Weekly Journal: Apple Acquires Digital Avatar Company for Vision Pro Personas
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. More on Apple's acquisition that allows users to scan their faces with an iPhone and create an avatar image using AI.
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 136 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge. New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
- Ryan
🌐 Digital Assets Market Update
To me, the Metaverse is the convergence of physical & virtual lives. As we work, play and socialise in virtual worlds, we need virtual currencies & assets. These have now reached mainstream finance as a defined asset class:
🔥🗺️Heat map shows the 7 day change in price (red down, green up) and block size is market cap. Bitcoin at all time highs 🤓
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is an insight into the underlying psychological forces that drives the market’s volatility. Sentiment reveals itself across various channels—from social media activity to Google search trends—and when analysed alongside market data, these signals provide meaningful insight into the prevailing investment climate. The Fear & Greed Index aggregates these inputs, assigning weighted value to each, and distils them into a single, unified score.
🗞️ Metaverse news from this week:
Bitcoin ETFs Soar Past $158 Billion in AUM as Institutional Demand Surges
Bitcoin’s recent price rally to an all-time high of $118,500 has triggered a fresh wave of institutional inflows into U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, which now hold a record-breaking $158 billion in total net assets.
According to SoSoValue, Thursday and Friday alone saw $2.21 billion in combined inflows, marking the strongest two-day stretch since the ETFs launched in January 2024. BlackRock’s IBIT fund accounted for the lion’s share, absorbing $953.5 million on Friday alone, and cementing its position as the fastest ETF in history to reach $80 billion in assets under management (AUM).
The surge reflects rising confidence in Bitcoin as a long-term regulated asset, comparable to gold. Meanwhile, spot Ethereum ETFs are also gaining traction. Although they’ve yet to reclaim December 2024’s peak NAV of $14.3 billion, the funds posted a record $5.31 billion in cumulative net inflows after a six-day streak. With Bitcoin ETF flows setting new benchmarks and Ethereum ETF activity building momentum, the trend suggests institutional investors are doubling down on regulated crypto exposure - even as markets brace for macroeconomic volatility.
Implications for the Metaverse: As capital floods into on-chain assets through compliant ETF wrappers, these inflows accelerate the infrastructure required for mainstream digital asset integration - laying the foundation for tokenised financial rails, metaverse-native payments, and programmable asset interoperability across virtual worlds. This is not just a financial milestone, it’s a metaverse signal.
Apple Acquires TrueMeeting to Advance Realistic Metaverse Avatars for Vision Pro
In a quiet but strategic move, Apple has acquired TrueMeeting (formerly CommonGround-AI), a Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley-based startup known for its cutting-edge 3D avatar technology. The acquisition, revealed via a European Commission filing, underscores Apple’s accelerating ambitions in spatial computing and personalised digital presence.
TrueMeeting’s core product enabled users to create highly realistic avatars by simply scanning their face with a smartphone - usable across both traditional video calls and XR experiences. This capability appears to directly support Apple's enhanced “Personas”, the lifelike avatars used in Vision Pro’s immersive environments. At WWDC 2025, Apple previewed a major update to Personas in visionOS 26, showcasing notably more realistic skin textures, stubble detail, and expressive facial movements—improvements likely powered by TrueMeeting’s technology. According to early hands-on reports, the latest Personas demonstrate “impressive nuance” and high-fidelity emotion capture, inching closer to real-time digital telepresence.
Alongside this, Apple also acquired WhyLabs, an AI infrastructure company focused on monitoring and debugging generative AI systems. This signals a broader push to improve AI safety and stability within Apple’s ecosystem - including conversational agents that may underpin Vision Pro’s spatial operating system.
Metaverse Lens: Apple’s moves have deep implications for the emerging metaverse. With TrueMeeting, Apple isn’t just refining avatars - it’s shaping the standard for digital embodiment across mixed reality. As Vision Pro evolves from a niche headset to a potential anchor of hybrid work, learning, and social interaction, realistic avatars become the connective tissue for identity, presence, and trust in the metaverse. The acquisition also hints at posthumous avatar use-cases, raising philosophical questions: If lifelike Personas persist beyond physical death, will they become vessels of memory, or ghostly participants in virtual society? Apple’s tech stack is laying the groundwork for such questions to shift from speculative to real.
👓 Read of the Week: (Opinion) Don't Let the AI Agent Hype Outpace Reality
As AI agents race into the spotlight, MIT Technology Review contributor and AI21 Labs cofounder Yoav Shoham urges us to take a sober look at what’s really happening under the hood. In his sharp, level-headed critique, Shoham warns against "agentwashing" and outlines the coordination, semantics, and trust issues that must be solved if autonomous AI agents are to become truly useful digital collaborators. With Google’s Agent-to-Agent protocol and enterprise tools like Maestro gaining traction, this is essential reading for anyone navigating the fast-emerging agentic AI landscape.
🎥 Watch of the week: Apple’s VisionOS 26 update
Apple’s VisionOS 26 update is here - and it changes everything. From a dramatically improved Persona to more immersive spatial experiences, the Vision Pro finally feels more than just an entertainment device.
AI Showcase🎨🤖🎵✍🏼: Sam Altman Says Today’s Computers Can’t Handle the AI Future - So OpenAI Might Build Its Own
In the Metaverse, AI will be critical for creating intelligent virtual environments and avatars that can understand and respond to users with human-like cognition and natural interactions.
This week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed what many in the tech world have suspected: today’s computers were never designed for a world dominated by artificial intelligence. Speaking at the prestigious Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference and on the Hard Fork podcast, Altman hinted at OpenAI’s plans to build a new kind of AI-native computer—one that could make the experience of AI not just functional, but “transcendentally good.”
🧠 Why it matters:
Altman’s comments mark a notable shift from his earlier stance, where he suggested no new hardware would be needed for the AI revolution. Now, both he and OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap suggest that existing systems lack the “context and situational awareness” required for truly powerful AI assistants.
“You can build something that [reads and replies to emails] today, but to get to the version that’s transcendentally good… you need a ton of context and awareness,” said Lightcap.
💡 What kind of device are they hinting at?
While details are sparse, the direction points toward:
A context-aware, always-available AI assistant that could help in real-time across diverse situations.
Possibly a screenless AI-native device, as previously teased in collaboration with ex-Apple designer Jony Ive.
A form factor that transcends today’s smartphones or laptops—perhaps blending voice, vision, and environmental input to anticipate user needs.
📉 Why new hardware?
OpenAI’s hardware push aligns with broader concerns across Big Tech:
Google’s Sundar Pichai also said current systems are inadequate to reach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
Amazon’s Alexa, despite billions in investment, has failed to achieve the sophistication users expect - and the device division has reportedly lost $25B between 2017–2021.
In short, if AI is going to be everywhere—from your inbox to your kitchen to your daily conversations—it needs hardware built for the AI era, not the web and app era.
📱 The road ahead:
OpenAI’s entry into hardware may rival Apple’s iPhone moment—except this time, it’s not about apps, but pervasive intelligence. If successful, it could redefine what a “personal computer” or “digital assistant” even means.
Bottom line: The next generation of AI won’t just live in the cloud. It will be with you, aware of you, and built into a whole new class of devices. OpenAI seems determined to lead that transition.
That’s all for this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from keynotes about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Public speaking is one of many services I offer.