📔 Weekly Journal: Kawasaki’s Robotic Horse Concept
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. Kawasaki’s Corleo is a robotic horse you can ride—fusing cutting-edge engineering with bold, off-road mobility ambitions.
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 126 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. Huge positive week.
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is based on volatility, social media sentiments, surveys, market momentum, and a few other bits and pieces. Back into the Greed Zone!
🗞️ Metaverse news from this week:
Meta Retreats from Its Metaverse Dream—But the Open Metaverse May Be Just Beginning
Meta has laid off over 100 employees from its Reality Labs division, the latest signal that Mark Zuckerberg’s once-cherished Metaverse vision is being deprioritised. The cuts hit teams behind the Quest VR headsets and Oculus Studios, marking a continuing retreat from the company’s multibillion-dollar bet on immersive virtual worlds.
Despite spending more than $70 billion on the Metaverse, Meta struggled to deliver compelling experiences. Horizon Worlds never captured mainstream attention, becoming a punchline rather than a platform. While Ray-Ban smart glasses saw modest success, the broader VR ecosystem under Meta’s control has stalled—drifting from ghost-town social spaces to lacklustre content libraries.
Zuckerberg’s pivot to AI in 2023 accelerated the decline, with internal priorities and capital shifting away from immersive environments toward generative models and infrastructure. But while Meta’s centralised Metaverse may be winding down, the broader vision of a persistent, interoperable digital world is far from dead.
In fact, this could mark a turning point: from walled gardens to open ecosystems. The rise of decentralised platforms like The Sandbox, Somnium Space, and HiberWorld—as well as innovations in spatial computing and onchain identity—suggests the Metaverse may thrive not through single-vendor dominance, but via an open, composable architecture owned by its participants. Meta’s withdrawal doesn’t signify the end of the Metaverse; it might be the beginning of its decentralised rebirth.
Kawasaki’s Robotic Horse “Corleo” Kawasaki has unveiled a futuristic concept: Corleo, a quadrupedal robotic horse designed to carry humans across rough terrain—an ambitious fusion of engineering, biomechanics, and immersive transport. More than just a marvel of mobility, Corleo represents a bold leap toward physically embodied experiences that could redefine how we interact with digital and real-world environments.
While currently a concept, Corleo envisions a new category of off-road mobility, capable of navigating environments that traditional wheeled vehicles can’t reach. The robot is expected to be manually steered, but autonomously handle balance and terrain adaptation using advanced actuators and sensors—bringing together decades of research in proprioceptive and perceptive locomotion.
From a Metaverse perspective, Corleo is significant not just as a mode of transport but as a potential interface for immersive experiences. Imagine traversing open virtual landscapes—like those in the Sandbox or Roblox—not via keyboard or joystick, but by riding a physical robot that mirrors your in-world motion. If developed with XR compatibility, Corleo could bridge physical and virtual travel, blurring the line between simulation and reality.
The technologies enabling Corleo—sensor fusion, real-time environmental feedback, adaptive balancing—could also power next-generation metaverse-ready exosuits and personal mobility devices. As legged robots mature, they will become essential to inclusive metaverse ecosystems, offering physical interfaces that mirror the fluidity and freedom of virtual worlds. Read the full piece by Matías Mattamala at The Conversation.
👓 Read of the Week: Future of Work in the Metaverse: 9 Trends Shaping 2025
As we shift from Work From Home to Work From Metaverse (WFM), the workplace is being fundamentally reimagined. This latest analysis uncovers nine metaverse-aligned trends reshaping the future of work:
Expertise Gaps Go Virtual – As seasoned professionals retire, immersive metaverse training environments must bridge the widening skills gap with simulated, hands-on learning.
Metaverse-Ready Org Design – Businesses are restructuring for decentralised collaboration, using persistent virtual workspaces to enable agility and innovation at scale.
Nudgetech in Virtual Spaces – AI-driven “nudgetech” tools help synchronise communication styles within avatar-led teams, improving cohesion across geographies and generations.
Bots > Bosses in Virtual Oversight – In the metaverse, employees increasingly trust AI agents to manage performance fairly and transparently, replacing traditional oversight models.
AI Ethics in Immersive Work – With generative tools embedded into metaverse workflows, companies must define clear policies around originality, skill, and acceptable AI use.
Inclusion Takes Centre Stage – The metaverse can transcend physical limitations — but only if designed inclusively. DEI strategies are key to ensuring true belonging in virtual spaces.
Productivity Paradox of AI-first Workspaces – Over-engineering metaverse workflows with automation can hinder rather than help. Success depends on human-centred design.
Loneliness in the Infinite Office – Despite constant virtual presence, isolation remains a risk. Smart metaverse firms are prioritising social architecture and avatar-based bonding rituals.
Employee-Led Ethics Movements – From avatar surveillance to algorithmic bias, employee activism is driving governance around responsible AI and digital workplace norms.
The shift to WFM isn’t just a technological upgrade — it’s a philosophical one. The metaverse may soon become the default office — but whether it’s empowering or alienating will depend on how these trends are addressed.
🎥 Watch of the week:
Watch Kawasaki’s robotic horse concept video, wild!
AI Showcase🎨🤖🎵✍🏼:
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, Anthropic unveiled a significant expansion of its AI assistant, Claude, introducing a suite of integrations that connect it directly to popular workplace tools. These new capabilities allow Claude to interact seamlessly with platforms such as Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence, Zapier, Cloudflare, Intercom, Asana, Square, Sentry, PayPal, Linear, and Plaid. By leveraging these integrations, Claude can access and act upon data across various applications, enhancing its utility as a collaborative partner in diverse workflows .
A notable advancement is the enhancement of Claude’s Research feature. Now, Claude can conduct in-depth investigations across connected tools, web sources, and Google Workspace, delivering comprehensive reports complete with citations. This functionality enables users to obtain detailed insights without manually sifting through multiple platforms .
These developments are underpinned by Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard facilitating secure and efficient communication between AI models and external applications. MCP’s adoption by major AI providers underscores its significance in the evolving landscape of AI integration .
Currently, these integrations and the advanced Research feature are available in beta for users on the Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, with plans to extend access to Pro users in the near future .
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.