Metaverse

Improbable sells gaming venture for $97M, shares 2024 metaverse predictions

The metaverse developer Improbable sold its gaming venture, The Multiplayer Group, as a part of its venture strategy for 2024.

Metaverse technology company Improbable announced in an end-of-the-year statement on Dec. 18 that it had sold its gaming venture, The Multiplayer Group (MPG), to Keywords Studios for £76.5 million ($97.1 million).

Herman Narula, co-founder and CEO of Improbable, called Keywords “a like-minded business partner” and said he was delighted to see MPG embark on a new chapter. Keywords works with large names in the gaming industry, such as Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, Zenimax, Epic Games and 2K.

Narula said this deal is a part of its venture strategy for 2024. Improbable originally acquired MPG in 2019 for around £30 million.

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Thrash-metal band Megadeth launches NFT collection and metaverse community

The American thrash-metal band Megadeth released a new NFT collection, aiming to connect with its community in both physical and digital reality.

Legendary American thrash metal band Megadeth announced a new nonfungible token (NFT) collection on Dec. 5, allowing fans exclusive access to content and physical experiences.

The band announced the NFTs on social media through a post on X, formerly Twitter, saying the 5,000-piece collection features the band’s digital mascot, ​​Vic Rattlehead.

Related: Grimes’ collaboration with music platform makes 200+ AI songs available for creators

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Metaverse for youth: Meta urged to ban minors from virtual world

Currently allowing users from 18, Meta also wants to open up its metaverse app Horizon Worlds to users aged 13 to 17.

Advocacy organizations and safety groups have urged Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant Meta to halt plans to allow minors into the metaverse.

Online safety groups and experts sent a letter to the Meta CEO on April 14, calling out the firm to scrap its plans to invite teenagers and young adults to join its metaverse app, Horizon Worlds. The letter was signed by major safety groups, including Airplay, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Common Sense Media and others, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The activists argued that Meta must first assess the potential risks of allowing youth in the metaverse, as minors will likely face harassment and privacy violations on its virtual reality app.

“Meta must wait for more peer-reviewed research on the potential risks of the metaverse to be certain that children and teens would be safe,” the advocates wrote in the letter.

The statement referred to a March report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that found users under 18 have already been facing harassment from adults on the app. The study specifically witnessed 19 episodes of abuse directed at minors by adults, including sexual harassment, during 100 visits to the most popular worlds within Horizon Universe.

The safety experts argued that Meta should create a new path with its metaverse project to protect the youth, stating:

“Should Meta throw open the doors of these worlds to minors rather than pause to protect them, you would, yet again, demonstrate your company to be untrustworthy when it comes to safeguarding young people’s best interests.”

As previously reported, Meta started planning to open Horizon Worlds to users aged 13 to 17 in February. The company opened Horizon Worlds to users from 18 in 2021 but has struggled to keep users returning to the platform.

Related: France’s metaverse consultation seeks input on alternative to tech ‘giants’

According to Bloomberg, Meta currently doesn’t intend to abandon its plans for miners in the metaverse but is preparing to adopt some extra measures to protect such users from any metaverse-related violations, Meta’s Joe Osborne said.

“Before we make Horizon Worlds available to teens, we will have additional protections and tools in place to help provide age-appropriate experiences for them,” Osborne noted, adding:

“Quest headsets are for people 13+ and we encourage parents and caretakers to use our parental supervision tools, including managing access to apps, to help ensure safe experiences.”

The latest initiative to protect minors in virtual reality is not the first callout on Meta to reconsider its plans on allowing youth into the metaverse. Previously, Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumental demanded Meta to scrap plans to expand access to the app for teens aged 13 to 17 in a joint letter issued in early March.

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An eclectic display at the 2nd Metaverse Fashion Week

The second edition of Metaverse Fashion Week came with a few technical hiccups — and featured a line-up of big brands, from Dundas to Adidas and HBO.

Inspired by success in 2022 and an impressive list of designers who attended that year’s Metaverse Fashion Week, Decentraland held another event this year from March 28–31. The week’s theme, “Future Heritage,” aimed to connect the next generation of creators with traditional fashion designers.

It’s the second time digital fashion’s core members — including Zero10, DressX and The Fabricant — have participated in MVFW, though the total number of brands declined. There were two shows worth noting: Dundas, which distinguished itself with beautiful avatars last year, and Adidas, which joined this year as a first-time participant. Decentraland and HBO also participated.

Real experience

Attendees this year immediately faced a problem: Neither an iPhone nor an iPad Pro could be used to enter Decentraland. That is, we lost our mobility in the real world. I had to cancel a couple of meetings and stay home.

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Moreover, the event’s Mac app didn’t work. So, you had to play the browser version of the game, which didn’t work properly, and you needed to clear your browser cache.

On the first day, there was such an influx of users that it was impossible to even visit the locations, and many users didn’t even see the Dundas show.

Metaverse fashion week or meta market?

In addition to the show on the first day, there was a meditation with Alo Yoga, which had planned activities for each day: yoga, breathing techniques and Reiki practices. It was as if you should have gotten off the computer and done the practice the coach dictated. This was the least obvious collaboration for Metaverse Fashion Week.

Shopping life

The most interesting thing happens in digital boutiques and during fashion weeks in general: Players most want to collect free clothing, which they do 24/7.

The Luxury District featured the big brands, including Dolce & Gabbana, which held a talent contest in which Katya Garnet, Nataliya Grimberg, David Lopez and Dundas prevailed. The biggest boutiques were Tommy Hilfiger and DKNY, which are not luxury brands in the real world.

Dolce & Gabbana store at Metaverse Fashion Week. Source: ScreenMVFW.

It’s worth noting that DKNY had a huge four-story boutique with a pizzeria, bar and disco on the roof. It all looked large-scale, but it was very sad. They could at least have put an NPC in it — or even an employee with whom you could interact and buy goods.

Then we went to the failed case of Vivienne Westwood. In the Dear Vivienne location, we could go on a quest in a boutique decorated in branded tartan and a ladder with the letters “SEX.” The miracles ended there.

Adidas had a good boutique and a show as well. In the boutique, you could get a free jacket, which slowed down your entire game if you wore it — but it looked good.

The best location was Coach, which had a presentation of a tabby bag.

You entered through the pink city and climbed into the bag itself, where each day, you could go on new quests, win a boa and try on a bag in Zero10, a partner location.

At the end of the four days of MVFW, participants could visit two DKNY and poker night parties.

MVFW’s final DKNY party — which the author attended alone. Source: Screenshot of MVFW.

Last MVFW, you could attend a Grimes concert, which looked decent and generated a lot of buzz.

It’s worth noting that after the previous MVFW, luxury brands decided not to participate in the metaverse. The focus shifted to the middle, which makes sense — they should understand which audience is playing Decentraland.

Who are they?

After four days in the metaverse, there were many questions: Who are these people who have so much time to load a browser, tolerate bugs and play weird games? Why are they so eager to join the metaverse? Do they want to buy something from Dolce & Gabbana? Or do they want to walk on the red carpet in a Dundas evening dress?

In those four days, it became clear that most players’ goal was to get free clothes.

For now, it does not make sense for luxury brands to participate in these events. Their buyers are busy working in order to have the money they need to buy luxury products — and playing in Decentraland takes a lot of time and effort, leaving little time for work.

Inna Kombarova is the founder of the popular fashion Telegram channel @Mamkina. In 2019, she quit her job as the head of the industrial sales department at a prominent climate company and started working full-time in fashion media.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Meta coughing up big money to developers building its metaverse

Despite turbulent times for Meta in terms of metaverse development, sources close to the company say its metaverse programmers are paid up to $1 million for their work.

Tech giant Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and the WhatsApp messaging service — has been eyeing expansion into the metaverse for some time now. However, it has had a rough start, with billions in losses.

Nonetheless, a new report from The Wall Street Journal says that Meta’s programmers working on the company’s virtual reality suite can earn total compensation from “$600,000 to packages approaching $1 million.”

The report says the information on metaverse developer salaries at Meta came from anonymous “people familiar with the matter.”

According to reports from the beginning of the year, the company’s metaverse-building division, Reality Labs, lost $13.7 billion over the course of 2022. It marked the division’s largest yearly losses recorded.

However, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and CEO, has been on record saying the company doesn’t have any plans to change its long-term vision for the metaverse. In fact, at the beginning of February 2023, Meta was given approval by a judge in the United States to go forward with acquiring a virtual reality company.

Related: Meta working on text-based decentralized social network codenamed P92

Prior to that ruling, Meta was served with a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission against Meta and Zuckerberg as an attempt to block “its ultimate goal of owning the entire ‘metaverse.’”

Recently, two U.S. senators released a letter addressed to Zuckerberg urging the Meta CEO not to allow teenagers access to the metaverse platform Horizon Worlds. They cited “serious risks” and called it a “digital space rife with potential harms.”

On March 13, the head of commerce and financial technologies at Meta tweeted that the company was slowly stopping its support for nonfungible tokens on Facebook and Instagram for the time being. According to the executive, the move was to “focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses.”

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Solana reveals cost-cutting solution for on-chain storage

Known as state compression, the technology promises to drastically reduce the cost of on-chain storage.

Layer-1 blockchain Solana has released a new solution aiming to drastically reduce the cost of on-chain storage. Called state compression, the technology promises to bring down the cost of minting 1 million nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the network to nearly $110. 

“After numerous phases of development, adoption, and rollout, compressed NFTs are live on Solana’s mainnet-beta and powering the next wave of novel on-chain product experiences,” said Solana Foundation tech lead Jon Wong in a blog post on April 6. According to Wong, compressed NFTs “are 2,400-24,000x cheaper than uncompressed” peers with identical structures.

On Twitter, users classified the state compression solution as a “game changer” and a path “to make Solana a much more viable option for enterprise use cases.”

According to Solana’s tech lead, state compression relies on Merkle trees, ”a data structure known for its capability to ‘compress’ the verifiability of a tree of data into a ‘hash,’ or ‘fingerprint,’ of the current state of the tree.”

“This compression-friendly data structure allows developers to store a small bit of data on-chain and updates directly in the Solana ledger, cutting the data storage cost down dramatically while still using the security and decentralization of Solana’s base layer,” noted Wong.

 A breakdown of NFT costs with Solana compression. Source: Solana Foundation

The development is a “true cross-ecosystem effort,” according to Wong. The solution was built by developers at Solana Labs and Metaplex, with support from Phantom and Solflare and powered by RPC node providers, as well as indexers Helius, Triton and SimpleHash.

Dialect, Crossmint, Helium and Wordcel are among the Solana ecosystem projects that already use state compression. They employ solutions ranging from NFT minting to integrations for business loyalty programs to improvements in user experience.

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Augmented reality helps brands tell their story: MVFW 2023

During Metaverse Fashion Week 2023, the augmented reality platform — Over — projected a larger-than-life virtual catwalk over one of Milan’s most prominent locations.

The second annual Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW) hit the virtual runway this year from March 28–31 via a collaboration between Spatial — a 3D social network platform — and Over, a blockchain-based augmented reality (AR) platform.

This year’s event saw over 60 brands, including legacy names such as Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY and Gucci. Like last year, the event combined digital runways, panels with industry thought leaders and designers, and afterparties.

However, one of the main attractions occurred on the event’s last day, March 31, when a hybrid AR runway from Over was cast across the Piazza of Duomo di Milano — one of Milan’s most iconic locations.

Guests watching an AR fashion show on the Piazza of Duomo di Milano. Source: Over

Diego Di Tommaso, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Over, told Cointelegraph that core components of the fashion industry include projecting identities and creating narratives around brands.

“AR, specifically, is regarded as the new and exciting medium that allows brands to tell their stories and showcase their creations more compellingly and intuitively.”

Tommaso said the “impression, understanding and emotion” that consumers get from an item presented in AR vs. 2D is incomparable. According to the co-founder, AR catwalks, augmented shop windows and AR virtual try-on are only scratching the surface of what’s to come for the fashion industry. 

“As soon as consumer-ready smart glasses hit the market, there will be no brand without an AR strategy.”

This AR runway featured large-scale virtual models who paraded across the plaza in cutting-edge digital designs from the participating brands, including Balmain x Space Runners and Pet Liger, part of the Gucci “VAULT” project. Even some notable Bored Ape Yacht Club personalities walked the runway. 

Over shared with Cointelegraph that guests called the event a “new level of experience,” bringing digital fashion to a “whole new stage.”

Related: The metaverse is becoming a platform to unite fashion communities

Dave Carr, the head of creative strategy and partnership at Over, told Cointelegraph that AR differs from the metaverse because viewers don’t have to sit in front of a computer or strap on an “unwieldy VR headset” to have the experience. 

“With AR, the metaverse comes to you. You can be present among real people while enhancing your surroundings with amazing immersive digital content.”

Carr hinted that future developments from Over would even allow engagement with the AR models through speaking and deciding on outfits, indicating “huge implications for brands and retailers.”

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OKX launches metaverse training session with football star Rúben Dias

The experience will allow fans to connect with Dias, and experience training techniques and coaching tips in virtual reality.

Cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 technology developer OKX has been active in the space over the last month, with the latest announcement on its first immersive metaverse fan experience part of its “OKX Collective.“

On April 3, the company revealed a collaboration called “Train Like Dias” with one of its brand ambassadors and Manchester City footballer, Rúben Dias.

According to the announcement, fans can virtually experience Dias’ favorite training techniques, and have exposure to coaching and tips. The experience is open to fans within the OKX Collective metaverse.

Haider Rafique, the global chief marketing officer at OKX, commented that the new immersive experience helps connect fans, and “is another great example of what this technology allows.“

“The possibilities that Web3 can offer are vast and only limited by our own imaginations.“

OKX and Manchester City officially became partners back in July 2022, with the platform hinting at future offerings of Web3-content from other players on the team, including Alex Greenwood, Ilkay Gündoğan and Jack Grealish.

Metaverse avatar for OKX Collection immersive metaverse experience. Source: OKX

Cointelegraph reached out to OKX and Dias for comments on the immersive experience. 

Related: To be or not to be: Ethics, democracy and morality in the nascent metaverse

The metaverse continues to be the next frontier to explore connections between physical reality and Web3 applications, as seen with “Train Like Dias.” However, recent events surrounding metaverse development have been mixed after Disney reportedly scrapped its metaverse division. 

That came only a week after rumors began circulating that Animoca Brands — a prominent metaverse developer in the space — made cuts of around $200 million to its metaverse fund. Animoca promptly denied those claims. 

On the other hand, South Korea launched a “Metaverse Fund” on March 12, intending to accelerate metaverse initiatives within the country. Automotive manufacturer Nissan also recently filed multiple Web3 trademarks and trialed sales in the metaverse.

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Former Activision Blizzard executive joins Yuga Labs as CEO

With Daniel Alegre on board, Yuga Labs is expected to ramp up its metaverse efforts. Previously, he held leadership positions at Google, Activision Blizzard and Bertelsmann.

Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and CryptoPunks nonfungible token (NFT) collections, has a new CEO, Daniel Alegre. The executive resigned as president and chief operating officer of the gaming giant Activision Blizzard to join the NFT startup on April 1.

“Couldn’t be more excited for this next chapter,” he wrote on Twitter. Alegre was a crucial player in Activision Blizzard’s growth in recent years, overseeing popular gaming franchises like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo and Candy Crush.

The executive has been involved in the gaming, entertainment and technology industries for many years. According to his LinkedIn profile, Alegre worked for the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann for nearly six years before joining Google, where he worked for more than 16 years in various leadership positions overseeing areas such as global shopping revenue, retail ecosystem engagement, and operations in the Asia Pacific and Latin America.

Yuga Labs announced Alegre’s arrival in December 2022. In a press release at the time, the executive said,  “the company’s pipeline of products, partnerships, and IP [intellectual property] represents a massive opportunity to define the metaverse.“

The opportunities will also come with challenges. A class-action lawsuit filed in December in the United States accuses BAYC creators of misleading investors about the financial benefits of Yuga securities, and using celebrity promoters to lure in more investors. Investors that bought BAYC and ApeCoin (APE) between April 23, 2021, and Dec. 8, 2022, may be entitled to compensation, claims Rosen Law Firm.

Aside from that, Yuga Labs co-founder Wylie Aronow took a leave of absence in January to prioritize his health following a congestive heart failure diagnosis. It’s unclear when he will be able to resume his responsibilities.

Alegre’s arrival has been considered a bold move in the NFT industry. Kieran Warwick, a co-founder of the blockchain role-playing game Illuvium, said that Yuga Labs’ new hire is “big for all of GameFi,” suggesting that Web3 gaming will spark the next crypto bull run.

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AI makes the metaverse safer and more inclusive: The Sandbox co-founder

AI continues to be more pervasive in emerging technologies, and according to a co-founder of The Sandbox, it will make digital spaces more inclusive places.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new buzzword in the emerging tech scene after the release of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT-4. However, opinions on this groundbreaking technology are mixed, with some claiming it is something to be feared. 

Speaking to Cointelegraph reporter Jesse Coghlan at the WOW Summit Hong Kong 2023, Sebastien Borget, co-founder and chief operating officer of The Sandbox and president of the Blockchain Game Alliance, said he is excited about “the possibilities that AI offers for creators.”

Rather than fearing AI, Borget said essentially it is here to help creators create even faster. 

“With this tool, generative AI, [creators] can show and materialize ideas in seconds. It’s fantastic. The speed at which ideas can come to life has been accelerated so much.”

Borget continued by saying this will help bring more life into the metaverse, moreover, more “diverse and inclusive” avatars for users. 

The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget and Cointelegraph reporter Jesse Coghlan at WOW Summit Hong Kong 2023. Source: Cointelegraph

He signaled to a company developing an AI application that allows users to upload videos from a smartphone, take emotions directly from the live feed, and add them to an avatar. According to The Sandbox co-founder, this AI use case allows “more expression and feeling” in content creation.

“AI also helped to make the metaverse safer because it can moderate text in chats to reduce toxicity, for example, in a more automated manner.”

This is not the first time AI has been mentioned as a way to improve safety in the Web3 space. AI-based tools are said to be able to bring security and transparency to nonfungible token markets.

Related: 7 artificial intelligence examples in everyday life

Others have echoed Borget’s sentiment of AI being used to make the metaverse more interactive. It can help in more accurate representations of physical-world social experiences that are yet to be possible in the metaverse available today.

Nonetheless, AI skeptics are still sounding alarms over the potential negative effects stemming from the technology. On March 22, over 2,600 leaders and researchers in the tech industry, including Elon Musk, signed an open letter stressing the need for a pause on further AI development. 

The letter cites “profound risks to society and humanity” with the current speed of developments.

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