The Year in Review
Our eye on the charts, the Fed’s movement in crypto and potentially in the XR hardware space. News briefs from the VR Awards, Ori Inbar and the Augmented World Expo, Conquest VR, Yuga Labs, VIVE, Ready Player Me, and Meta. Year-in-review content from Rooom, Virtualwear, Niantic, Meta, Ashley Huffman, and XR news outlet Mixed.
An Eye on the Charts
Bitcoin and Ethereum both started the week on a downtrend, with spikes around the middle of the week turning down again. Bitcoin is slightly down while Ethereum is slightly up, though both are within a percent of where they were this time last week. BTC is hovering around $16.6k and Ethereum is hovering around $1.2k.
Most other major coins followed a similar trajectory throughout the week and have similar fates being in the red or green but usually by just one or two percentage points. One notable exception is Solana which has lost about a quarter of its value in the last seven days.
An Eye on the Fed
There is a lot going on in Sam Bankman-Fried’s personal life, but the government’s eyes seem to have shifted to the events immediately following the company’s dissolution. Within a day of the company declaring bankruptcy, it was hacked resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars disappearing from the already sinking company. Was it users trying to save their money? Was it SBF himself? We’ll see.
There are also interesting regulatory movements happening in the immersive tech area. A Forbes report published late last week found that TikTok has been tracking the locations of journalists covering the platform. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, the Chinese company that also owns Pico. American skepticism is often cited at presenting Pico’s consumer expansion into the U.S. and this report won’t help.
News in Brief
- It’s already time to register interest for next year’s VR Awards.
- The days are numbered to apply for the XR Prize Challenge: Fight Climate Change from Ori Inbar and the Augmented World Expo.
- Conquest VR announced a black “Stealth” version of their high-end audio adapter for users of VIVE and Varjo headsets.
- Yuga Labs launched a collection on Giphy further expanding the potential influence of the bored apes, as well as their other popular NFT brands.
- Yuga Labs is also going forward in its court battle against Ryder Ripps. Ripps is accused of stealing intellectual property rights in his version of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, but there are also slander allegations as Ripps has promoted the conspiracy that the BAYC is based in Nazi ideologies.
- VIVE and Ready Player Me released holiday outfits for their avatar generators. VIVE also announced updates to make world creation easier in the VIVERSE platform.
- Speaking of VIVE, the company is teasing a big announcement next week. We’ll cover it in next week’s article but the current speculation is that the reveal will be a more consumer-friendly stand-alone headset. Many were expecting more robust opportunities from VIVE Flow, but the device was a little too consumer-friendly, leaving many fans feeling let-down.
- In addition to a New Year’s celebration sale, a whole new round of apps and games landed in the Meta ecosystem including
- Professional development series Retreat
- Immersive language learning app Noun Town
- The highly anticipated second installment of The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners
The Year in Review
With this being the last week of 2022, a number of companies are taking a moment to reflect on the year-to-date. These include:
- Immersive event space Rooom
- Industrial immersive tech firm Virtualware
- Niantic
- Meta
- Ashley Huffman’s “All Things Haptics” Substack page
- How did the whole XR industry’s year go? No “gamechangers” according to news outlet Mixed