Weekly Journal: Your Next Controller? Your Wrist.
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. Learn about how Meta’s sEMG smartwatch is building the foundation for gesture-driven digital worlds.
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 138 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.
🎭 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:
Meta’s Neural Smartwatch Tech Hints at Post-Touch Future for Wearables
Meta’s Reality Labs is showcasing what could be the most profound leap forward in smartwatch interaction since the touchscreen. Its new prototype uses surface electromyography (sEMG) to interpret electrical signals from micro-movements in your hand, enabling high-fidelity gesture control without touching the device.
Published in a recent research blog, the project reimagines how wrist-worn devices can interpret intent. By detecting individual finger movements—tapping, pinching, even writing in the air—users can interact with their digital environment as though their body were the interface. One demo shows users drawing letters mid-air or using their wrist like a mouse to guide a cursor with surgical precision. This tech goes far beyond Apple’s “Double Tap” gesture, opening the door to immersive experiences where physical controllers become obsolete. Handwriting recognition, gesture-based game control (yes, including Pac-Man), and spatial input are all on the table.
It’s early days yet. The smartwatch is still in development and has no commercial release date. However, it’s already being tested alongside Meta’s Project Orion AR glasses, hinting at a unified wearable ecosystem designed for natural, ambient computing.
Metaverse Lens: Meta’s sEMG smartwatch isn’t just a wearable—it’s a foundational input device for the spatial internet. As we move into the age of mixed reality and ambient interfaces, being able to seamlessly control digital experiences with a flick, pinch, or thought-aligned gesture is critical. Instead of screens and taps, the future of the metaverse will depend on intuitive, embodied interaction. Meta’s wrist-based neural interface offers a low-latency, high-precision method for users to interact with persistent 3D environments—whether that’s navigating virtual workspaces, manipulating digital twins in enterprise settings, or simply playing games in mid-air. In short, Meta may have just unveiled the mouse of the metaverse era.
Tobacco Giants Exploit Gaming and Metaverse to Target Youth, Watchdog Warns
Tobacco and vape companies are increasingly shifting their marketing tactics into the immersive digital worlds of gaming, NFTs, and the metaverse, effectively sidestepping conventional advertising regulations. A damning new report, presented at the World Conference on Tobacco Control in Dublin, reveals how these industries are embedding their brands within virtual ecosystems to reach a younger, impressionable audience.
The report, compiled by Canary, a global public health monitoring initiative by Vital Strategies, details how tobacco firms are sponsoring online games, creating branded NFTs, and hosting immersive virtual events. These tactics have already surfaced in countries like India, where one firm celebrated its 93rd anniversary with an NFT drop. Meanwhile, vape brands are covertly sponsoring digital environments popular with teens and young adults. “These spaces operate in the dark, far beyond the reach of current regulation,” said Dr. Melina Magsumbol, of Vital Strategies India. “They're glamorising smoking through immersive experiences and digital ownership models that make it feel aspirational—especially for youth.”
Canary tracks digital marketing trends across India, Indonesia, and Mexico, with plans to expand to Brazil, China, and other emerging digital economies. The group warns that without urgent oversight, the metaverse may become a breeding ground for a new wave of tobacco addiction, packaged as entertainment and digital prestige. The findings coincide with the World Health Organization’s 2025 report, which confirms tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable death globally, with 8 million deaths annually—most in lower-income countries.
Metaverse Lens: This isn’t just a public health issue—it’s a battle for narrative control inside the metaverse. As platforms become more immersive and decentralised, traditional gatekeepers (like advertising regulators) lose their grip. Tobacco companies, long experts in brand psychology, are seizing the opportunity to rebrand smoking through avatars, tokenisation, and immersive play. The metaverse promises to be a next-generation attention economy—and if public health advocates don’t keep up, tobacco giants will write the rules. The Canary report is a wake-up call: the metaverse isn’t a future health threat. It’s already a frontline.
👓 Read of the Week: State of Stablecoins Report by Messari
Andrew Dyer, Jake Koch-Gallup, and Qorban Ferrell have co-authored the 2025 State of Stablecoins. The 128-page report provides an in-depth analysis and review of the stablecoin sector throughout 2025 and a forward-looking perspective on what lies ahead for crypto's killer use case.
This year's report covers trends in cross-border payments, e-commerce, dollar access, tokenized money market funds, regulation, experimental stablecoin designs, and more.
Key Insights
$250 billion market-cap milestone on clearer rules. Total outstanding stablecoins punched through $250 billion, right as bills such as the GENIUS Act and MiCA moved from drafts to law, ending a two-year drawdown and unleashing a wave of new issuers.
Onchain settlement is now “ACH-scale.” Adjusted monthly stablecoin volumes already approach 40% of the U.S. ACH network and have overtaken PayPal and Visa, showing stablecoins are no longer exchange collateral but a mainstream payment rail.
Remittances are shifting to crypto faster than expected. Bitso Business already moves more than 10% of the US-to-Mexico corridor (≈ $64 B/yr) using stablecoins, evidence that cross-border consumer flows are shifting first as stablecoin rails save time and money.
Yield-bearing “digital dollars” are exploding. Tokenized money-market funds (e.g., BlackRock’s BUIDL) climbed from virtually zero to ~$7B in 18 months, offering 24/7, transferable T-bill yield and prompting Treasury warnings that deposits could migrate off-balance-sheet.
GENIUS Act locks in strict 1:1 backing plus U.S. strategy. The July 2025 law limits issuers to federally supervised entities, mandates cash/Fed-balance or ≤93-day-T-bill reserves, monthly audits, and on-demand redemption; sponsors openly frame it as a tool to “cement dollar dominance” in the digital age.
🎥 Watch of the week:
John Oliver explains why you’ve been seeing more AI-generated content online, the harm it can do, and – sadly – why it is threatening his marriage. Something a bit light-hearted that I enjoyed.
AI Showcase🎨🤖🎵✍🏼: Air New Zealand Takes Flight with OpenAI Partnership
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.
n a first-of-its-kind move for Aotearoa, Air New Zealand has partnered directly with OpenAI to roll out AI tools across its entire corporate workforce — making it the first major Kiwi organisation to formally integrate ChatGPT Enterprise at scale.
Under the new collaboration, 3,500 staff now have access to Companion AI, a custom deployment of OpenAI’s enterprise-grade model designed to streamline internal operations, boost productivity, and improve decision-making.
“We already have 1,500 custom GPTs built for specific airline problems,” said Chief Digital Officer Nikhil Ravishankar. “This isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about transforming how we work and how we serve customers.”
The AI agents are already assisting in everything from customer service and flight operations to HR and planning — and Air New Zealand is now co-developing AI solutions with OpenAI engineers that could be rolled out globally.
Why it matters:
This is New Zealand’s first enterprise-level OpenAI partnership, giving the airline early access to new tools and features.
It positions Air New Zealand as a regional leader in responsible AI adoption, showing how legacy industries can embrace advanced technology for real-world impact.
The partnership aligns with the NZ Government’s National AI Strategy, encouraging confident private sector investment in AI.
Bottom line:
Air New Zealand isn’t just experimenting with AI — it’s institutionalising it, with over 1,500 GPTs already in use. As AI becomes core to airline operations, the national carrier is turning technology into a strategic advantage — and helping define what AI-enabled business looks like in the Southern Hemisphere.
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.