What can fictional immortality teach us about the reality? — Every living being carries the innate agenda to remain alive. That is core to the definition of life. Certainly we can find exceptions. First, we all die. Some animals prioritize reproduction over their own longevity, literally dying for their offspring to take root. Some humans even lose the will to…

I gave a talk at the most recent AWE conference in Santa Clara on May 31st called “Hype or Hero: Separating Bullshit from Reality for XR, AI & The Metaverse.” The talk covers recent trends in AI, Metaverse and XR, focusing on what’s hype and what’s hero and which is…

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told us recently that using AI for advertising, generative AI that is, will be a top priority for this year. What’s the concern? It’ll start with simple product placements. That can of Coke in your instagram photo will somehow become a Pepsi. A car you like…

Last year’s “Metaverse Hype Cycle” graph predicted [correctly] a big downswing in Metaverse hype this year. How did I know that would happen? Cyberspace. Virtual Reality. Information Superhighway. If something doesn’t stick immediately, the next iteration of the thing likes to find a new name, to indicate newness, or else…

One of the things we can all agree on about the Metaverse is that, whatever it’s called, no single company should control it. Even the big companies want to avoid the other big companies controlling things. But they all need to ultimately buy into the same set of standards to…

Welcome, to all the newly minted AI experts! Everyone by now has heard of ChatGPT and other generative AIs. Personally, I got into XR about thirty years ago with a dream to tell stories, perhaps even new interactive 3D stories (think: Holodeck) with the vital help of AI. Along the…

I wrote the post below in 1993 for April Fools, soon after I’d joined the Disney VR Studio. I posted it anonymously to USENET (the plaintext Reddit of the day). I didn’t know much about neural nets back then, but the idea with this ‘bit-index’ is that any image can…

If you’re lucky, your work is both fun and rewarding. But for most people, work is work. Yet everyone needs and deserves time to have fun. So play is different from work. It should be fun. If it isn’t fun, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re doing it for money…

Towards Ethical, Responsible and Trustworthy Spatial Computing — There is diversity of ideas about what the Metaverse is or will someday become, whether AR or VR will lead consumer experiences, and how much of our lives should be digital vs. analog. But there’s one thing professionals in XR can all agree on: we want to build things that…