Weekly Metaverse #126: AR robbery, a Chinese restaurant skyscraper, and city planning in the metaverse
Plus Timbaland's thoughts on where things are going with digital entertainers
Here’s a fun one from Twitter to start us off:
You wouldn’t download a car, but you might right click and save some sneakers…
Here’s another one that puts a fun twist on the intersection of AR + AI:
While a Chinese restaurant skyscraper probably isn’t the greatest metaverse use case, it’s a fun twist on a place where I think the metaverse will become an incredible tool for governments and businesses alike - city planning.
Planning Cities in the Metaverse
We’ve already seen a few cities like Seoul start to make digital twins for the sake of city planning, and I think they’re definitely ahead of the curve. As AI and AR/VR continue to improve, the digital twin will be the basis for modeling future changes to the city, and those that have a twin and plenty of historical data to go with it will be able to avoid unexpectedly bad outcomes when enacting changes.
Once upon a time, I almost opened a brick and mortar business. The details don’t really matter as the pandemic derailed the whole thing, but I went through a local city planning process to get a special use permit for a slight alteration to the outside of the building. It was a whole thing that dragged on for months and required a bunch of reports (which I had to produce at significant expense).
Most of what was required could be solved with a digital twin of the city, AI that’s a bit more advanced than what we have now, and AR/VR. For example, I had to get a whole bunch of detailed renderings made of what the change would look like. These were done by the architecture firm that drew up my plans for modifying the inside of building, and they were not cheap despite mostly being drawings of a new fence. If DALL-E can generate a Chinese restaurant skyscraper, you’d better believe it won’t be long before I can walk around a building with my AR glasses and have it render a fence for me while I do.
Luckily, I was able to avoid a traffic impact study, but there’s a good use case for AI - with enough data, we should be able to simulate this in a digital twin. And with the metaverse, we don’t have to just stop at simulating a report. The point of these reports is to help people understand how much worse traffic will be, and with AR and VR, the city council members (and other interested parties like the neighbors) could experience how things would be different if my permit was approved - step into the digital twin of the city and see what the fence would look like and how bad traffic would be at any time of the day they choose.
That’s the crux of the whole thing - the metaverse will enable us to build digital experiences atop the physical world, and that means we can experience it under whatever circumstances we choose, whether that’s a new fence or a giant new mall. When you add powerful AI and digital twins, it becomes almost trivial to measure and experience the impact new projects will have without the time and expense of studies that are required today.
Speaking of which, Beverly Hills is embracing the metaverse - unfortunately, digital twin or no, I probably won’t be able to afford a house there any time soon.
Timbaland Understands the Metaverse
Remember FN Meka? Here’s a quick refresher - there was a digital rapper named FN Meka. He used the n word in his music. It turned out he was made by a couple of white guys, who thought it would be fine to make a black digital rapper who says the n word. It was not fine, and FN Meka is no more.
So does that mean the whole idea of a digital rapper is bad? Timbaland says no, and he seems qualified to judge. In fact, he told Complex that FN Meka’s “execution was correct… because it got people imagining and rethinking. And then it led to a conversation. So I felt like it broke a barrier to let people know what’s coming.”
The article is a great read from a longtime leader in the music industry who is embracing the metaverse and the idea of digital artists by turning his Bored Ape into a rapper named Congo. In this case, Timbaland’s doing the rapping and even doing motion capture to bring Congo to life, which really gives us an idea of the spectrum of possibilities when it comes to digital musicians and entertainers.
FN Meka had lyrics written by AI but was voiced by a human, but you could clearly go farther and have an AI write and perform its own music. You could also go the route Timbaland’s going with Congo - an alter ego that’s an overlay to a real human. The latter isn’t really a new concept (think about artists like Daft Punk and deadmau5, who are largely alter egos of the people inside the suits) - it’s just taking the nom de plume fully digital.
The reality is that in ten years, you’ll almost certainly see digital artists, and it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to distinguish a fully AI artist from a human in a motion capture suit. I think the real question is - will you care?
Entertainment may well be the first place where we start to treat AI like we do people. After all, people tend to be pretty good at separating musicians and their entertainment personas from the people they actually are. R. Kelly is a monster, but I can still enjoy Trapped in the Closet, the greatest hip-hopera of all time. People listen to Elvis and James Brown and Michael Jackson. The reality is that we don’t really treat famous entertainers like they’re real people, so will anyone really care if one day they aren’t?
News from the Metaverse
Detroit Design Students Turn To Virtual Reality to Create a Metaverse Concept Car Experience in Meta Horizon Worlds: You don’t have to go full city planner - the metaverse is the perfect place to try out new products or do a test run of your upcoming event.
Touching the metaverse: Haptic glove maker HaptX grabs $23M to fuel commercialization: Haptics are high on my list on topics to write about - there’s some really cool stuff out there already, and it’s an area that gets more interesting by the day.
Ray-Ban Maker EssilorLuxottica Focuses on Smart Glasses as Metaverse Booms: Form and fashion are going to matter when it comes to AR glasses - remember Google Glass? The biggest maker of sunglasses in the world sees what’s coming, and it should make the next generation of AR appealing to the masses.
ByteDance's Pico will unveil new VR headset Sept. 22: Beating Meta to the punch… but how will it stack up to what’s coming from Meta and Apple?