Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
Spatial, the former augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) collaboration platform, has today announced a significant company evolution to become the metaverse for cultural events such as NFT exhibitions, brand experiences, and conferences, whether on web, mobile, or VR.
Spatial unveils web browser collaboration in 3D workspace and NFT virtual galleries
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more on Spatial in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=spatial
Virtual-reality workspace startup Spatial is offering a free version for users. All you need is a web browser.
JULIAN CHOKKATTU
https://www.wired.com/story/spatial-vr-ar-collaborative-spaces/
Spatial is a startup that enables people to meet through augmented or virtual reality. It’s a little similar to the now defunct Facebook Spaces, except it has much broader support. You can use VR or mixed-reality headsets from a myriad of brands—from Microsoft’s HoloLens and Nreal’s Light to the Oculus Quest—as vehicles to meet in virtual spaces.
Spatial is announcing that it’s launching support for web browsers on desktops, Android, and iOS. Oh, and the platform is now completely free and open to everyone.
The free version temporarily gives you unlimited access to all the enterprise features. Agarawala says a free version will always exist, but limitations will be added back in (like 40-minute sessions and up to three saved project rooms) once social-distancing orders wind down.
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more on immersive reality platforms in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=virbela
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=engagevr
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=asvr
http://bootcamp.uspatial.umn.edu/
More on GIS and geospatial in this blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/02/04/gis-and-geoweb-technologies/
U-Spatial is pleased to announce the 2016 University of Minnesota Summer Spatial Boot Camp, an intensive, five-day geospatial workshop held on the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus from June 6th to 10th, 2016. Over the course of five days, participants will learn the fundamentals of Remote Sensing, GPS, LiDAR, Cartography, and more. Emphasis is on foundational skills in gathering, creating, managing, analyzing, and communicating spatial data. In addition to short courses, guest speakers will present on applications of geospatial tools and techniques.
Working knowledge of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a prerequisite for admission to the workshop. In particular, familiarity with ArcGIS or comparable software packages is required.
The non-refundable participation fee for the entire workshop is $250.
U-Spatial has reserved a block of single-occupancy rooms in an on-campus dormitory at a rate of $46.95/night.
Application opens: February 16, 2016
Application deadline: May 9, 2016*
Notification of acceptance: May 16, 2016
Course fee due: May 31, 2016
Workshop begins: June 6, 2016
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http://www.dhtraining.org/hilt2016/course/spatial-data/
David McClureDigital Humanities Research Developer, Center for Interdisciplinary Digital ResearchStanford University Libraries
http://stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/index.php
My (his) main research interests are augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) as well as camera networks. This includes building novel 3D user interfaces (e.g., using projection mapping or VR headsets) that adapt the layout of spatial UI elements based on implicit user input (e.g., gaze data) and building toolkits for room-scale interfaces. More recently, I also investigate different realities afforded by the combination of VR devices and camera networks.
a spatial VR environment where they can work together
metaverse (hopefully) won’t be the virtual world of ‘Snow Crash,’ or ‘Ready Player One.’ It will likely be something more complex, diverse, and wild.
The metaverse concept clearly means very different things to different people. What exists right now is a series of embryonic digital spaces, such as Facebook’s Horizon, Epic Games’ Fortnite, Roblox‘s digital space for gaming and game creation, and the blockchain-based digital world Decentraland–all of which have clear borders, different rules and objectives, and differing rates of growth.
different layers of realities that we can all be experiencing, even in the same environment or physical space. We’re already doing that with our phones to a certain extent—passively in a physical environment while mentally in a digital one. But we’ll see more experiences beyond your phone, where our whole bodies are fully engaged, and that’s where the metaverse starts to get interesting—we genuinely begin to explore and live in these alternate realities simultaneously.
Xverse
It will have legacy parts that look and feel like the web today, but it will have new nodes and capabilities that will look and feel like the Ready Player One Oasis (amazing gaming worlds), immersion leaking into our world (like my Magicverse concept), and every imaginable permutation of these. I feel that the Xverse will have gradients of sentience and autonomy, and we will have the emergence of synthetic life (things Sun and Thunder is working on) and a multitude of amazing worlds to explore. Building a world will become something everyone can do (like building a webpage or a blog) and people will be able to share richer parts of their external and inner lives at incredibly high-speed across the planet.
Reality will exist on a spectrum ranging from physical to virtual (VR), but a significant chunk of our time will be spent somewhere between those extremes, in some form of augmented reality (AR). Augmented reality will be a normal part of daily life. Virtual companions will provide information, commentary, updates and advice on matters relevant to you at that point in time, including your assets and activities, in both virtual and real spaces.
I think we can all agree our initial dreams of a fully immersive, separate digital world is not only unrealistic, but maybe not what we actually want. So I’ve started defining the metaverse differently to capture the zeitgeist: we’re entering an era where every computer we interact with, big or small, is increasingly world-aware. They can recognize faces, voices, hands, relative and absolute position, velocity, and they can react to this data in a useful way. These contextually aware computers are the path to unlocking ambient computing: where computers fade from the foreground to the background of everyday, useful tools. The metaverse is less of a ‘thing’ and more of a computing era. Contextual computing enables a multitude of new types of interactions and apps: VR sculpting tools and social hangouts, self-driving cars, robotics, smart homes.
as carbon is to the organic world, AI will be both the matrix that provides the necessary structural support and the material from which digital representation will be made. Of all the ways in which AI will shape the form of the metaverse, perhaps most essential is the role it will play in the physical-digital interface. Translating human actions into digital input–language, eye movement, hand gestures, locomotion–these are all actions which AI companies and researchers have already made tremendous progress on.
Qualcomm views the metaverse as an ever-present spatial internet complete with personalized digital experiences that spans the physical and virtual worlds, where everything and everyone can communicate and interact seamlessly.
As an active researcher in the security and forensics of VR systems, should the metaverse come into existence, we should explore and hypothesize the ways it will be misused.
I picture [the metaverse] almost like The Truman Show. Only, instead of walking into a television set, you walk into the internet and can explore any number of different realities
We imagine the metaverse as reality made better, a world infused with magic, stories, and functionality at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds.
Rather than building the “metaverse,” a separate and fully virtual reality that is disconnected from the physical world, we are focused on augmenting reality, not replacing it. We believe AR–or computing overlaid on the world around us–has a smoother path to mass adoption, but will also be better for the world than a fully virtual world.
In the reality-based metaverse, we will be able to more effectively design products of the future, meet and collaborate with our colleagues far away, and experience any remote place in real-time.
I prefer to think of the metaverse as simply bringing our bodies into the internet.
The metaverse isn’t just VR! Those spaces will connect to AR glasses and to 2D spaces like Instagram. And most importantly, there will be a real sense of continuity where the things you buy are always available to you.
At its core will be a self-contained economy that allows individuals and businesses to create, own or invest in a range of activities and experiences.
the metaverse experience can be altered from the individual’s point of view and shaped or curated by any number of agents—whether human or A.I. In that sense, the metaverse does not have an objective look beyond its backend. In essence, the metaverse, together with our physical locations, forms a spatial continuum.
The AR applications of the metaverse are limitless and it really can become the next great version of the internet.
It seems fair to predict that the actual aesthetic of any given metaverse will be determined by user demand. If users want to exist in a gamified world populated by outrageous avatars and fantastic landscapes then the metaverse will respond to that demand. Like all things in this world the metaverse will be market driven
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More on meta-verse in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=metaverse