Unreal Engine's newest update: 

Chat GPT-4 add-on for blender tutorial video:

courtesy of @complex on instagram

From wikipedia: "Joan Miró i Ferrà (/mɪˈroʊ/ mi-ROH,[1] US also /miːˈroʊ/ mee-ROH,[2][3] Catalan: [ʒuˈam miˈɾoj fəˈra]; 20 April 1893 – 25 December 1983) was a Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramicist born in Barcelona. Professionally, he was simply known as Joan Miró. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.
Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism but with a personal style, sometimes also veering into Fauvism and Expressionism.[4] He was notable for his interest in the unconscious or the subconscious mind, reflected in his re-creation of the childlike. His difficult-to-classify works also had a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting."

His museum can be viewed digitally through the Fundació's website, available at the link below:

The long-awaited Apple XR headset is set to be released late 2023/early 2024.  More info here:

Music LM is a project released by google that takes text description and turns them into music.

From its release paper: "We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff". MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes. Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption." 

Unreal is a video-game engine used to create immersive and interactive experiences. It's latest version, UE5, is a revolutionary tool available free to use (until a certain amount of revenue) and with a wide range of free and paid available learning resources available. Here are two videos highlighting its features and a link to the FAQ on Unreal's website. 

Along with video-game design, one use-case for Unreal Engine is Virtual Production. To learn more, see our previous post on the topic. 

From the youtube video description: "Topics include generative AI for robotics, chip design, media, leveraging chatgpt by openai and many reveals across every application of artificial intelligence." 

Nvidia is referred to as one of the backbones of the AI industry because of the chips they make.  This month, their stock had record gains due to the hype around the industry, and Nvidia's position within it. 

From the youtube video description: "Neuralangelo, a new AI model by NVIDIA Research for 3D reconstruction using neural networks, turns 2D video clips into detailed 3D structures — generating lifelike virtual replicas of buildings, sculptures and other real-world objects. Like Michelangelo sculpting stunning, life-like visions from blocks of marble, Neuralangelo generates 3D structures with intricate details and textures. Neuralangelo’s ability to translate the textures of complex materials — including roof shingles, panes of glass and smooth marble — from 2D videos to 3D assets significantly surpasses prior methods. The high fidelity makes its 3D reconstructions easier for developers and creative professionals to rapidly create usable virtual objects for their projects using footage captured by smartphones."

From artnet.com: "‘This Is a New Renaissance:’ Why the Pseudonymous Digital Art Collector Cozomo de’ Medici Just Gave a Major NFT Collection to LACMA...The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has just announced a major donation, courtesy of one Cozomo de’ Medici, an anonymous NFT collector. The museum touts the gift of 22 digital artworks by 13 international artists, almost half of whom are women, as the first donation of a collection of NFTs to a U.S. museum." 

One challenge the museum now faces is properly displaying these works of art, "LACMA has yet to announce plans to display its new NFT holdings, which will require specialized screens (one barrier to entry for first-time collectors).“There are some great companies that are that are building some cool frames, but they’re very expensive right now—running from $10,000 at the smallest, to $40,000 for slightly larger displays, which is just too much for mainstream adoption,” de’ Medici said." 

This will most likely be the first of many major institutions recognizing digital art as worthy of their collections, if they haven't already. One major advantage to accepting art recorded on the blockchain is the ease and accebility of the works provenance (it's record of ownership). "“The beauty of this digital world is everything is on chain and online. You can go and see the mint dates, and the provenance is all recorded. You can see other works from the artists you are interested in, who owns them, where they’ve been, and the prices—versus the contemporary art world, where it’s really tough to get access to that data as an outsider,” he said." 

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By @freelancefounders on instagram 

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From Realtor Magazine: "Nowadays, it seems as if there’s virtual everything. Virtual artwork, virtual events, virtual marketing. But what about virtual real estate? Is that a thing, and if so, can you invest in it? Enter metaverse real estate, an online platform where people can connect to play games, release products, offer services, and host events. Businesses often own these virtual properties. And, just like any other type of real estate, they can be bought, sold, purchased, and leased. The metaverse is still new and still evolving, which leaves many wondering if investing in virtual real estate is worth the cost. ... Metaverse real estate can be purchased similarly to how you would purchase an NFT. A quick recap: An NFT, or nonfungible token, is a unique or collectible virtual item that can be purchased and is housed completely in the virtual world, such as digital artwork. Just as NFTs are, real estate in the metaverse is bought with cryptocurrency. After the transaction is complete, you receive a unique piece of blockchain code, which serves as a deed of ownership." 

There are many options but a few of the most popular are Decentraland, Somnium Space, and Voxels. Somnium space is the only one that currently supports VR. Land can be purchased on opensea. Prices vary from a few hundred to many thousands. Almost $2 billion of virtual land has been bought, with the most expensive lot selling for $5 million (Ruby Home). 

Other companies are trying to provide a platform for people to rent out their land, for example rentparcel.io. 

Some companies are devoting entire arms of their business to land purchase and development, like The Metaverse Group. 

Similar to the .com bubble, it's possible and even likely that most of these companies do not exist in 5-10 years. That being said, it is projected to grow from roughly $80 billion in 2022, to $426 billion in 2027​ (www.marketsandmarkets.com). 

The reality of the present moment is that these platforms lack the users, functionality, and interactivity to be worthy of some of these investments.  But like any new tech, the possibilities are endless and the tech is developing at insane speeds. It's possible that the future of the internet exists in these 3D spaces, as opposed to 2D web pages and that these worlds are our early look into the evolution of web2 into web3. Or not. 

From their website: "Mona spaces are beautiful social worlds for you to collect, show your art, and gather with others. ""What Is A Space?""A ‘Space’ is a 3D virtual social environment that can be viewed in a web browser.
Builders are able to create spaces using free tools like Unity and Blender, or other applications like Maya, Gravity sketch and many other tools that create digital content.
Each Space is minted as an NFT, and can be bought and sold much like any other NFT. If you are the owner of a space you can use Token Gated access to only allow users you want to enter the space.
A Space does not"

From their website: "Dia is a constellation of eleven locations and sites...​Dia Art Foundation is committed to advancing, realizing, and preserving the vision of artists. Dia fulfills its mission by commissioning single artist projects, organizing exhibitions, realizing site-specific installations, and collecting in-depth the work of a focused group of artists of the 1960s and 1970s."

"Spiral Jetty is an earthwork sculpture constructed in April 1970 that is considered to be the most important work of American sculptor Rober Smithson." (Wikipedia)

In 3D design a normal map is a texture to make an object look more realistic. These videos demonstrate the concept and how to apply normal maps in blender. From the video description, learn about Normal Maps and "...its use in faking lighting calculations of a surface." These are commonly used to create a higher detail object with a smaller file size by "baking" the textures into the object.

SketchUp and Cinema4D are 3d design softwares used to build and render environments. From the article, "​When assessing the two solutions, reviewers found SketchUp easier to use and set up. However, reviewers felt that administration of both products was equally easy, and preferred doing business with Cinema 4D overall."

From Polygon Blog- "Spatial LABS (sLABS), founded by Iddris Sandu, is a California-based VC studio developing wearable hardware products that can serve as physical entry points into the Metaverse. They chose Polygon’s low-fee, high-speed network to build on.
LNQ, the first project by sLABS, promises to reimagine the way products and fashion interact in both digital and physical worlds to offer users a fully immersive experience. Apparel, wearable items and other physical objects can serve as Points of Experience in the LNQ ecosystem. LNQ is currently under agile development and is set to launch later this year."

From cryptocoven.mirror.xyz on smart contracts - "What is a smart contract? It’s a misnomer, really. A smart contract is a program that lives and stores its data on the blockchain, typically with APIs to interact with its contents. Poking around contracts on Etherscan makes that much clearer; you can see the entirety of the code for a verified contract, as well as call read and write functions on them."
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From gemini.com on digital assets - "The two most common blockchain-based digital assets are cryptocurrencies and tokens. The biggest differentiation between the two is that cryptocurrencies have their own blockchains, whereas crypto tokens are built on an existing blockchain."