Coachella In Fortnite, Snap Lenses For MS Teams, VR’s Top Ten

The tech press, having watched Meta’s recent recovery with a gimlet eye, piled back on this week with the NY Times headline Mass Layoffs and Absentee Bosses Create a Morale Crisis at Meta. The Washington Post piled on, reporting Meta paid VR developers salaries of up to $1 million. Facebook’s owner is now in financial trouble. You’d never know it if you follow financial news. Meta stock has doubled in the past four months. Despite the bad press, investors seem to have remembered that Meta’s AI – its algorithms – generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue with humans there not contributing a whole lot. The mere suggestion Meta’s dropping humans in favor of code, and that they’ve stopped talking about the metaverse, has sent the stock soaring, and refilled our favorite new section, “This Week in Schadenfreude” below.

Microsoft Teams adds Snapchat AR Lenses to video chats. In addition to the avatars Teams is rolling out this month, the company partnered with Snap to bring a small set of 26 curated Snapchat Lenses to Teams. Snap Camera, which contains all of Snaps’ filters, has been integrated into Zoom since 2020.

Coachella 2023 Announces ‘Fortnite’ Metaverse Activation. Today (Thursday April 13), the festival announced “Coachella Island,” a partnership with Fortnite that presents the festival in the metaverse. Launching Friday (April 14) at 3 p.m. PT to coincide with the first day of the IRL fest, Coachella Island is inspired by Coachella’s dreamy desert landscape, with digitally rendered mountains, polo fields, palm trees and day-to-night features.

My Top Ten VR Experiences. I make the same list over and over for people so I thought I’d write it down. The list does not include games. The criteria is simply that it made me go “wow.” Check out what’s on the list.

This Week in XR is also a podcast hosted by the author of this column, Ted Schilowitz, Futurist, Paramount Global, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Sid Odedra, Head of UI/UX Design at AUDI. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.

What We’re Reading

Mom, Dad, I Want To Be A Prompt Engineer (Craig S. Smith/Forbes)

This Week in Schadenfreude

Whatever Happened to the Metaverse? (Parmy Olsen/Bloomburg)

It Sounds Like Faebook Is Completely Falling apart (Futurism/Maggie Harrison)

Mark Zuckerberg Abandons Metaverse As Shiny New Toy Appears (Futurism/Maggie Harrison)

Bobbing for Apples

Apple’s Mixed Reality Headset Can’t Defy the Laws of Physics (Karl Guttag/Display Daily)