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. …

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. …

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. …

Virtually Exploring the Undiscovered Country I have multiple friends who have lost loved ones recently. Some of them work in XR. And so a topic we occasionally explore is the role of XR and “digital twins” in this case to bring the departed back into this world, or not. …

Meta has released more details about the lengths they’ve gone to protect users of their new eye tracking HMDs. — I’ve worked with eye tracking technology since 2010 (Hololens) and written publicly since 2019. Here are some thoughts after reading all of the available documents on Meta’s eye tracking protections and their rationales. Meta clearly wants us to believe they’ve gone to great lengths. But despite some very capable advisors…