The Week in Facts n°20
Metaverse: Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Metaverse Legs Were Staged
It's fair to say that nobody is more excited about Meta's future metaverse than billionaire CEO, co-founder, and chairman Mark Zuckerberg. Note his utter delight when, earlier this week, he announced
"one more feature coming soon that's probably the most requested feature on our road map."
"Legs!" he said. "I think everyone has been waiting for this!"
Zuckerberg explained that Meta will use an artificial intelligence model to predict and depict the positions of a user's whole body. But as delightful as the live-streamed reveal may have been, it appears the Horizon Worlds legs "demo" was more a "screen images simulated" moment.
At least Zuckerberg's commentary about adding legs makes clear that doing so is a significant challenge, one that, in retrospect, he could have been saying Meta hasn't yet solved.
"We discovered early on that your brain is a lot more willing to accept a rendering of a part of you as long as it's accurately positioned, but if it's rendered in the wrong place it just feels terrible—it breaks the whole feeling of presence and immersion."
That's why Zuckerberg explained, early VR iterations depicted the positions of VR controllers, rather than guessing the positions of the hands and arms holding them. But for Horizon Worlds, and most VR technologies, there are no controllers or sensors for users' feet and legs.
"Understanding your leg position is surprisingly difficult because of occlusion—if your legs are under a desk or your arms block your view of them, your headset can't see them directly," he said. "You need to build an AI model to predict your whole body position."
NFT: Beeple Building Physical Studio to Bring NFTs Into the Real World
This week, Beeple shared a video showing the construction of his sizable new studio in Charleston, South Carolina, which appears to be set in an overhauled warehouse. In the video, we see the first steps as workers tear down walls and develop the space within the future Beeple Studios.
In a tweet thread, Beeple wrote that the space will be an “outlet for not just my artwork, but the entire digital art/NFT community,” with plans to host exhibitions and find unique ways to display NFT artwork for real-world patrons to view on-site.
Beeple added that NFT creators need to “find new ways” to attract people who may have heard about NFTs, but don’t fully understand how they work. An NFT is a blockchain token that represents ownership in a unique item, and can be used with things like digital artwork and collectibles, but also real-world items.
“I believe by showing people that this artwork can absolutely be shared and appreciated in real life, not just on our tiny screens,” Beeple wrote, “they will see that this medium is just like any other with the ability to bring beauty, provoke thoughtful discussion, and truly move us.”
Luxury: Ralph Lauren’s Los Angeles Fashion Show Attracts Hollywood Heavyweights
Ralph Lauren is a cinephile, whose vision for his brand is theatrical in scope: a movie with infinite sequels.?
He is decidedly East Coast in his sensibility and has never shown a collection in Los Angeles until Thursday evening. What felt like a last bastion of the Hollywood A-List — longtime house muse Diane Keaton, Jennifer Lopez, and Ben Affleck, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, Sylvester Stallone, and others, sat in the moonlit front row beside TikTok influencers and top clients, taking in the brand’s latest runway proposition: a 120-plus-look fantasia of products spanning several Ralph Lauren collections, including the traditional runway line, Double RL (rustic, upscale denim and workwear), Polo men’s and women’s, Purple menswear and children’s.
Like many fashion brands, the US became a growth engine for Ralph Lauren during these strange pandemic times. But unlike some of its European counterparts, the company didn’t quite realize just how much opportunity was left for it, especially in the Southwest and West Coast, which are under-penetrated compared to the eastern seaboard and Deep South.
At the show in Los Angeles, where the company operates several stores, each with a specific purpose, serving a specific consumer: they’re on Rodeo Drive and in Century City, in Saks but also Macy’s.
Ralph Lauren hosted a slew of major clients, who buy everything from Purple Label to Double RL. They put them up at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, then whisked them off to the show. A perfect Hollywood ending.
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Web3: CoinShares Creates Twitter Bot That Gives Traders 'Fair Prices' for Ethereum NFTs
Crypto asset investment and trading group CoinShares has launched an experimental Twitter bot, CoinSharesNFTAI, that can calculate a “fair price” for a given NFT.
NFTs—unique blockchain tokens that signify ownership—can have wildly fluctuating prices. CoinShares’ Twitter bot aggregates data and tells users at what price a specific NFT could be bought or sold.
“A simple tweet can let you know how much an NFT might be worth,” CoinShares tweeted Thursday.
While this might seem like a great idea with a clear use case, the bot isn’t exactly timely with replies or universally applicable. Upon testing, the CoinShares bot took three minutes to reply—and told me the NFT I wanted to find a fair price for was “not available.”
The CoinShares NFT bot currently only supports pricing data for 50 NFT collections. Some of the collections are so-called blue chips, or higher-priced NFTs like Doodles, CloneX, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Moonbirds, but the bot also supports several lesser-known collections as well.?
Mobility: VW invests $2.3B in China AV joint venture
Volkswagen Group will invest 2.4 billion euros ($2.33 billion) and take a 60 percent stake in a joint venture with Chinese technology company Horizon Robotics for autonomous driving software and hardware.
The companies will work together to develop technology that can integrate numerous functions for autonomous driving onto a single chip, VW said in a statement on Thursday.
VW already carries out research and development in China but this is its first joint venture focused specifically on technology, an area where it is currently lagging behind Chinese competitors in the electric vehicle market.
VW, which makes around 40 percent of sales and half of profits in the country, holds a 75 percent stake in a joint venture with JAC, a 50 percent stake with SAIC, and 40 percent with FAW.
The automaker has a budget of 89 billion euros ($86 billion) for EV and software development over the next half decade and is also investing $2.6 billion in Ford Motor-backed driverless tech startup Argo AI.
Will we see full autonomous driving cars in Europe in this decade?
Fashion: Benoit Pagotto: The Nike-Backed Gamer Building the Supreme of the Metaverse
Benoit Pagotto believes the next wave of breakout fashion brands will sell virtual looks to a generation who grew up with video games. The shift, he says, will be more significant than the streetwear revolution that powered the rise of Supreme and Off-White and transformed the business models of mega-labels from Gucci to Dior.
Last December, sportswear giant Nike made a big bet on Pagotto’s thesis, acquiring his virtual fashion brand RTFKT less than two years after its launch. In a statement announcing the transaction, RTFKT appeared in the pantheon of Nike Inc.’s multi-billion-dollar megabrands Nike, Jordan, and Converse.
He expects to see a long tail of new creators offering everything from virtual fashion to mini-games. “Even with Shopify, if you are 13 you can’t start a DTC brand — you need the manufacturing and you need the logistics — but you can be 13 and make your digital brand and you can be better than the big brands because you know how to market it, you understand the content, you understand TikTok.”
For bigger brands, a strong community is the best defence. “It’s very important to be attractive to creators; that’s the biggest change for brands,” he adds. “You need the right people in your community or you will be overwhelmed by creators who are more culturally relevant and technically savvy.”
“A lot of brands are going to die.”