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Welcome back to Spatial Beats. Meta’s 50% Profit Loss Has Investors On The Run. The most painful part was Meta Reality Labs’ 49% drop in revenue, due to slowing sales of its flagship product, the Quest 2. Not a confidence builder. The press already had their knives out before the stock dropped 20%. Some of the bloodletting can be found below in our new section, “This Week in Schadenfreude.” Meanwhile, in the rest of the Metaverse, there were three major funding announcements this week,
Resonai announced $20 million in fresh funding for its Series A, bringing the round to $30 million altogether. Its program, called Vera, uses computer vision to create a highly accurate digital twin that can serve as an operating system for a wide variety of applications. Investors include Meitav Dash, a TSE-traded Israeli institutional investment house; Blue Square Israel, the second-largest retail chain in Israel; and Irani Ventures.
YOOM (formerly Tetavi) announced a $15M funding round, backed by a long list of celebrities in music and sports like Jimmy Iovine, Finneas O’Connell, and Maverick Carter. The company’s volumetric technology enables the creation of photorealistic digital content, popular for bringing live performers into the Metaverse. The new round brings YOOM’s total funding to $50 million.
ForeVR Games raises $10M Series A. The money will enable the company to expand its portfolio of casual multiplayer games like darts, bowling, Cornhole and soon, pool. The Series A round, led by Lobby Capital with participation from existing investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners and Galaxy Interactive, brings ForeVR’s total funding to date to $18.5M. Since launching in July 2020, ForeVR has attracted notable angel investments from Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, and Emmett Shear and Justin Kan, founders of Twitch.
HaptX Introduces $4,000 Haptic Gloves For Enterprise. The new G1 is connected to a lightweight backpack (the “Airpack”), uses microfluidics to channel air into the gloves, and looks and fits more like a normal glove. Inside the Gloves are hundreds of microfluidic actuators that physically displace your skin, so when you touch and interact with virtual objects, the objects feel real.
Meta Confirms Quest 3 VR Headset Is Arriving In 2023. On the bright side, Scott Stein of CNet reports a follow-up device to the Quest 2 is coming “later next year.” Based on the slowing sales of the Quest 2, it’s needed. There will also be more competition next year from Sony Playstation VR 2 and rival Pico (which is owned by Tik Tok parent Bytedance).
Metaverse Startup Burning Galaxy Soft Launches Social UGC Platform Another Earth. Founded in 2018 by Louis Jin, Burning Galaxy raised their Series A round of $10 M from Matrix Partners China in early 2022 to launch Another Earth. The new game allows users to build and share architecture, apparel, and experiences. For PCs only right now, Another Earth will soon be available on mobile devices, Xbox series, PS5, as well as VR and AR.
ZDNet Contributing Editor Throws Up On Apple Rumors. “An Apple-branded mixed-reality headset might be available for developers in 2023. But don’t expect an army of Apple Glassholes hitting the streets for quite a few more years,” says David Gurwitz. “I just don’t buy the idea that Apple is going to try to hang something that weighs more than a 12-inch iPad off of your face.”
Zoe No Code Content Creation App Launching On Quest. It’s like a game engine on training wheels, except it’s collaborative, so teachers and students, or anyone, can build places together in real time.
‘Wooorld’ is Basically a Multiplayer Version of ‘Google Earth VR’ for Quest. We’ve been waiting for something like this to launch on Quest since the Quest launched in 2019. The app features passthrough AR so you can browse 3D maps of the world in the world. You’ll also be able to move through millions of 360 street view images, sketch anywhere, take pictures, and save 360 images too, all in multiplayer mode. $15 in the Quest store.
This Week in Schadenfreude
‘It’s not good, it’s not fun.’ The Oculus founder who sold his VR startup to Mark Zuckerberg slams Meta’s Horizon Worlds as a hobby ‘project car’ (Alice Hearing/Fortune via Yahoo News)
Quest Pro Review – Impressive Hardware With a Value Proposition That’s Kind of a Mess (Ben Lang/Road to VR)
We were not wowed by our first Meta Quest Pro experience (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica)
Meta’s $10B metaverse investment is ‘not enough’ according to Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu (Romain Dillet/Techcrunch)
Losing face: Is this the beginning of the end for Mark Zuckerberg? (James Ball/Spectator)
Mark Zuckerberg might have doomed his metaverse, but Neal Stephenson’s Vision Is Very Much Alive. (Jesus Diaz/Fast Company)
This Week in XR is now a podcast hosted by Paramount’s Futurist Ted Schilowitz and Charlie Fink, the author of this weekly column. You can find it on podcasting platforms Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube. Watch the latest episode below.
Charlie Fink is an author and futurist focused on spatial computing. See his books here. Spatial Beats contains insights and inputs from Fink’s collaborators including Paramount Pictures futurist Ted Shilowitz.
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