If you missed these stories over the year, I hope you give them a second look: They're among my personal favorites and/or the ones I believe will remain relevant for the coming year.
Study Suggests Emotion & Player Agency More Important Than High-End Graphics in Virtual Experience
"Field of view and visual realism – achieved through cutting-edge graphics and usually powered by high-end headsets – can be relatively unimportant in creating a believable VR experience. Far more important is the way a user is made to feel (e.g. happy or scared) within the virtual environment, the study found." This specific study was conducted in VR with over 300 volunteers, but the results probably apply to flatscreen 3D experiences just as neatly...
CONFIRMED: Adam Schiff's Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act Would Apply to Video Games, Virtual Worlds & Metaverse Platforms
While the 2024 election means Schiff's specific bill is dead in the water, the gen AI intellectual property controversy will likely come to a head in 2025. (Or stagger on, bloody and bedraggled, through protracted court battles.)
US Government-Funded Researchers Found That Women Using Quest Devices Much More Likely to Experience VR Nausea. No One in Meta/the VR Industry Has Contacted Them About It.
I can't believe the tech/VR industry hasn't given this revelation wider (hardly any?) coverage, so I'll keep bringing it up until they do:
Dr. Kelly tells me no one at Meta, let alone the VR industry at large, has contacted him about these findings.
“I'm not sure why they haven't reached out,” he tells me by e-mail. “My guess is they have their own ideas of how to solve the problem of cybersickness, but I don't think the industry track record on that is very good.”
He adds that they may just be unaware of this research (from a NSF-backed, well-ranked science and technology-focused university), but I tend to agree about the unimpressive track record. Then again, no one at Meta contacted danah boyd about her findings, even though she’s a senior researcher at Microsoft.
Seven more beneath the break!
If AI is Soon Supposed to Replace Millions of Jobs, Why Has US Unemployment Remained Historically Low Despite the Launch of ChatGPT?
Another question I wish reporters in tech would ask more often! (And probably will, when the AI bubble inevitably bursts.)
An Author Darkly: Last Years of Philip K. Dick Remembered by Jonathan Lethem, Tim Powers, and Linda Levy -- PKD's "Dark-Haired Girl" Muse
This one's a bit farther afield from my usual virtual world focus, but given Philip Dick's influence on people in the industry, I hope you find these insights as valuable (and somber) as I did.
Inside Crack Den: The Untold Story Behind Second Life's Controversial, Long-Running Roleplay Community
Online communities emerging in unexpected places continue to be a core them I want to write about for, well, forever:
[R]ather than just fill it with headstones of characters who never existed, Hathian’s graveyard also marks the real life players who’ve left the material world. One of Crack Den’s very first founders, who struggled with real world health issues and died at 40, is among the first to have a tombstone there. The Crack Den community held a ceremony for her; offline roommate managed to log into Second Life to attend.
“We’ve had a number of deaths in the community that hit hard,” says Nadir, “people with health issues that found escapism in writing stories and their characters.”
Here's Why the Metaverse Works, Leading to Massive Platforms Like Roblox, Fortnite & Many More
Still another under-told story!
The New Second Life Shoes of Hanna Lindberg Tell Two Amazing Stories
The kind of story New World Note was pretty much created for. Here's hoping Hanna and her country have a positive outcome in the new year.
The Limits of Gen AI, the Immersion Divide, and The Rise of the Metaverse Generation
Very few people who grew up on immersive interactivity are part of the demographic who largely comprise the investor class. Their flight to AI may seem like a rational apprehension of new technology, but the dream of creating thinking machines predates Snow Crash by decades if not centuries. Not having grown up on interactive immersion as an integral thread in their social fabric, it’s difficult for them to see the appeal of metaverse platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, and easy to dismiss it all as “just online games” -- even when the evidence of their continued growing mass adoption is right in front of them.
BREAKING: Philip Rosedale Returns Full-Time to Second Life as Linden Lab CTO, Focusing on Mobile & AI Applications to Grow the Virtual World
After 21 years of tracking the evolution of my own thinking about virtual worlds while writing about Philip's own perspective, it was a rare treat to circle back as neatly as we did in this chat:
“I feel like it's not for everybody, but the people that it serves when it does are aided by it, or at least can be, when you do it right. Maybe even like teenagers, to pick a contentious group, I'm not really sure that teenagers should be in virtual worlds, I don't know. But I think people that are using Second Life and getting benefit from it are almost in every case, not teenagers, as we both know. They're disabled veterans, there are people that are stay-at-home moms that don't have access to a social life because they've got kids on their knees.
“There's always wonderful reasons why people use Second Life, and part of the fun for me has been growing up and realizing, I don't have to make it something that I get super famous, and everybody in the world uses it, and feels more like an Elon Musk project or something. No, I'm perfectly happy making it a really positive experience for a much smaller number of people. Like, that's totally fine.”
Thanks to everyone who's been reading along this year and all the years before that. I'm already preparing several pretty amazing new stories for 2025.
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