Twenty five thousand people attended the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week, the first fully in-person event since 2019, which was about half this size, a record at the time. I guess you could say there was some pent-up demand.
Attendees stand near the registration desk at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco, … [+]
GDC is known for its dealmaking and networking at scale found nowhere else in the industry. The conference is notorious for the large number of parties put on by companies looking for developers, who are busy networking among themselves. The panels are all inside baseball unless you’re in the business of making games
Tim Sweeny, founder and CEO of Epic Games delivered his highly anticipated annual “State of Unreal” keynote. With 500M Fortnite user accounts, and 350M monthly users, Epic is probably the most powerful company in the game industry, and is best positioned to benefit from an expanding Metaverse, which Sweeny believes is now upon us. Fortnite Creative, introduced in 2018, has allowed users to build more than a million “islands” using a proprietary toolset. Over 40% of player time in Fortnite is spent now spent in user generated worlds. Yesterday, Epic introduced the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), and launched its Public Beta.
UEFN is a version of Unreal Editor that can create and publish places and experiences directly to Fortnite with many of Unreal Engine 5’s powerful features using a new programming language called “Verse.” Epic says it hopes to see Verse widely adopted as a programming language for the Metaverse.
Kitbash has begun selling assets in Epic’s new Fab, a 3D marketplace. Kitbash creates creates … [+]
Epic launched a new asset marketplace, Fab, to which it has added to the Kit Bash library of popular virtual world assets, which appear in numerous AAA games, and Hollywood productions. Soon to be added are the Unreal Engine Marketplace, Sketchfab, Quixel Bridge, and the ArtStation Marketplace. Users can check out the Alpha version of Fab as a plugin for UEFN today. This represents a significant development. There is money to be made in asset stores, where users sell assets to one another, and Epic will skim a little vigorish of the top of each sale. Second Life makes over $60M a year doing this, and it has 1/350th of as many users as Fortnite.
Working with Unity, Spatial has just made it a lot easier to deploy an interactive world on its … [+]
Spatial Launches Creator Toolkit SDK for Unity. The 3D social and co-experience platform has made it easier for creatives to build and share interactive online worlds, with the launch of Creator Toolkit powered by Unity. Spatial can now support gamification & interactive exhibitions. The latest gaming components include visual scripting, custom avatars, a world linking system, and the ability to set up quests and rewards.
Luma AI Raises $20 M Series A led by David Beyer and Mike Dauber of Amplify Partners. The company has developed a new neural rendering technology that makes it possible to take a small number of photos to generate, shade and render a photo-realistic 3D model of a product. Also participating in the round are NVIDIA (NVentures), General Catalyst and existing investors, who did a $4.3 M seed round in 2021.
The 20-year-old metaverse game ‘Second Life’ is getting a mobile app. The company was responsible for so many firsts – the first open world metaverse, the first social network, the first creator economy – its surprising they missed the most important one: the shift to mobile. While it once was a unicorn with twenty million users, it remains a vibrant million user community today, sustained by its social ties and robust creator economy with over half a billion dollars in transactions every year. Maybe it’s not too late for the first Metaverse. They’ve got nostalgia on their side.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during a press conference at The MGM during CES 2018 in Las Vegas on … [+]
Nvidia Teams Up With Microsoft On Industrial Metaverse. The Azure cloud computing platform will host Nvidia’s suite of internet services for building and operating hyper-realistic virtual worlds called Omniverse Cloud, as well as Nvidia DGX Cloud. The latter is a new offering described as an artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputing service that gives enterprises instant access to the infrastructure and software needed to train advanced models for generative AI.
Run though the virtual world like Wade Watts on this omnidirectional treadmill, The Omni One, now … [+]
Virtuix’s Omni One VR treadmill. $2,595 Omni Directional VR Dish now shipping to early supporters. Users don overshoes with ball bearings and run in a hard plastic dish held in place with a stabilizing strap. Your feet, in other words, are a controller. The company says it has 35,000 people on its waitlist. Currently, around 50 VR games are compatible with the Omni.
Meow Wolf’s parody grocery store anchors Area 15 in Las Vegas.
AREA15 named as most visited attraction in the US in 2022. The Las Vegas entertainment destination welcomed over three million visitors last year, according to data analytics firm Placer.ai. Meow Wolf’s parody supermarket, Omega Mart, is Area 15’s anchor tenant.
IMAGE DISTRIBUTED FOR ADOBE – Anil Chakravarthy, President of Digital Experience at Adobe, left, … [+]
Adobe introduces Generative AI, Adobe Firefly. At its annual Summit in Las Vegas the company says this new family of creative generative AI models, with the first model being trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content where copyright has expired, and focused on image generation and text effects for safe commercial use. Adobe Firefly is available today as a public beta.
The live concert you watch in Mixed Reality using Vive’s new Elite XR HMD.
The Serendipity, FOMO And Joy Of South-By. My popular Forbes story about my SXSW experience last week. Along with Judging SXSW 2023 XR Experiences, This Week in XR, and three episodes of the podcast, this is my 6th piece of media around the venerated music-movies-tech-media and everything show.
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 Steve Zaho, founder and CEO of Sandbox, a chain of free roam VR attractions with celebrity backers. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.
What We’re Reading
What is an Industrial Metaverse? An Introduction (Rebekah Carter/XR Today)
Who’s still buying real estate in the metaverse? (Chris Morris/Fast Company)
This Week in Schadenfreude
Attendees visit the Meta booth at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco, Wednesday, … [+]
Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? (Paul Murray/NY Mag)
Virtual Reality Is Still Trying to Get Game (Dan Gallagher/Wall St. Journal)
Meta’s pivot from ‘irresponsible’ metaverse spending earns stock an upgrade (Emily Bary/Marketwatch)
Meta’s metaverse is on the back burner (Peter Allen Clark/Axios)
Comedians are trying to make the metaverse cool, but it won’t let them (Jay Peters/The Verge)
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2023/03/23/this-week-in-xr-gdc-wrap-up-luma-3d-ai-raises-20-million/