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It’s that time of year again when the open metaverse community comes together to share developments at the annual OpenSimulator Community Conference. The organizers have put out the call for presentation proposals for the 2023 event happening December 9 and 10. This will be the eleventh year for the community-run conference, which spotlights the latest […]

Well, the NFT craze certainly crashed and burned quickly. According to a new report by DappGambl, 95 percent of NFT collections now have zero value. That’s not a typo. Zero. Out of over 73,000 collections, only around 3,500 still have any market cap at all. And only a tiny fraction of those are worth more

(Image courtesy Microsoft.) Remember those mixed reality combat goggles that Microsoft was building for the Army that made soldiers nauseous? (See our previous story here.) Well, they’re back. Microsoft got its hands slapped and had to go back to the drawing board after reports came out last year that its new AR goggles were making

(Image courtesy OSFest.) The annual OpenSimulator Community Conference, known as OSFest, will take place September 15 through September 30 inside the OSFest virtual world grid. The three-day event features live music, exhibits, talks, tours, social spaces, and shopping for attendees across the hypergrid metaverse. This year’s OSFest offers 94 hours of 94 hours of non-music

  Free land on Avitron. (Image courtesy AviTron.) AviTron owner Alexander Pomposelli has a long history of closing grids without warning. Back when he ran AviWorlds, I counted more than a dozen times that he closed that grid, often without any warning. Residents complained of losing access to regions, inventories, and in world-currency balances. At

(Image courtesy AvatarLife.) AvatarLife is launching its Wild Poker game today, based on Texas Hold’em poker. But it’s more skill-based, said AvatarLife CEO Sushant Chandrasekar. There is also a starting jackpot of 1 million AV$, the grid’s local currency — which translates to about US $4,000. “The launch event will be a three days festival

(Image by Maria Korolov via Midjourney.) New research reports and surveys released this month show that interest in virtual and augmented reality is continuing to drop. According to an EY Consulting survey released earlier this month, only 24 percent of people said their company has started using VR and AR technologies, putting it in last

In April, I wrote that I had high expectations for Apple’s new augmented reality headset — and that I was looking forward to switching back to the iPhone if it was what I hoped for. I was very much disappointed by the actual announcement on Monday. You can watch the headset part of the presentation

I used to think that the path to the metaverse started with screen-based virtual worlds then expanded to virtual reality. At some point, I thought, we’d all be doing everything in the metaverse. The same way that the Internet made information instantly accessible to everyone everywhere, the metaverse would do the same with experiences and

(Image by Maria Korolov via Midjourney.) Virtual reality hasn’t caught on with American teens, according to a new survey from Piper Sandler released on Tuesday. While 29 percent percent of teens polled owned a VR device — versus 87% who own iPhones — only 4 percent of headset owners used it daily, and just 14

(Image by Maria Korolov via Midjourney.) I can’t tell if he’s just being tone deaf, or trying desperately to do some damage control, but after releasing ChatGPT without any warning on an unsuspecting world late last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is now calling for slow and careful release of AI. If you remember, ChatGPT

(Image by Maria Korolov via Midjourney.) Florida-based Avalon Corp. has raised $13 million to build a platform for games capable of taking advantage of the metaverse, featuring a universe of interoperable worlds with various intellectual properties, to be built using technologies including blockchain and game engines. According to the press release, Avalon Corp is uniquely

(Image by Maria Korolov via Midjourney.) Generative AI is one of the world’s top three geopolitical risks this year — right after Russia and China — according to a report released last month by the Eurasia Group, a US-based risk consultancy. “This year will be a tipping point for disruptive technology’s role in society,” the

In the first decade of this century, unscrupulous website owners noticed that Google had caught on to their tricks — link exchanges, invisible keywords, and meta tags. These tricks were designed to fool search engines into thinking that the websites were better and more useful than they actually were. Spoiler alert: these websites were usually