rotation, and between low sickness and increased distance travel in VR.
Unlike past work, [they] found no effect of age on cybersickness, nor a significant link between presence and cybersickness.”

Follow the link to read the paper, hear the talk, and more.

Here’s a nifty chart from the study.

No alternative text description for this image

Want another chart? Here’s a great one.

HMD Positioning Map

Niclas Johanssen of XR4Work created the chart below as an overview of the XR hardware landscape.

”Here you have an image that shows you the different product segments that XR is crystallizing into, and how the different headsets are made to appeal to different user segments / use cases - with a growing interest in productivity applications”.

Read the article for more deets.

Image from segpolo.org (the International Segway Polo Association)

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee: 'Web3 is not the web at all'

We started on TB-L back in SN #007 via the Tim O’Reilly article then again in SN #032, so you know I had to wade into the fray (I would have anyways).

“While breaking our personal data out of Big Tech's clutches is an ambition shared by Berners-Lee, he's not convinced blockchain[…] will be the solution.
"They're too slow too expensive and too public. Personal data stores have to be fast, cheap and private," he said.

Read the article to find out more about what he plans to do about it (Hint: it involves a startup).

Is Web3 BS?

Here’s Molly White, crypto researcher and critic, speaking at Web Summit 2022.

"Dig deep. Ask the hard questions. Criticize the flaws. And cut through the...." -Molly White, doing the dirty work

(Shared by James Edward Marks.)

While Molly’s cutting through the bull-scat, Kelly’s cutting straight to the meat. (Yeesh, sounds like a slaughterhouse!)

“Web3 is here (Tim - I'm talking to you), so let's stop looking back, let's only go forward.” -Kelly Vero with that cannon-fire

Web3 Rules, OK?

“Safety and data have to go hand in hand. And web3 is a fantastic opportunity for us to put everybody together on servers worldwide to experience lots of things all at the same time and feel inspired, but more importantly, feel safe. So if we're not utilising KYC [Know Your Client or Know Your Customer], MFA [multi-factor authentication] and CIAM [Customer Identity Access Management] correctly, then we're not really doing web3 fairly - after all, this space is open, persistent and interoperable. It’s transparent and it is here.”

Then Robby Yung, CEO of Animoca Brands, goes on and says,

'There Is No Metaverse Without Web3

because you need to have that transaction layer so that you have interoperability between content and you can bring it from place to place.”

So blockchain is the only way towards interoperability…? What about the USD (Universal Scene Description) that NVidia and others on the Metaverse Standards Forum are promoting as the “HTML of the metaverse” (as seen in SN #037), for one?

Yung also calls VR a ‘big distraction’ and a ‘mistake’ on Meta’s part.

The way things have been going for Zuck and Meta these past weeks, many would agree. Sure, it’s been a money pit, but aren’t you curious to see where it all leads? Paraphrasing Teemu, “he’s the leader of our industry [VR, metaverse] whether people like it or not”.

If you’ve been following the newsletter since the early days or have read through past SN editions, dear reader, you can see how I’ve tried to capture, among other things, this ever-evolving discourse of what the metaverse is/might be, what Web3 is, and how they are connected. Since I’m already knee deep, I’ll share a possible future connection between the metaverse and Web3 taken from pages of This Book Does Not Exist.

This be a dark vision…

“When the metaverse is turned on and automatically everywhere, technologies like blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and smart contracts that were once part of “the Web3 movement” will almost instantly share in its ubiquity, but from the shadows. While these technologies aren’t necessary for the existence of the metaverse, they will be everywhere anyway.
It all starts when the stork brings the big baby LONI, a name of the world’s new digital currency, from the Central Bank [see SN #032 on CBDCs -Joh] tenderly wrapped in the legal backing that the public and private ledger systems never had.
Right away, AI doctors it, placing it into a black box. Accountants act as nursemaids looking terrific in their tactical vests and their gas masks, batons by their keyboards, shields leaning against their desks. Then, the new king presents LONI for everyone to adopt.
In that day, blockchain and its technological kin will be allowed to lattice the entire digital world, ‘chaining the nascent metaverse, making its denizens’ every transaction trackable.
Then the Web will finally be one, and the Arachnitects will rest as the servers serve them their meals.
Nobody will give two cricket chips about this or that discourse anymore. The once insistent, dissident voices will become distant as they give in to cognitive dissonance and join in or join the underground, where they can freely enjoy homemade rum, rock moss and/or rat meat, or made to run…”

I warned ye…

Well, that was fun.

Interestingly, the march of CBDCs might already have begun with this pronouncement and this experiment.

Blockchain expert Andy Martin makes a distinction between

Wholesale vs Retail CBDCs

In the comments he defines

“a retail CBDC as a direct account between the central bank and consumers, whereas wholesale is an account between the central bank and commercial banks. A use case for a wholesale cbdc might be cross border payments - bank to bank[…]
both are centralised and public money. Wholesalee is useful for cross border payments and especially as collateral in stable coins. Retail cuts out the commercial banks as is programmable in the wallets of consumers. This gives too much power to central banks/politicians.”

Jesús Herencia, whose work on blockchain we’ve shared before in SN, also comments,

“CBDC is the perfect excuse to sell the ‘story’ of the digital and web3 world applied for population control...”

Has he read some of This Book Does Not Exist before? Uncanny…

If we’re gonna view the metaverse and Web3 as inseparable (or even conflate them, which doesn’t make sense, see, for instance, SN #025), we should know the rules (see Kelly’s article above), what needs regulating (as per Louis Rosenberg’s plethora of articles on the topic like in SN #007, for one example), and

What Laws [Should] Govern The Metaverse

(We’ll also probably need to repurpose and adapt old laws and create entirely new ones as well.)

Now, we’re reaching the

Event Horizon:

Nordic VR Forum 2022 videos

Did you miss Nordic VR Forum 2022? Enjoy the videos and check out what’s new in the Norwegian and greater Nordic XR community!

MatchXR 2022 recap

Spatial8 was at Helsinki XR Center’s MatchXR 2022, the biggest one-night XR & emerging tech event in the Nordics, yesterday.

⭐ All 1300 tickets were sold out (well, they were free but whatev)

⭐ We had so much traffic that we didn’t have any time to visit other booths and try out cool tech or hardly even say hi to our ecosystem partners also in attendance. Based on the interest in our ecosystem, we might even reach 100 partners by year’s end…

⭐ Well done, HXRC, and thanks for the invite!

AWE Nite Northern XR: Wise Guys XR Accelerator

Join us (Teemu and I since we are the co-organizers) Thursday the 24th, 18-19:30 EET (that’s Helsinki time) for the last AWE Nite Northern XR meet up of the year, featuring the Startup Wise Guys XR accelerator program!

Follow the link here for more details on how to join.

Do I have to stop now? Yes, I probably should. This baby is getting chubby.

<Your Spatial AD Here>

Immersal announces the launch of its AR solution for horse racing tracks

The solution will work on horse racing tracks anywhere and enhance the visitor experience at the track. Visitors at the track can use AR through their mobile devices or AR glasses, for example, to navigate to their seats at the stand, view real-time statistics or information concerning the races and individual horses, or enjoy 3D entertainment.