Weekly Journal: Meta Update Spruces up the “Virtual Home”
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. Meta’s Immersive Home is a taster of the metaverse, where AI, spatial memory, and personal identity being to converge.
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 148 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:
Massive and sudden crash then partial recovery in digital assets markets, Anton gave an excellent analysis:
🔥🗺️Heat map shows the 7 day change in price (red down, green up) and block size is market cap.
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is an insight into the underlying psychological forces that drive 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:
Meta Pushes Metaverse Teams to “Go 5X Faster” with AI
Under the banner AI4P (AI for Productivity), Shah urged engineers, designers, and product managers alike to integrate AI into every workflow, from prototyping to debugging. The message aligns with Mark Zuckerberg’s prediction that within 18 months, most of Meta’s code will be written by AI—a sign that the company’s metaverse ambitions are now inseparable from its AI transformation.
The push is both visionary and unsettling. On one hand, it promises a future of rapid iteration, where ideas can be tested and deployed in hours rather than weeks. On the other, it exposes the cultural tension of “vibe coding” — a growing industry term for AI-generated code that humans struggle to understand or maintain.
Shah’s target is clear: 80% of Meta’s metaverse staff using AI daily by year’s end, supported by mandatory training and internal “Days of AI Learning.” For Meta, AI is no longer a side project — it’s the engine meant to rescue and accelerate its metaverse bet, turning a sluggish virtual platform into a self-optimising creative system.
From a metaverse perspective, this move signals a new paradigm:
The next version of the metaverse may not just be built by humans — it will be co-engineered by AI.
If Meta succeeds, its virtual worlds could evolve faster than any human-only team could manage. If it fails, it risks drowning in the same algorithmic complexity it’s unleashing.
Quest v81: Meta’s New “Immersive Home” Redefines the Entry Point to the Metaverse
Meta’s Horizon OS v81 update is now rolling out across Quest headsets, marking a major milestone in the company’s long-term metaverse architecture. Built atop the new Horizon Engine, the update introduces an Immersive Home experience, persistent window anchoring, and faster app loading through QuickPlay—all signals of Meta’s push toward a more seamless, spatial computing ecosystem.
🏠 Immersive Home: A New Metaverse Gateway
Gone are the dated, low-poly living rooms of the Quest 2 era. The new Immersive Home environment delivers cinematic lighting, dynamic scenery, and free movement powered by the Horizon Engine—the same system Meta says will underpin its entire metaverse infrastructure. Users can now teleport, slide, or even sit naturally within their virtual home, while social and content integrations like the Instagram window begin to fuse digital life with physical identity.
📌 Persistent Anchoring: Spatial Continuity Arrives
For the first time, Quest users can pin and anchor 2D windows—whether browser tabs, chats, or productivity tools—so they persist across sessions and reboots. This feature is a key step toward spatial computing continuity, transforming the headset from a transient entertainment device into a persistent workspace or social hub.
⚡ QuickPlay & Expanded Multitasking
The new QuickPlay system allows apps to launch before fully downloading—cutting load times by up to 50%. Meta also teased an increase from 6 to 12 active 2D windows, though the rollout is gradual. Together, these features position Quest as an increasingly capable personal computing platform, not just a gaming device.
🤖 Meta AI, Remote Work & Horizon Integration
Meta AI now interprets natural language commands (“It’s too loud,” “open IMDb for Chris Hemsworth”), and Windows 11 remote desktop access is becoming mainstream—further blurring lines between physical and virtual productivity.
From a metaverse perspective, v81 feels like the connective tissue between today’s headset and tomorrow’s ambient operating system. The Immersive Home isn’t just a menu redesign—it’s the lobby of the metaverse, where AI, spatial memory, and personal identity begin to converge.
As Horizon Engine, Hyperscape, and Ray-Ban Meta evolve in parallel, Meta’s ecosystem is rapidly stitching together a continuous mixed-reality fabric—one that could eventually stretch from your face to your physical surroundings, and into the cloud.
📖 Read of the week: How Ethereum Will Be the Home of Decentralised AI Agents — and Power the Metaverse Economy
🗞 By Oluwapelumi Adejumo | CryptoSlate | 11 October 2025
Ethereum’s latest innovation, ERC-8004, could redefine both artificial intelligence and the metaverse economy. Unveiled by the Ethereum Foundation’s dAI team and Consensys, the new standard provides a framework for AI agents — autonomous digital entities capable of browsing, negotiating, transacting, and collaborating — to trust and verify one another directly on-chain, without human intermediaries.
Why it matters:
The AI market is projected to exceed US $1 trillion by 2031, driven by autonomous agents that think, decide, and act independently. ERC-8004 positions Ethereum as the neutral ground for these agents — a decentralised “trustware” layer where machine identities, reputations, and behaviours can be permanently recorded.
How it works:
🪪 On-chain identity: Each agent receives a verifiable ERC-721 NFT “passport”, recording its capabilities, endpoints, and behavioural metadata.
🌟 Reputation and validation: Through lightweight registries, agents can build provable histories of trustworthy behaviour, using x402 payment proofs and feedback data.
🤝 Autonomous cooperation: Agents can discover, authenticate, and transact with one another across networks — forming the basis for decentralised AI commerce.
Why this matters for the Metaverse:
ERC-8004 doesn’t just enable machine trust — it lays the foundation for living, self-governing virtual worlds. In emerging metaverse economies, these AI agents could serve as:
🏗️ Builders — autonomously constructing 3D assets, environments, or entire virtual cities.
💱 Traders — negotiating exchanges of digital goods, land, and tokens across interoperable worlds.
🎭 NPCs and companions — persistent, evolving characters who remember player interactions and respond with true agency.
🧠 DAOs of machines — autonomous collectives governing virtual infrastructure, supply chains, or in-game economies.
Ethereum engineer Binji summarises it best:
“Smart contracts are how we will communicate with AI. The immutable ledger is how they will communicate with each other. Ethereum is how we’ll build this right.”
ERC-8004 could thus transform Ethereum from a platform for human-driven finance into the coordination layer for a global, decentralised machine economy — one that powers the next evolution of the metaverse itself.
🔗 Read the full article on CryptoSlate
🎥 Watch of the week:
The consumer VR market may have slowed over the past year, but research and innovation in the field certainly haven’t. In just the past month, Meta has released several groundbreaking papers showcasing major advances across multiple fronts: ultra-wide field-of-view displays, ultra-compact holographic optics that address the long-standing vergence-accommodation conflict, and hyper-realistic headset prototypes.
Whether these breakthroughs make it into the Quest 3+ or Quest 4 is doubtful—but one thing’s clear: by 2035, virtual reality is going to be absolutely mind-blowing.
AI Spotlight 🎨🤖🎵✍🏼: The AI Bubble—Capitalism’s Next Big Test
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.
The Guardian Editorial, 10 Oct 2025
Global regulators have issued their starkest warning yet: the AI boom is inflating markets to dotcom-era highs, and the fall could be just as spectacular. With trillions tied up in a handful of tech giants, and China threatening export controls on rare earths, the stability of the global economy may hinge on a single question—can capitalism evolve faster than the technology it funds?
Drawing from financial historian Charles Kindleberger and economist Hyman Minsky, the Guardian editorial argues that the problem isn’t just overvaluation—it’s systemic. Capitalism, by design, amplifies belief: investors pile in because others do, creating a feedback loop of confidence and risk. The longer the calm, the riskier the bets become. Minsky warned that this dynamic leads inevitably to what he called the “Ponzi endgame,” where asset prices rise purely on the expectation they’ll keep rising.
This is where AI now sits: startups with “three people and an idea” are raising billions, valuations are “insane,” and capital is chasing hype rather than productivity. Even Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos have called out the irrational exuberance.
From a metaverse lens, the parallels are haunting. Like the early 2000s web frenzy, AI and the metaverse are fusing into a new speculative frontier—an economy built on belief, data, and digital property. But without what Minsky called a “big bank” and “big government” to temper the cycle—redirecting cash toward socially useful innovation—this next phase of techno-capitalism risks repeating the same old story: exuberance, excess, and eventual correction.
If capitalism can’t learn to manage the volatility of its own digital offspring, the so-called AI revolution may prove less an age of abundance than another test of economic survival.
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.