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The official Welsh governmental tourism board has debuted a browser-based Metaverse experience to promote the region’s cultural destinations ahead of a traveller’s journey. Metaverse platform provider Spatial is powering the Welsh Metaverse. The immersive service is highly accessible to demographics who may not be familiar with Metaverse platforms. By leveraging Spatial’s framework, Welsh officials can provide a browser-based experience ready for anyone using a smartphone, tablet, laptop, computer, or Meta Quest headset.

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Visit Welsh Metaverse

🟡 Sci-fi 🔵 FS

Science fiction widens the frontiers of our aspirations. It introduces us to new technologies that could shape the world, and new ideas and political systems that could organize it. It’s difficult to be an architect of the future without a pioneer’s vision of what that future might look like. For many, science fiction blasts that vision open.

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🔵 FS 🌀 DTech

It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.

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🔵 FS

When we imagine “the future”, what do we conjure up? Some may think five years ahead and struggle to imagine a world much different than today. Others may dream of a better world and wonder how it could be brought into being. Alas, these ideas focus on the content of the future. But what about the very shape of the future itself? Is it linear? Branching? Circular? Throughout history, people have tried to give shape to the future.

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VR studio and label Creature announced Starship Home, a plant-filled mixed reality adventure that turns your living room into a spacecraft on a mission to save alien flora. In it, we get a look at the virtual windows, control panels, and other components, which are placed strategically around your room to make it feel like you’ve blasted off into space.

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🌀 DTech 🟤 PP

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

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🟣 SC

Why the term Metaverse took hold, specifically, is an unknowable question. “Cyberspace” seems to have been left behind — probably because it was too commonly used to skeuomorphically describe where online “things” “resided” in the 1990s — while the “Matrix” was likely impaired by the blockbuster success of the film of the same name. Maybe the “Grid” was too similar to other already-popular terms such as the “power grid.” Virtual reality never really went away, which is problem number one, but it was also too firmly associated with hardware, problem two, and those products were typically considered flops and “uncool.” Three strikes. VR-adjacent terms, such as AR, the newer MR, and newest XR, brought their own taxonomy problems and, in an inversion of VR’s problem, lacked products that would have given consumers an intuitive understanding of one versus another.

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