Weekly Metaverse 130: AR in the car! AR on the couch!
I'm two weeks late on this newsletter; sorry to be a slouch!
Note that probably doesn’t matter to you but feels like a thing I should mention: I changed the subdomain of this newsletter to theweeklymetaverse.substack.com to reflect the recently-changed title/frequency. I wanted weeklymetaverse, but some other guy has it (but isn’t using it for anything). Life is tough like that sometimes. Anyway, onto the newsletter.
We’re back! Sorry for the missed newsletters… Jet lag followed by a lot of catching up on work really got me. In good news, though, I’m not going to write about Elon buying Twitter like literally everyone else with a newsletter that’s even tangentially related to business or technology, so there’s that.
Let’s get started with some AR - things are really developing rapidly these days, and it’s exciting to watch. Lots of folks seeing what the Quest Pro can do, plus there’s more and more integration of everyone’s favorite new AI tools.
Here’s one that isn’t necessarily thrilling - it’s AR changing the pattern on a pillow - but it’s good. Give it a watch and appreciate the lighting, the edges (most of the time), and how well it adjusts as the pillow is pressed and moved. Photorealistic pass through AR powered by the Apple M2 (rumored to go inside their VR/AR headset), video by Dawn Robotics. When you have this kind of fidelity, it’s going to enable truly immersive experiences in which you can’t tell what around you is being modified by AR and what isn’t.
If AR on your throw pillows isn’t exciting enough for you, how about AR in the car? Holoride just launched its in-car AR system for Audis in Germany, and it’s not just a headset in the back seat - it integrates real-time vehicle data (like information about acceleration, steering and braking) and uses it in the in-game experience.
Holoride uses a set of HTC Vive Flow glasses, plus an 8BitDo Pro 2 Gamepad. It’s only launching with one game, but it also allows you to mirror your smartphone screen and watch content on a large, virtual screen.
And if AR in the car isn’t enough for you, how about VR in the car? I know what you’re thinking - anybody can take a Quest 2 in the car; what’s so exciting about that?
That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about wearing a VR headset… while driving. Just give this bad boy a watch.
Land in the Metaverse
One of the big headlines that’s appeared several place sin the last few days is that $2 billion has been spent on land in the metaverse.
I still don’t get it. Is there some possibility that land in the metaverse will become worth something significant because of arbitrary scarcity? Sure. Of course there is. But even if you assume that to be true, you can’t possibly begin to predict where people are going to be willing to pay for land.
Decentraland? The Sandbox? The leading competitors when it comes to metaverse land don’t have any kind of meaning VR, AR or real-world integration. They’re missing the key pieces of what make something a metaverse experience, so it’s not tough to imagine them being supplanted by others that are really embracing the critical characteristics of the metaverse. If that happens, all their land is worth bupkus.
Here’s my speculation about land in the metaverse - the land that’s going to be matter is land in the real world as seen via AR. In VR (or non-VR metaverse platforms like Decentraland), your relative location to the rest of the world doesn’t matter, so VR experiences are likely to end up like apps today - you don’t wander down some virtual street to go from one app on your phone to the next; you just close the first and open the next.
AR is where location really matters. I believe that one day we’ll all be wearing AR glasses or contacts, and we’ll have a helpful stream of information overlaid onto our vision. Some of this will come from AR apps that we’re running on our devices - the LinkedIn app, for example, will be able to overlay someone’s name, company, title and mutual connections when I see them.
The rest of this AR content will come from some kind of public channels that you can choose to tune into. Your local shopping center might have a channel that they encourage you to turn on when you visit. It might show menus on the outside of restaurants or even something as mundane but helpful as the locations of open parking spaces. It might also give you a mall-specific virtual assistant that can offer directions to stores and answer basic questions for you. During the holidays, it might deck the halls with AR decorations.
It’s these AR channels where real estate will really be worth something, because they’ll enable to you be present where people already are. An AR ad in the mall is going to be seen by people, because people are visiting the mall. Your ad in your plot in Decentraland isn’t valuable unless you’re already drawing people in. Combine AR with ad targeting, and you can create some really valuable ad inventory that combines a physical space that people are in with digital targeting - instead of just having a big ad on the wall that promotes a store, that same space could promote a different store for each visitor based on their interests.
The way that I really hope this turns out is that people are incentivized to create magical AR experiences all around us, because getting people to tune into your AR channel means that you can sell ad space or monetize in some other way. Around the holidays, you’ll have AR channels that use AI to turn every house in your neighborhood into gingerbreads houses, and it will delight you, and people will tune and have a lovely holiday season.
Metaverse News
Animal Pal: The Newly-Released Pet-Walking AR App: Now when your kid begs you for a dog, you can challenge them to keep an AR dog alive and happy for a few months first!
Philips expands rollout of its ClarifEye augmented reality surgical navigation solution to Japan: Using low-dose x-rays and AR, this basically gives surgeons a real-time view of the inside of patients’ bodies. That’s some sci-fi stuff, man.
This SnapChat lens turns anything into a cartoon character. It’s like the fancy surgical innovations, except it’s pointless (but amusing!).
Strava partners with Snapchat for new augmented reality experience for athletes: These kinds of specific and useful AR experiences should help to make the technology increasingly mainstream.