🟣 SC
The word metaverse did not originate in a corporate rebrand, a product roadmap, or a quarterly earnings call. It entered our cultural vocabulary in 1992, in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, as a speculative description of the future of virtual worlds.
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The technology is certainly there. WebXR is the standard API for immersive experiences on the web, and frameworks like A-Frame provide ready-to-use XR components, covering inputs, primitives, teleportation, gestures and so on. Since AI coding tools can already interact with external libraries, I realized I only needed to provide the intent and guide the AI toward the spatial outcome I wanted.
Read more🟣 SC 🔴 HCI
The first time we handed our AR demo to a stranger, she did what any sensible person would do, she watched the world around. The room was busy, reflections from a window, her face moving in and out of light, and our neat row of icons behaved like extras, present, but not useful. In my notes I wrote a single line “if the room is our scene, the interface must be part of it not just a heads up display”.
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The glasses serve various purposes, with some using XR to create a portable desktop setup, and others competing with Meta's Ray-Bans, which pack cameras and voice assistants into a lightweight form factor. ZDNET's smart glasses experts have either covered the news or gone hands-on with many of them.
Read more🔵 FS 🟡 Sci-fi 🔘 Arch
Now that 2026 is no longer speculative but real, Metropolis invites a fresh look. It captured structural tensions that continue to shape modern urban life: who benefits from progress, who pays for it, and how technology changes human relationships when power is concentrated at the top.
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Prices will start from 1,899 yuan ($268.25) for the headset that will be powered by Alibaba's Qwen AI model and app. Unlike other headsets made by the likes of Meta, the Quark glasses look like regular eyewear, with a black plastic frame. Alibaba said the glasses would be deeply integrated with its apps, including Alipay and its shopping site Taobao, with wearers able to use them for tasks such as on-the-go translation and instant price recognition.
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Today, we’re introducing WorldGen: a state-of-the-art end-to-end system for generating interactive and navigable 3D worlds from a single text prompt. WorldGen is built on a combination of procedural reasoning, diffusion-based 3D generation, and object-aware scene decomposition. The result is geometrically consistent, visually rich, and render-efficient 3D worlds for gaming, simulation, and immersive social environments.
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In the last hundred years, humanity’s capacity for knowledge transmission progressed from the written word and the static-laden echoes of early radio technology to global information systems so vast and complex that no single person on Earth can claim a complete understanding of them. Inevitably, the social technologies built into both our biology and our society are no longer entirely capable of addressing our new epistemological landscape. But is a slow retreat into the machine necessarily the only path we can take to keep up?
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Notably, the platform doesn’t require coding or advanced design expertise, allowing users to design, drop, and share interactive AR experiences across mobile devices, headsets, and AR glasses.
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If you’ve encountered any science fiction, you’ve experienced the technological sublime—the feeling of awe, braided with dread, that can emerge in response to the engulfing possibilities of technology’s progress. Maybe you’ve gaped at the sprawling cyber-cityscapes of “Blade Runner,” or at the impossibly tall, leaflike alien ships in “Arrival.” In the cascading green code of “The Matrix,” you might have sensed a promise of revelation—or perhaps Ava, the uncannily beautiful android played by Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina,” has induced some idea of what it might mean to be more than human. In all of these cases, technology feels big, strange, relentless, but also mind-expanding and appealing—a bracing wave that will sweep you up.
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