Of all the rudimentary forms of the metaverse out there, few if any are as fully realized and well used as Epic Games’ Fortnite. Fortnite grew from game to metaverse in an organic way: People began lingering in Fortnite‘s 3D world after they were done playing, just to hang out with friends. Picking up on this, Epic began hosting planned events for Fortniters, such as concerts and movie previews. Earlier this month, Epic released the latest version of its gaming engine, Unreal
Visitors to the Smithsonian Institution will soon be one small step closer to virtually walking on the moon. A new partnership between Meta and the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall will let visitors don a Quest 2 VR headset and experience the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that sent Neil Armstrong and co. to the moon. Participants will first be placed in the Eagle spacecraft, and will then be able to walk on the moon’s surface. “You can literally
Fifty years ago today, photography changed forever. The 3,000-something people assembled at a Polaroid warehouse in Needham, Massachusetts were the first to hear the news—from Polaroid founder/president/resident genius Edwin H. Land himself, who declared it to be a turning point for the medium. Land was presiding over Polaroid’s annual meeting on April 25, 1972, and the change he was talking about came in the form of the company’s newest instant camera. It was indeed a trans
I love tools that save time. Especially when they take care of technical stuff for me automatically. That’s why I use IFTTT (If This, Then That). IFTTT lets you link together the sites or devices you use in creative ways. When you do something with one site or device, something automatically happens elsewhere. You can use it to link your favorite task app to Google Calendar, for example. Or to link your smart speaker (Alexa or Google Home) to an internet-connected light. Or link just
Even during times of conflict on the ground, space has historically been an arena of collaboration among nations. But trends in the past decade suggest that the nature of cooperation in space is shifting, and fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted these changes. I’m an international relations scholar who studies power distributions in space—who the main players are, what capabilities they possess, and whom they decide to cooperate with. Some scho
In 2021, an investment firm bought 2,000 acres of real estate for about US$4 million. Normally this would not make headlines, but in this case the land was virtual. It existed only in a metaverse platform called The Sandbox. By buying 792 non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, the firm then owned the equivalent of 1,200 city blocks. But did it? It turns out that legal ownership in the metaverse is not that simple. The prevailing but lega
Embattled video game maker Activision Blizzard is once again in hot water, this time over allegations of insider trading. Late last week, the company announced that it had received a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as a request for information from the Securities and Exchange Commission, both related to the question of whether three Activision investors engaged in insider trading just days before the company announced its sale to Microsoft for $68.7 billion. In a
Looking for good news about the planet’s future on Earth Day—an occasion often marked mainly by greenwashing corporate PR—can feel as doomed as fishing in the filthy, sometimes flammable rivers that spurred the first Earth Day in 1970. But if you may please pause your doomscrolling for a moment, cause for cautious optimism shouldn’t be far below the surface. American-made offshore wind power U.S. renewable energy adoption has lagged most visibly in offshore wind power
There’s nothing the video game world loves more than a good argument, and the rumored rise in interest in in-game ads on the PlayStation (and maybe Xbox) could be the industry’s next tempest in a teapot. Sony is reportedly working on a plan to put ads into titles on its platform, borrowing heavily from the model that has been so successful in the mobile gaming world. The goal of the initiative, reports Insider, is for the ads to be integrated into the games, such as appearing
Israel is one of the tiniest countries on Earth, but go hundreds of miles up and things look a bit different. Thanks to its homegrown orbital rocket, it is now the smallest of 16 countries with its own launch capability; a technology that was put on full display with the Beresheet mission of 2019, which made Israel just the fourth country to attempt a moon landing. (The attempt, which was partly privately funded, ultimately crashed into the lunar surface, but a second mission is planned for 2024