Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning’s storm was the worst I have ever experienced in my life
It was at work Tuesday afternoon around 4:00 p.m. when a coworker came over to my office cubicle to tell me that a Tornado Watch had been issued for Winnipeg. I hurriedly packed up my gear, hopped into my car, and drive home just as the skies turned dark grey and the first fat raindrops splashed on my windshield.
That evening, I experienced the worst storm I have lived through in my entire life (and I am 62-1/2 years old now). My cellphone kept going off with multiple Tornado Warning alerts (I lost count after 30). After a too-close-for-comfort, LOUD lightning strike nearby, I grabbed some pillows and blankets and headed for my bathroom, where I sat in my bathtub, following a storm-tracker livestreamer on YouTube which was posted to the r/Winnipeg subreddit on my iPad, and keeping my iPhone handy, which was still blaring alerts on regular intervals, sometimes minutes apart.
I was lucky. While parts of Winnipeg received baseball-sized hailstones, and many streets, underpasses, and home basements were flooded, my car, my apartment, and my neighbourhood escaped relatively unscathed. No hail damage to my car. However, I got zero sleep that night, and the stress exacerbated my pre-existing neck and shoulder pain, so I landed up taking a sick day on Wednesday, and spent almost all of it asleep in bed.
I’m dealing with a lot right now: a family member in rapidly deteriorating health, which might necessitate an emergency trip back to Alberta on short notice; my continuing neck and shoulder pain; and trying desperately to tie up loose ends and pass on information to the two librarians who are taking over my duties when I start my Research and Study leave on July 1st, 2026. I am stressed out and EXHAUSTED.
So, again, if you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s why. There’s just too much going on in my life right now to write blogposts. Thank you for understanding.
Please note: none of this blogpost was written or edited using GenAI; this is me, Ryan Schultz—and yes, as a matter of fact, I do use em-dashes (see what I just did there? 😉).
You might have noticed a dearth of content on my blog lately.
But, unfortunately, at the moment, I simply don’t have the time, nor the energy, to devote to documenting the latest events happening in what is clearly a “metaverse winter” (or, perhaps even more harshly, a “virtual reality winter,” as many companies do appear to be stalling or even abandoning further iterations on their virtual/augmented reality headsets and associated gear, in an all-out corporate stampede towards more-wearable, but still less-functional, glasses).
Once July 1st, 2026 hits, and I can finally start my Research and Study Leave from the University of Manitoba, I hope to be able to pause, catch my breath, and survey the current landscape as I research and write my Open Educational Resource on the metaverse. The timing seems very auspicious to me. There’s definitely a change in the air, and perhaps I will be lucky enough to be able to document this pivotal moment properly.
But not today, and not for a little while yet. Thank you for your patience while I have to deal with what is in front of me at the moment.
Last Friday, a new social networking app for the Apple Vision Pro was launched! It is called AuraTap, a project developed by Phil Traut and Artur Sychov, according to the About page on the visionOS app:
Apologies for the always-tilted nature of the screenshots I took of AuraTap in my Apple Vision Pro, and transferred to my MacBook Pro to write this blogpost! I still have to learn how to tilt my head properly so that the resulting screen captures are STRAIGHT, sigh!)
Even more interesting is that they make use of the sometimes-terrifyingly accurate spatial Personas feature in the visionOS operating system native to the AVP, as shown in this promotion YouTube video:
You meet someone new on Apple Vision Pro. Face to face. 2 minutes. That’s the idea behind AuraTap, a new app.
If there’s a mutual vibe, you keep going. If not, you’re on to the next.
I love how quickly you can meet people, make connections, and explore each other’s profiles.
It also features one of the most beautiful UX designs I’ve tried on visionOS. Everything feels incredibly polished.
The app launches this Friday, March 27.
They’re hosting an in app launch party this Friday at 1PM PDT. Hope you can make it.
Here’s a few more screen captures I took this morning, to show you what the app looks like. Now, obviously, this is a brand-new app, and the target audience of Apple Vision Pro users is, well, let’s be honest, still rather small, but even so, to already get 238 users signed up since last Friday is kinda impressive (and yes, I set up my own profile too, why not?).
Here’s my AuraTag profile. It’s easy to use your own spatial Persona to create a profile picture. It’s so new I was even able to get my first name, Ryan, as a username!
In fact, AuraTap is so new that I really didn’t have an opportunity to do more than set up a profile and browse through other users’ profiles! The idea is that you can connect with other AVP users who are also online, and have a brief chat (at least, that’s what I think it does). I mean, it’s obviously intended for professional networking, but it’s also giving me speed dating vibes, LOL! So maybe it’s going to be like so many social networking sites before it, where the users decide what it’s going to be used for.
And if the name of the one of the developers, Artur Sychov, rings a bell to my regular readers, it’s because he was one of the developers of a social VR program I wrote about on my blog, called Somnium Space (you can see all my blogposts about Somnium Space here). One thing that I can say about Artur is that he seems to be involved in many different projects! In addition to Somnium Space and now AuraTap, he’s also been working on his own virtual reality headset, called the Somnium VR1.
Interesting development, and along with InSpaze (which I have written about before many times on my blog), I look forward to testing it out and meeting some new people! The product is so new that it doesn’t even appear to have a website yet, but if I find one, I will update this blogpost to add it. And, if you already own an Apple Vision Pro, just search for “AuraTap” in the App Store, and you’ll find this free program.
UPDATE 3:25 p.m.: And the AuraTap website is now up! According to the description on the website, it works as follows:
MEET A PERSONA: Never met one before? Here’s your chance. We’ll randomly connect you with someone new — and you’ve got 5 minutes to decide if it’s a match. If you both Tap to Connect, the timer disappears, and you’ll be permanently linked, ready to find each other anytime in your contacts.
CROSS YOUR FINGERS: Here’s the catch: the other person won’t know you’ve tapped to connect. So bring your best behaviour, hope they want to stay in touch too — and in the meantime, keep your fingers crossed!
STAY IN TOUCH WITH YOUR CONNECTIONS: This is the address book you’ve always wished for — a place to rediscover past connections and spark new ones. See who’s online, invite them for a quick chat, or browse their business card with socials and more. It’s not just networking — it’s the future of networking.
AuraTap’s Connect Book keeps tabs on people you’ve chosen to connect with.
This, to me, sounds a little weird, and more like a dating app than a professional networking app. But then, it also sounds kinda fun. The big difference between AuraTap and InSpaze, as far as I can tell, is that all connections are one-on-one, as opposed to meetings of groups up to eight people (and, of course, the random aspect of AuraTap). Who knows, maybe Artur and Phil are on to something. I’d dearly love to know what inspired this particular app design!
UPDATE April 2nd, 2026: Well, I finally connected with my first person using AuraTap! We chatted for about two and half minutes (sorry, but I forgot to take a screenshot!). He was from the Philippines and worked in IT. It was the first chat for both of us!
I clearly do not know what I am doing, because I couldn’t see anywhere where I could actually add him to my Connect Book to talk to later if I wanted to. When that 2-1/2-minute chat abruptly ended, while I was waiting for somebody new to chat with, you are presented with a carousel of other potential people to chat with (if they were online), like FriedGuy here:
Again, apologies for the off-kilter angle of this shot! I’m going to have to tilt my head a bit more to the left side before I do any screen captures in future… 😉
Again, while I’m not completely sold on the random interaction model, it is kinda fascinating to see who you might connect with. So I will continue to pop in over the coming Easter long weekend, just to see who I will chat with.
UPDATE 12:19 p.m.: Okay, so AuraTap is basically ChatRoulette, but with Apple Personas rather than using your webcam. Apparently, they used GenAI to generate ideas for a Personas-based app. and this was the one that Artur and Phil decided to run with.
Rec Room will be closing down on June 1st 2026 at noon Pacific time.
Over the past decade, Rec Room grew into something amazing, reaching over 150 million players and creators along the way. Players made over half a billion friends on the platform. In total, people all around the world spent a cumulative 68 thousand years in Rec Room. The top UGC rooms saw over 500 years of play time each. That’s a lot of people having a lot of fun.
What this community built together is incredible, and something we’ll always be proud of. Even today, millions of people are showing up to spend time in this fun and welcoming place every month.
Despite this popularity, we never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business. Our costs always ended up overwhelming the revenue we brought in.
We spent a long time trying to find a way to make the numbers work. But with the recent shift in the VR market, along with broader headwinds in gaming, the path to profitability has gotten tough enough that we’ve made the difficult decision to shut things down.
We’re making this decision now, while we still have the ability to wind things down thoughtfully and do right by the people who built this with us.
This is a breaking story, and I will be updating this blog post as I get more details. While I was expecting smaller metaverse platforms to close during the current metaverse winter, I was not expecting Rec Room to be among them! I do expect that there will be much commentary about this decision among its userbase. You can see all my previous blogposts about Rec Room here.
