Imagine posting a thought or piece of content on Threads and having followers from another platform, like Mastodon, like and comment on that post. It’s a possibility that’ll soon come to fruition if Meta keeps its promise to allow the nearly 10 million people who still use Threads to follow and interact with users on other platforms like Mastodon. 

This is all thanks to the fediverse, or the federated universe, which is best described as a group of social media networks that are independent but able to communicate with one another. The fediverse’s origins reportedly date back to the early 2000s. But in with an increasingly fragmented social media landscape, Twitter’s decline, data privacy concerns and a colossal creator economy, the promise of cross-platform communication in the fediverse has sparked curiosity for some in the industry, especially with Meta’s plan to make Threads part of it. — Read More

Just days before assisting in his first major shoulder-replacement surgery last year, Dr. Jake Shine strapped on a virtual reality headset and got to work.

As a third-year orthopedics resident at Kettering Health Dayton in Ohio, Shine was standing in the medical center’s designated VR lab with his attending physician, who would oversee the procedure. 

Both doctors were wearing Meta Quest 2 headsets as they walked through a 3D simulation of the surgery. 

… Ultimately, there were no complications in the procedure and the patient made a full recovery.

While consumer VR remains a niche product and a massive money-burning venture for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the technology is proving to be valuable in certain corners of health care.  — Read More

The Meta vs Microsoft debate is that of both principle and the future of Metaverse technology. No doubt the Metaverse, as vague as the word is at the moment, can be seen by tech giants as a new world ripe for the taking. Two of the largest companies building the Metaverse are Meta, formerly Facebook, and Microsoft, are racing to stake their claim.

Now, of course, as mentioned, no one knows what the Metaverse will end up looking like. There are a few things we do know, however.

Firstly, the Metaverse is a virtual environment – or many of them – in which individuals can share their experiences and engage in real-time activities with other users in simulated settings.

 Secondly, we do know what technologies will constitute the infrastructure on which it is built. — Read More

Human moderators in the metaverse are proving essential to digital safety

I recently published a story about a new kind of job that’s becoming essential at the frontier of the internet: the role of metaverse content cop. Content moderators in the metaverse go undercover into 3D worlds through a VR headset and interact with users to catch bad behavior in real time. It all sounds like a movie, and in some ways it literally is. But despite looking like a cartoon world, the metaverse is populated by very real people who can do bad things that have to be caught in the moment. 

I chatted with Ravi Yekkanti, who works for a third-party content moderation company called WebPurify that provides services to metaverse companies. Ravi moderates these environments and trains others to do the same. He told me he runs into bad behavior every day, but he loves his job and takes pride in how important it is. We get into how his job works in my story this week, but there was so much more fascinating detail to our conversation than I could get into in that format, and I wanted to share the rest of it with you here. Read More

A new paper from the University of California Berkeley reveals that privacy may be impossible in the metaverse without innovative new safeguards to protect users.

Led by graduate researcher Vivek Nair, the recently released study was conducted at the Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI) and involved the largest dataset of user interactions in virtual reality (VR) that has ever been analyzed for privacy risks. Read More

Companies like Meta are still betting big on immersive virtual worlds, but people who have been building digital spaces for years don’t see the long-term potential.

THE PERFECT VERSION of the metaverse, to hear tech heads like Mark Zuckerberg tell it, marries social media, entertainment, and—most exciting of all—meetings in one pristine virtual space. Long ago foretold in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, it is a place where the online world offers more experiences than the flesh-and-bone one. But whereas Stephenson’s metaverse was part of an apocalyptic future, modern inventors have promised a digital utopia. 

Unfortunately, the metaverse they’ve built has, so far, lived up to those expectations about as well as a Craigslist apartment rented based on photos alone. Zuckerberg’s Horizon Worlds, clunky and strange, may have been at its most thrilling when Meta informed users that legs for their avatars were “coming soon.” The hardware needed to visit such virtual worlds—often a headset like Meta’s Quest Pro—can be pricey and cumbersome, and once you get there, it’s no party.  Read More