On key metrics, a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable from subjects who took medium doses of LSD or magic mushrooms.

Fifteen years ago, David Glowacki was walking in the mountains when he took a sharp fall. When he hit the ground, blood began leaking into his lungs. As he lay there suffocating, Glowacki’s field of perception swelled. He peered down at his own body—and, instead of his typical form, saw that he was made up of balled-up light.

“I knew that the intensity of the light was related to the extent to which I inhabited my body,” he recalls. Yet watching it dim didn’t frighten him. From his new vantage point, Glowacki could see that the light wasn’t disappearing. It was transforming—leaking out of his body into the environment around him.

This realization—which he took to signify that his awareness could outlast and transcend his physical form—brought Glowacki a sublime sense of peace. So he approached what he thought was death with curiosity: What might come next? Read More

What is the metaverse? Ask 10 different experts, and you’ll get a slew of different answers. Is it virtual reality? Mixed reality? Will it be a virtual city where we buy digital apartments? Will it just be a bunch of NFT JPEGs and other get-rich schemes before crypto creates so much carbon that our world burns? Or is it just Roblox and Snapchat in a couple of years?

While consensus is hard to find, Argodesign—a design firm that’s spent years consulting for Magic Leap—has put its cards on the table. It has developed a five-year vision for mixed reality, offering a convincing argument for how products like HoloLens and Magic Leap can work in half a decade. This metaverse would function as well for Starbucks as for Apple, with enough value and control for people to actually use.

The secret sauce of it all? Argodesign’s metaverse is basically the internet. But instead of going to websites, you go to real places—where mixed reality glasses reveal otherwise invisible digital layers. Read More

What is the metaverse? Ask 10 different experts, and you’ll get a slew of different answers. Is it virtual reality? Mixed reality? Will it be a virtual city where we buy digital apartments? Will it just be a bunch of NFT JPEGs and other get-rich schemes before crypto creates so much carbon that our world burns? Or is it just Roblox and Snapchat in a couple of years?

While consensus is hard to find, Argodesign—a design firm that’s spent years consulting for Magic Leap—has put its cards on the table. It has developed a five-year vision for mixed reality, offering a convincing argument for how products like HoloLens and Magic Leap can work in half a decade. This metaverse would function as well for Starbucks as for Apple, with enough value and control for people to actually use.

The secret sauce of it all? Argodesign’s metaverse is basically the internet. But instead of going to websites, you go to real places—where mixed reality glasses reveal otherwise invisible digital layers. Read More

It can feel as if the entire world is bolting on crypto tokens and NFTs. Many in the industry worry the gold rush is akin to a “collective Theranos” that is warping the economy to the benefit of professional investors.

It can feel at times as if the entire world is pivoting into Web3, and the question is why. There are, suddenly, Web3 media companies, Web3 advertising firms, Web3 studios, Web3 marketing tactics, and Web3 publishing networks. LimeWire and MoviePass have risen from the dead, newly “powered”—as one of their CEOs put it—“by Web3 technology.” Web3 apparently is not only “transforming gaming” and “re-engineering real estate,” but also the future of the internet, and maybe the entire global economy as well. 

Never mind that very few people can agree on exactly what Web3 is (and isn’t). What matters to investors is that Web3 is the hot new thing and the entrepreneurs are piling in. Read More

When Facebook rebranded as Meta last October, it brought into the mainstream a concept that has been exciting the bright minds of Silicon Valley for years: the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg’s unveiling of a vision for a new era of integrated, immersive technologies was met with enthusiasm in some quarters, and cynicism in others. It’s easy to see why. Skepticism is a natural reaction to something that sounds like it’s straight out of a science fiction novel — in a way, it is — especially when there are wider societal concerns about how tech operates in the two-dimensional world.

Many rightly ask: what is the metaverse and why should I care? And even if I can be persuaded that it is worth getting excited about, how can I trust that these new technologies will be built and governed responsibly? Read More

Web3 advocates promise decentralization on an unprecedented scale. Excessive centralization can stymie coordination and erode freedom, democracy, and economic dynamism—decentralization is supposed to be the remedy. But the term on its own is too vague to be a coherent end goal. Getting the job done takes the right kind of decentralization, and we worry that Web3 is thus far heading down the wrong track.

In particular, we worry about the focus on degree, rather than type, of decentralization. Focusing on degree—whether we want more or less decentralization—can lead Web3 advocates to mischaracterize both the reality of existing centralization, as well as the possibility of pure decentralization. On the one hand, existing “centralized” systems are not nearly as centralized as Web3 advocates commonly describe. “Legacy” banks delegate many activities to local branches, and even central banks are often consortia. Architecturally, “centralized” clouds are rarely so centralized in practice; they are usually scattered around a range of geographies and train large machine-learning models in a distributed fashion. Read More

Web3 is off to a rocky start. Optimists may rattle on about progress on the horizon, but at present the space is rife with fraud, hacks, and collapses. In this Q&A with Web3 critic Molly White, creator of the website Web3 Is Going Just Great, White argues that as this technology becomes more mainstream, its ability to do harm — financial, emotional, and reputational — will grow, and fast. For one, blockchain technology is often applied in ways, or to problems, to which it is not suited, and companies frequently don’t understand the consequences of their decision to utilize it. Additionally, some issues are being overlooked, such as privacy concerns, which could make it more difficult to address online harassment. Finally, for all the rhetoric from Web3 proponents about opportunity and democratization, crypto projects have mostly served to make the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful. Read More

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