SOCIAL
Meta Launches New Interactive Options for VR Worlds, the Next Steps in the Metaverse Shift

Meta’s taking early steps towards making its VR environments more interactive, with an initial rollout of the ability to invite friends into your Meta Horizon Home environment.
As you can see in this overview, soon, VR users will have a new way to invite their friends to connect in the VR environment, in order to play games, watch video, or simply explore new virtual worlds together.
As explained by Meta:
“For years, Home has existed as a transitory space. Home is the first thing you see when you put on your Meta Quest headset, and a familiar place to return to when you’re done exploring […] With v41, we’re taking a step towards our long-term vision. As part of this update, we’ll begin gradually rolling out the ability to invite friends to your Meta Horizon Home environment and hang out, coordinate your next gaming session, and even launch your group straight into supported multiplayer experiences.”
There’s limited support for multiplayer interaction in VR apps right now, and as you can see, VR avatars still don’t have legs as yet. But this is another step towards Meta’s ultimate metaverse vision, where VR headsets will become a portal to entirely new, entirely immersive social experiences.
It may not seem like it now, as it’s still early days for VR adoption, but eventually, Meta’s hoping that this will become as common a practice as checking your phone, till you don’t even need your phone any more to interact, and you spend all your mobile screen time in VR environments instead.
That still seems far-fetched. Wearing a VR headset for any length of time can get annoying, while there are also issues with motion sickness and other factors that likely limit the amount of time you want to be engaging in virtual spaces. But again, Meta’s making big bets on VR, and the metaverse, becoming the future of interaction, with Zuck and Co. investing billions into the technology that will power the next phase of digital connectivity.
Experiences like this give us a glimpse of what we can expect, and while it is still early, you can start to see the framework of Meta’s metaverse taking shape, with more interactive tools being built in, more collaboration and creation platforms being released, and more avatar customization options being developed to facilitate personalization and identity within the space.
On that front, Meta’s also working on its new photo-realistic avatars, and developing new ways to create more true to life avatar characters for the VR space.
Late last year, Meta showed off its evolving Codec avatars, which are effectively photo-realistic depictions of your physical self, in digital form.
Those are impressive, but the problem lies in creating these depictions, as users need to be filmed within a 360 degree camera rig to facilitate creation.
Or at least, they did.
According to a new report from Upload VR, Meta has now developed a new process which will enable users to create similar photo-realistic avatars via their current mobile device.
As per Upload:
“Previously, generating an individual Codec Avatar required a specialized capture rig called MUGSY with 171 high resolution cameras. But Meta’s latest research gets rid of this requirement, generating an avatar with a scan from a smartphone with a front facing depth sensor, such as any iPhone with FaceID. This scanning process takes 3 and a half minutes on average, the researchers claim – though actually generating the avatar (in full detail) then takes six hours on a machine with four high end GPUs. If deployed in a product, this step would likely happen on cloud GPUs, not the user’s device.”
So, there is still a heavy processing load required – but again, we’re seeing the next steps of VR interaction, which will eventually form another layer of the metaverse shift.
It’ll take time, of course, for all of these elements to coalesce, and for VR take-up to reach the point of critical mass. But Meta’s bet is that younger audiences, who are more accustomed to engaging in virtual spaces like Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft, will eventually welcome these new interactive environments, where they can interact via digital avatars within shared worlds.
Ideally, this would all happen at once, and we’d have a fully-formed VR space right now. But each step will take time, with a key shift being the rapid acceleration of VR take-up as VR devices become the central point of engagement for younger users.
One great game or app could be the catalyst on this front, and when that happens, the metaverse shift could happen faster than you’d think.
It’s not there yet, but the building blocks are being shifted into place.
SOCIAL
The North Face Delivered Jacket Via Helicopter After Viral TikTok Complaint

- Popular apparel brand The North Face posted a crazy marketing stunt on TikTok recently.
- In a video, they delivered a rain jacket to a woman at the top of a mountain in New Zealand via helicopter.
- The woman had complained in a viral TikTok that her waterproof jacket got soaked in the rain.
The North Face pulled an elaborate marketing stunt on TikTok and delivered some rain gear via helicopter to a woman in New Zealand, whose complaint about the brand went viral on the platform.
Jenn Jensen posted a TikTok video on November 17 showing herself on a hiking trail in the rain where she’s soaked whilst wearing a rain jacket sporting The North Face logo.
“I’ve got a bone to pick with North Face,” Jensen says in the video which has racked up over 11 million views. “I bought this ‘rain jacket’ a couple of days ago and the tag for the advertising said that it’s waterproof. Well listen, I’m 100% sure that it’s raining outside and I’m soaking wet.”
She added: “Listen… I don’t want a refund. I want you to redesign this rain coat to make it waterproof and express deliver it to the top of Hooker Valley Lake in New Zealand where I will be waiting.”
She tagged The North Face’s TikTok page in her caption. In one comment a user named @timbrodini wrote: “*Northface has left the conversation.”
The popular outdoor clothes brand made their own TikTok video in response to @timbrodini’s comment in which they said: “We were busy express delivering @Jenn her jacket at the top of mountain.”
In the TikTok video, a North Face employee can be seen grabbing a red jacket from one of its physical stores and then hopping onto a helicopter where he’s flown out to New Zealand. The man then jumps out of the helicopter at the top of the mountain and runs out to throw the jacket to Jensen who is waiting.
She says “thank you” at the end of the video, which has also gone viral and gained 4.1 million views.
Jensen then made a follow up video on her page explaining that The North Face’s marketing team saw her video and wanted to make “amends.” She said they flew her out by helicopter to the top of a mountain in New Zealand to give her new rain gear.
“At this point the ultimate test will be if the new rain gear they gave me at the top of that mountain will hold up to the very high bar that North Face has now set for themselves,” she concluded at the end of the video.
Some users speculated whether her original video was also a part of the marketing stunt but Jensen responded that she “turned down” the opportunity to be paid for the company’s follow up video.
“I’m not an influencer, I was just a disappointed customer.”
The marketing strategy appears to be a new way for brands to connect with customers by showing their care whilst also providing an entertaining video on social media.
The North Face seems to be following the steps of the Stanley cup brand which recently went viral after gifting a woman a new car. The woman’s own car had burnt down, but in a TikTok video she showed that her insulated Stanley cup had survived the car fire and that the ice inside hadn’t even melted.
SOCIAL
U.S. Judge Blocks Montana’s Effort to Ban TikTok in the State

TikTok has won another reprieve in the U.S., with a District Judge blocking Montana’s effort to ban the app for all users in the state.
Back in May, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed legislation to ban TikTok outright from operating in the state, in order to protect residents from alleged intelligence gathering by China. There’s no definitive evidence that TikTok is, or has participated in such, but Gianforte opted to move to a full ban, going further than the Government device bans issued in other regions.
As explained by Gianforte at the time:
“The Chinese Communist Party using TikTok to spy on Americans, violate their privacy, and collect their personal, private, and sensitive information is well-documented. Today, Montana takes the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.”
In response, a collection of TikTok users challenged the proposed ban, arguing that it violated their first amendment rights, which led to this latest court challenge, and District Court Judge Donald Molloy’s decision to stop Montana’s ban effort.
Montana’s TikTok ban had been set to go into effect from January 1st 2024.
In issuing a preliminary injunction to stop Montana from imposing a full ban on the app, Molloy said that Montana’s legislation does indeed violate the Constitution, and “oversteps state power”.
Molloy’s judgment is primarily centered on the fact that Montana has essentially sought to exercise foreign policy authority in enacting a TikTok ban, which is only enforceable by federal authorities. Molloy also noted that there was a “pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment” within Montana’s proposed legislation.
TikTok has welcomed the ruling, issuing a brief statement in response:
We are pleased the judge rejected this unconstitutional law and hundreds of thousands of Montanans can continue to express themselves, earn a living, and find community on TikTok.
— TikTok Policy (@TikTokPolicy) December 1, 2023
Montana attorney general, meanwhile, has said that it’s considering next steps to advance its proposed TikTok ban.
It’s a win for TikTok, though the Biden Administration is still weighing a full TikTok ban in the U.S., which may still happen, even though the process has been delayed by legal and legislative challenges.
As I’ve noted previously, my sense here would be that TikTok won’t be banned in the U.S. unless there’s a significant shift in U.S.-China relations, and that relationship is always somewhat tense, and volatile to a degree.
If the U.S. Government has new reason to be concerned, it may well move to ban the app. But doing so would be a significant step, and would prompt further response from the C.C.P.
Which is why I suspect that the U.S. Government won’t act, unless it feels that it has to. And right now, there’s no clear impetus to implement a ban, and stop a Chinese-owned company from operating in the region, purely because of its origin.
Which is the real crux of the issue here. A TikTok ban is not just banning a social media company, it’s blocking cross-border commerce, because the company is owned by China, which will remain the logic unless clear evidence arises that TikTok has been used as a vector for gathering information on U.S. citizens.
Banning a Chinese-owned app because its Chinese-owned is a statement, beyond concerns about a social app, and the U.S. is right to tread carefully in considering how such a move might impact other industries.
So right now, TikTok is not going to be banned, in Montana, or anywhere else in the U.S. But that could still change, very quickly.
SOCIAL
Israeli president tells Musk he has ‘huge role’ in anti-Semitism

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, said in video remaks that Hamas militants ‘have been fed propaganda’ – Copyright POOL/AFP Leon Neal
Israel’s president told Elon Musk on Monday that the tech mogul has “a huge role to play” to combat anti-Semitism, which his social media platform is accused of spreading.
The meeting came after the world’s richest person visited a kibbutz community devastated in attacks by Hamas militants on October 7, and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence officials.
Musk has been criticised over what critics say is a proliferation of hate speech on X, formerly Twitter, since his takeover of the social media site in October 2022.
He has been accused by the White House of “abhorrent promotion” of anti-Semitism after endorsing a conspiracy theory seen as accusing Jews of trying to weaken white majorities.
Israel’s figurehead President Isaac Herzog told him: “Unfortunately, we are inundated by anti-Semitism, which is Jew hatred.
“You have a huge role to play,” he said. “And I think we need to fight it together because on the platforms which you lead, unfortunately, there’s a harbouring of a lot of… anti-Semitism.”
Musk did not mention anti-Semitism in his video remarks released by Herzog’s office, but said Hamas militants “have been fed propaganda since they were children”.
“It’s remarkable what humans are capable of if they’re fed falsehoods, from when they are children; they will think that the murder of innocent people is a good thing.”
On October 7 Hamas militants broke through Gaza’s militarised border into southern Israel to kill around 1,200 people and seize about 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials, in the worst-ever attack since the nation’s founding.
Vowing to destroy Hamas in response, Israel has carried out a relentless bombardment of targets in Gaza, alongside a ground invasion, that the Hamas government says has killed almost 15,000.
A temporary truce has been in effect since Friday.
– Talk of satellites –
Earlier Monday, Netanyahu and Musk discussed “security aspects of artificial intelligence” with senior defence officials, the Prime Minister’s Office said.
Musk and Netanyahu held a conversation on X following their tour of Kfar Aza, one of the communities attacked by Hamas.
“We have to demilitarise Gaza after the destruction of Hamas,” Netanyahu said, calling for a campaign to “deradicalise” the Palestinian territory.
“Then we also have to rebuild Gaza, and I hope to have our Arab friends help in that context.”
Netanyahu told Musk he hoped to resume United States-mediated normalisation talks with Saudi Arabia after Hamas’s defeat and “expand the circle of peace beyond anything imaginable”.
The war stalled progress towards a Saudi-Israel normalisation deal, and in early November Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler denounced the conduct of Israeli forces fighting Hamas in Gaza.
Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said his country had reached an understanding in principle on the use of Starlink satellites, operated by Musk’s company SpaceX, in Israel and the Gaza Strip “with the approval of the Israeli Ministry of Communications”.
Starlink is a network of satellites in low Earth orbit that can provide internet to remote locations, or areas that have had normal communications infrastructure disabled.
In September, Netanyahu urged Musk “to stop not only anti-Semitism, or rolling it back as best you can, but any collective hatred” on X.
Musk said at the time that while his platform could not stop all hate speech before it was posted, he was “generally against attacking any group, no matter who it is”.
X Corp is currently suing nonprofit Media Matters on the grounds that it has driven away advertisers by portraying the site as rife with anti-Semitic content.
Musk has also threatened to file suit against the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group, over its claims that problematic and racist speech has soared on the site since he completed his $44-billion takeover.
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