On March 23, 2021, Rec Room announced that they raised $100M with a valuation of $1.25 billion, which makes them the first VR software company to achieve 'unicorn' status. Rec Room was launched for the Vive on June 1, 2016 after 99 days of development, and they've continued to rapidly iterate and develop it over the years with a release cadence ranging from a weekly to every other week for five and half years now. They're the most cross-platform VR application being on Oculus Quest, PCVR on Steam and Oculus Home, PSVR for PS4 as well as a 2D version for PS4 (with a PS5 release coming soon), XBox, iOS, as well as Android.

#1027: Rec Room’s Origin Story, Oral History, & Evolution to Becoming the first VR Unicorn Company

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Virtual land speculation within cryptocurrency-based Metaverse platforms has gone from boom to bust over the past couple of years. I sat down to do a deep dive with the Voxels platform (formerly Cryptovoxels) founder Ben Nolan to interrogate the premise of idea of buying and selling virtual plots of land. Nolan is not all in for all aspects of cryptocurrencies, including the carbon footprint of proof-of-work chains like Ethereum that Voxels uses, and surprisingly the buying and selling virtual plots of land as a speculative investment. Nolan says that 'Voxels isn't a way to make money. Voxels is a way to build the Metaverse and to capture the value that they create. It's not an investment vehicle.' He's increased the supply of virtual plots of land over the last years to keep it affordable, but to also capitalize on the NFT boom and crypto Metaverse hype to the tune of $22 million of 2021 revenue in New Zealand dollars.

#1117: Deconstructing “Voxels (formerly Cryptovoxels)”: Virtual Land Speculation & the Experiential Gap of Crypto-Based Metaverse Neighborhoods

Photo of The Beast Prototype courtesy of Rony AbovitzI had a chance to sit down with Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz for two hours to unpack some of the many threads Magic Leap's behind origin story, including some of the underlying philosophical questions and aspirations towards what he calls 'Neurologically-True Reality.' Considering the many tens of billions of dollars of XR R&D that companies like Meta, Apple, and Microsoft have been spending, then the multiple billions of venture capital raised by Magic Leap seems like a relatively efficient and tight budget.

#1116: Magic Leap’s Origin Story & Goal of “Neurologically-True Reality” with Founder Rony Abovitz

Time Detectives AR by Picture This Productions is a site-specific AR trail experience meant to be seen at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, UK, but you can also experience it remotely as a table-top experience at home. Time Detectives AR asks users to investigate the sinking of the Mary Rose in July 1545 using a mobile phone as 'a magical spyglass to reveal secrets from the past and complete your mission for King Henry VIII.'

#1115: Using Multi-Sensory, AR Storytelling at the Mary Rose Cultural Heritage Museum with “Time Detectives AR”

Living Cities is a digital twin XR startup announced on May 26th, 2022 with an article titled 'Reality is Scarce...and The Metaverse is infinitely abundant.' that shares a list of '9 principles for connecting the real & virtual.' The founders of Living Cities include XR luminaries Matt Miesnieks (who sold his previous startup 6D.AI to Niantic), John Gaeta (who did visual effects on The Matrix, worked on the HoloLens, co-founded Lucasfilm's ILMxLAB, & was a senior Vice President at Magic Leap), as well as Dennis Crowley who co-founded the geospatial social networks Dodgeball and Foursquare.

#1114: Capturing the Lore & Spirit of a Place with the “Living Cities” Digital Twin XR Start-Up

Matthew Ball's 'The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything' book (launching today) is the most comprehensive articulation of the Metaverse technology stack, as well as it's foundational principles catalyzing a paradigm shift from 2D into 3D into spatial and immersive computing. What started as an essay on Fortnite (Feb 5, 2019), then evolved into an essay on the Metaverse (Jan 13, 2020), then evolved into a series of essays with his Metaverse Primer (Jun 28-29, 2021), and now has tripled in size with the publication of Ball's The Metaverse book (Jul 19, 2022) that dives into specifying each layer of the Metaverse tech stack, where it's at now, and where he expects it might go in the future.

#1027: Rec Room’s Origin Story, Oral History, & Evolution to Becoming the first VR Unicorn Company

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