Richard MacManus

Quantum computing is not yet a mainstream technology, but as I discovered at last week’s London Tech Week, there are some promising use cases for it. I attended a panel at the Quantum Computing Summit exploring how three global companies, in three different sectors, are using quantum computing. The panelists were Einar Magnusson, Head of … Read more

Interoperability — or lack thereof — is a key issue in the nascent metaverse industry. The Khronos Group aims to solve this with a new open standards discussion forum called The Metaverse Standards Forum, which launches today. The group includes representation from most of the big players in the 3D internet, including Nvidia, Meta, Epic … Read more

Last week I attended The AI Summit in London, where I discovered how companies are using machine learning (ML) and other forms of AI technology. One session I enjoyed was run by Branded Entertainment Network (BEN), a global product placement and influencer marketing company. Normally I run away from anything to do with “influencers,” but … Read more

When you hear the word “metaverse” in 2022, you’re likely to think of Meta (née Facebook) or one of the big online gaming platforms, like Fortnite or Roblox. But there’s also a groundswell of “open metaverse” projects on the internet, most of which are web-based — and some tied into the Web3 ecosystem as well. … Read more

Heading into Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, there were rumors that a “mixed reality” AR/VR headset would dominate the event — even though the hardware itself wasn’t expected to be revealed. Others predicted that Apple would launch a new 3D development environment. Neither of these things happened. If anything dominated WWDC this year, it was … Read more

Despite there being no standard definition for “the metaverse,” a raft of startups have emerged to offer specialist services for the 3D internet. One such company is Agora, which offers “real-time communication and live broadcasting features” for interactive apps. Its functionality covers a variety of platforms, but is mainly used at present for 3D web … Read more

One of the more intriguing technologies demonstrated at this week’s Microsoft Build conference was ​​OpenAI Codex, a machine learning model that translates natural language into code “across more than a dozen programming languages.” In a keynote presentation entitled “The Future of AI Development Tools,” Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott said that “Codex lets us … Read more

Cloud computing company Fastly announced last week that it is acquiring Glitch, a popular browser-based app creation tool. Fastly started out as a content delivery network (CDN) in the early 2010s, but nowadays it pitches itself as an “​​edge cloud platform.” So Glitch will be a nice fit with Fastly’s growing suite of cloud tools. … Read more

The programming language Rust has been growing in popularity over the last couple of years. In its latest developer industry report, analyst firm SlashData stated that Rust has “nearly tripled in size in the past 24 months, from just 0.6M developers in Q1 2020 to 2.2M in Q1 2022.” The Rust Foundation recently announced its … Read more

Croquet is an intriguing new browser-based system for creating 3D “microverses,” described as “independent, interconnected web-based spaces and worlds created on the Metaverse.” The technology was developed by David A. Smith, a computer scientist with 30 years of experience in the VR and AR industry — including creating the set visualization software behind James Cameron’s … Read more

Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, was held this week and one of the themes was developing for the “real world.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai used the phrase four times in less than a minute in his opening keynote (with a “real lives” thrown in) while discussing Google’s emerging Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities. He talked … Read more

It’s early days for decentralized social networks, despite the recent bump in Mastodon users due to Elon Musk buying Twitter. But if you’re a developer looking for the next big thing, what better time to experiment with a platform? The “fediverse” — a group of federated websites and applications that interconnect with each other — … Read more

The Reactathon conference was held outdoors in San Francisco this week. One of the highlights was a quick-fire presentation by Shawn Swyx Wang, continuing his thesis that we’re in the third age of JavaScript. He began blogging about this in 2020, the year he pinpoints as the start of “the third age.” This year, the … Read more

If the metaverse is to become a reality, there will need to be development and content creation tools for it. There will also need to be a standard definition for “the metaverse” (currently an amorphous term that refers to a 3D internet) and, following that, a set of open standards that developers and platform companies … Read more