📔 Weekly Journal: Star Trek's "Holodeck" Comes To Life
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. Today, the usual market news & how Meta is making the Star Trek"holodeck experience" a reality with Hyperscape
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 96 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:
🔥🗺️ 7-day heatmap below, showing the current share of the market for the top cryptocurrencies, and their change in price over the last week. Not a great week, lots of red 🩸
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is based on volatility, social media sentiments, surveys, market momentum, and a few other bits and pieces.
🗞️ Interesting news from this week
Meta has introduced its experimental "Hyperscape" technology, offering a potential game-changer for bridging Web3 and reality in the metaverse. Unveiled at Meta's Connect event, Hyperscape allows users to scan their surroundings with a phone camera and convert them into a fully navigable 3D-rendered digital environment in real-time. This advancement could revolutionise virtual collaboration, enabling immersive, real-time meetings where participants can interact seamlessly between physical and virtual worlds. The impact on education could be profound, allowing students to attend classes in real-world-like environments from anywhere, creating a more engaging and interactive learning experience. As the metaverse continues to evolve, Hyperscape positions itself as a key driver of Web3’s integration into daily life, reshaping remote work and education.
SWIFT is preparing to trial live digital currency transactions in 2024, marking a significant step towards integrating tokenised assets into the broader financial system. This move follows years of exploration by banks and asset managers seeking faster, more efficient trading through blockchain-based tokens. With 90% of central banks testing digital currencies, the financial industry is poised for transformation. SWIFT’s trial aims to connect central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and tokenised assets, addressing market fragmentation and enabling real-world payments, positioning the financial system for a new era of digital asset trading.
👓 Read of the Week
In 2022, Yon Raz-Fridman predicted the metaverse could grow into a $10 trillion industry, inhabited by 100 billion avatars. His vision, now detailed in a reflection, emphasises the concept of “multifaceted identities”, where individuals can adopt multiple avatars, driving engagement and creativity within the metaverse. These dynamic personas promise to attract diverse users, each shaping the virtual world in unique ways.
Raz-Fridman also highlights the inclusive and accessible nature of the metaverse, which breaks down barriers of language, culture, and physical limitations. With technological advancements in VR, AR, and AI, this digital realm will not only be more immersive but also provide economic incentives, encouraging users to monetise their creativity through virtual goods and real-world commerce.
As the metaverse evolves, its success hinges on building an ethical, inclusive space that fosters community, innovation, and connectivity. By prioritising safety, privacy, and user engagement, the metaverse will become a boundless digital universe, reflecting the complexities of human identity and interaction—one that Raz-Fridman hopes will be a safe, enriching space for future generations, including his daughter.
🎥 Watch of the week
Meta's Hyperscape demo is edging us closer to a true Star Trek “holodeck experience” in the metaverse. Revealed at Meta Connect 2024, Hyperscape uses your smartphone to scan real-world spaces and transforms them into immersive VR environments on devices like the Quest 3 headset. This video is from the review that David Gewirtz from ZDNET wrote after testing the beta version, exploring six different environments that showcase the technology's potential. Despite some limitations like lower resolution and occasional discomfort when teleporting, Hyperscape demonstrates how accessible photogrammetry could revolutionize education and real-time meetings. Imagine students virtually walking through historical sites or professionals collaborating in scanned office spaces—Hyperscape hints at a future where VR seamlessly integrates with our physical world.
AI 🎨🤖🎵✍🏼
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:
Meta has unveiled "Movie Gen," an AI video-generation tool designed to rival OpenAI's Sora. Movie Gen allows users to generate realistic videos from text prompts, perform video editing, match sounds, and personalise content with specific images. Initially aimed at Hollywood filmmakers, artists, and influencers, the tool is part of Meta’s strategy to enhance content creation across platforms like Instagram and Facebook. While examples of AI-generated videos have been released, full integration into Meta’s platforms is not expected until 2025. Meta claims its tool surpasses competitors in quality and realism, but emphasises it will not replace artists' work.
That’s all for the free version this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from learning about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Educational workshops are one of many consulting services I offer.
DCA With Me 🤑
Dollar Cost Averaging is an investment strategy in which an investor regularly invests a fixed amount of money into a particular asset/asset class at regular intervals, regardless of its current market cycle. By doing so, the investor can reduce the impact of market volatility and potentially earn a better return over time. Motto = time IN the market beats trying to time the market
To experiment with this, I invest $50 NZD into a Digital Asset every week. Each week I will choose an asset that seems underpriced in the short term and has positive long-term potential. My timeframe is 3-5 years. I don’t give financial advice but if you want to follow along with me you can use my easycrypto.co.nz referral link to support this newsletter. Let’s dive into this week’s pick:
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