A twofer. First up, Yahoo Finance:
"Our future digital reality will need rules to keep people safe online"
On Aug. 6, pop star Ariana Grande will kick off her latest concert. But the show won’t be in front of a packed arena. Instead, she’ll perform in front of thousands of fans via Epic Games’ “Fortnite.”
The Rift Tour, as the concert is called, will run from Aug. 6 to Aug. 8 and feature five shows that “Fortnite” players can join and watch virtually with their friends. Grande joins a growing number of artists including Travis Scott and Killer Mike entering the tech industry’s newest obsession: the metaverse.
A persistent and virtual world accessible through augmented reality, virtual reality, or even smartphones, the metaverse is being hyped by CEOs ranging from Facebook’s (FB) Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Satya Nadella to Nvidia’s (NVDA) Jensen Huang, and, of course, Epic’s Tim Sweeney.
The pandemic — and its accompanying social distancing — has also made the idea of a virtual world more appealing, especially as the Delta variant spreads. I, for one, have used a number of virtual and augmented reality apps since the pandemic. While they’re still in their early days, these apps reveal a sneak preview of the metaverse.
“The notion is that all of us can join a shared virtual space where we get to be spatially arranged with one another in a similar manner that you'd have in the real world, but combining that with all the things that virtual worlds offer — the ability to create and build 3D content on the fly and to do things that are fantastical,” explained Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.
But the metaverse comes with risks. Experts warn that metaverse hosts like Facebook and Epic need to address practical concerns before they create full-fledged, digital worlds. Political disinformation, user harassment, and crypto scams already pervade the digital world, and they’ll only become bigger problems as we enter the metaverse — unless companies tackle them head-on.
Accountability in the metaverse
To help visualize the metaverse, it’s best to think of it as a digital version of reality. The online life simulator “Second Life” is a form of metaverse where you create your own avatar and explore a virtualized version of the real world, as are, to a degree, massive multiplayer online games like “World of Warcraft.” The gist is you have an avatar that you customize and use to interact with other people’s avatars in a virtual setting....
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And from Nvidia's blog, August 11:
From Our Kitchen to Yours: NVIDIA Omniverse Changes the Way Industries Collaborate
Talk about a magic trick. One moment, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was holding forth from behind his sturdy kitchen counter.
The next, the kitchen and everything in it slid away, leaving Huang alone with the audience and NVIDIA’s DGX Station A100, a glimpse at an alternate digital reality.
For most, the metaverse is something seen in sci-fi movies. For entrepreneurs, it’s an opportunity. For gamers, a dream.
For NVIDIA artists, researchers and engineers on an extraordinarily tight deadline last spring, it was where they went to work — a shared virtual world they used to tell their story and a milestone for the entire company.
Designed to inform and entertain, NVIDIA’s GTC keynote is filled with cutting-edge demos highlighting advancements in supercomputing, deep learning and graphics.
“GTC is, first and foremost, our opportunity to highlight the amazing work that our engineers and other teams here at NVIDIA have done all year long,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse engineering and simulation at NVIDIA.
With this short documentary, “Connecting in the Metaverse: The Making of the GTC Keynote,” viewers get the story behind the story. It’s a tale of how NVIDIA Omniverse, a tool for connecting to and describing the metaverse, brought it all together this year.
To be sure, you can’t have a keynote without a flesh and blood person at the center. Through all but 14 seconds of the hour and 48 minute presentation — from 1:02:41 to 1:02:55 — Huang himself spoke in the keynote.
Creating a Story in OmniverseIt starts with building a great narrative. Bringing forward a keynote-worthy presentation always takes intense collaboration. But this was unlike any other — packed not just with words and pictures — but with beautifully rendered 3D models and rich textures.
With Omniverse, NVIDIA’s team was able to collaborate using different industry content-creation tools like Autodesk Maya or Substance Painter while in different places....
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