ForeVR Games Raise, snap camera updates, Tik Tok AR effects, Venice VR

The launch of Facebook Horizon’s Workrooms was the topic last week, but it looks like the fanfare has faded. He got solid reviews (including ours) from the tech press. Now, however, reality is photobombing the photo of the Facebook team Reality Labs. Developer and blogger Tony Vitillo says that for all its MR magic, workrooms have too much friction. With limited features and several bugs, it is largely a beta product. People are wary because of Facebook’s previous privacy failures and because this is Facebook’s third trip to the real dish with social RV. But. With 2.5 billion users, the company gets unlimited bats. (Yes, I see too much baseball).

ForeVR Games VR developer announced today that it has raised an additional $ 7 million in start-up capital, reaching its total rise to $ 8.5 million. The studio says it will use the mass to launch more games like its first ForeVR Bowl title on more platforms. The latest investment was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with the participation of Galaxy Interactive, All Star Capital, Mark Pincus and Emmett Shear.

Venice VR Expanded, the virtual reality section of the Venice Film Festival, opens to the public online on Tuesday 1 September and will run until 19 September. The virtual VR world of Venice, designed by VRrOOm within VRChat, will be the center of VR VR, a virtual version of Venice. It is available to anyone with a VRChat account. However, only for PC VR. Within this virtual world, following the success of the 2020 virtual edition, Venice VR Expanded will feature a new section, the Venice VRChat Worlds Gallery, with a selection of 35 virtual worlds, celebrating the creativity of creators who they use VRChat as a platform to build their own fantasy worlds. Click here for tickets to the 37 official festival VR selections.

Snapchat updates its camera to highlight the visual search. The new computer vision feature allows Snapchatters to identify dogs, food and plants and even use their camera to solve mathematical equations. The Scan feature will also search for clothes that match what the camera sees.

TikTok Testing TikTok Effects Studio, which will allow its users to create RA effects and filters. Facebook / Instagram (via Spark AR) and Snap (via Lens Studio) have huge communities of mobile AR filter makers. Effects Studio is currently in closed beta.

Space Pirate Trainer Arena VR will include warehouse scale options and customizable maps. Following the free September 9 update, the VR game will be expanded to allow 2 gamers wearing Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets to go freely in 100 cms of shared gaming space. Free VR roam is the only truly immersive VR for users to walk through mixed reality environments using their natural locomotion and touch. Now you can only use a PC backpack and VR headsets in special places like Sandbox VR, Zero Latency and Dreamscape.

Click here for a list of shares of the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, NYSE: META. These are stocks collected by Matthew Ball, author of the metaverse manifesto. Ball is a former Amazon strategy executive turned investor. The fund’s top five holdings are Nvidia (8.93%), Microsoft (4.91%), Roblox (4.85%), Tencent, the majority shareholder in Epic Games (4.80%) and Unity (3, 99%).

This week on XR is now a podcast hosted by Viacom / CBS futurist Ted Schilowitz and Charlie Fink, the author of this weekly column. You can find it on the Spotify, iTunes and YouTube podcast platforms.

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Interview with Jensen Huang: You can connect the physical world and the metaverse. Venture Beat’s Dean Takahasi has been waiting for the day when analysts asked Huang about the metaverse. Speaking of Nvidia …

NVIDIA researchers won the Best in Show award at SIGGRAPH 2021 for their real-time digital avatar technology. The team proposes to use this AI for video conferencing, storytelling, virtual assistants and more.

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