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.
Marie Vans (left) introduces me (right) as a keynote speaker at the 19th annual Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference, held in the pioneering virtual world of Second Life (screen capture from the video at the end of this blog post)
NOTE ON MY GENERATIVE AI USAGE: While most of the writing of this blogpost is me, Ryan Schultz, unassisted by GenAI tools, I should note that, in the attached PowerPoint presentation, I did make extensive use of Google NotebookLM by feeding my entire blog into a notebook, and asking it questions (as described in a blogpost here). I used many of the answers I received back in creating both the slides and the speaking notes attached to the slides, in parts two and three of my presentation. That includes the quoted speaker notes below the pictures of specific slides in this blog post!
UPDATE March 30th, 2026: you can scroll to the very bottom of this long blogpost to see the video of my presentation. Thanks again to the organizers for throwing such a successful virtual conference!
As some of you might know, a while back I was asked by my librarian colleague (and fellow Second Life aficianado) Marie Vans if I would be willing to be one of the three keynote speakers during the 2026 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) Conference, which is held every year in the pioneering virtual world of Second Life. I said yes (of course!). I never turn down an opportunity to give a presentation in my beloved Second Life. (I was asked to speak at the 2021 Virtual Ability Mental Health Symposium, giving a presentation on the topic of this blogpost on acedia during the pandemic, and in 2024, I gave a presentation on virtual world building in Second Life, in Second Life, to a graduate class in virtual world building and design, which was team-taught by a computer science professor and an interior design professor.) So, as you can see, this was not my first rodeo. 😉
Quotes from Andy Fidel’s talk which I found inspiring and wanted to share (7 slides);
My initial, general observations about the metaverse (4 slides); and finally
A section titled Your Metaverse Is Too Small, where I discuss various ways our biases and preconceptions about virtual worlds and social VR/AR actually hinder their effective use in educational settings (with reference to Andy’s comments; 14 slides).
Yes, it’s a lot to cover in 45 minutes, but I did it! I’m just going to share my slides as-is, without any Creative Commons-type license this time around, since a lot of it is referring back to Andy Fidel’s ideas, which I found so inspirational in the first place. And yes, while the topics of these 14 slides in part 3 all sprang out of one particularly fevered brain dump of my ideas one evening, rather than relying on GenAI, I do freely admit that I fed my entire blog into a Google NotebookLM and asked it questions in order to create the content based on thirteen (yes, 13!) different ways that, quote: “your metaverse is too small!”
Your metaverse is too small because…
it has too steep a learning curve for new users
your platform has a poor fit-to-purpose
it lacks accessibility features (e.g. speech-to-text for the Deaf/HoH community)
it is poorly designed and/or Quality Assurance tested, and it causes VR sickness/nausea (more common among women than men)
it is soulless/designed by committee (hello Meta Horizon Worlds and Workrooms! Proof positive that you cannot will metaverse platforms into existence by executive fiat and the spending of billions of dollars.)
it requires a VR/AR/XR headset (I used two slides to discuss this controversial take; see below for more detail)
it relies on cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or some other form of blockchain (do I really have to explain this at this point?)
it has poor (or non-existent) safety and trust features and policies
it focuses on the product rather than the community
it has user data privacy issues/is based on surveillance capitalism (once again, hello Meta Horizon Worlds and Workrooms!)
you fail to market it properly (or, in many cases, fail to market it at all)
it is unfriendly to different cultures and subcultures (e.g. trans people, furries, etc.)
(another controversial one, explained further below) it refuses adult content
Now, before all you social VR adherents rise up with torches and pitchforks and tar and feather me for even daring to say “your metaverse is too small because it requires users to have a VR/AR/XR headset,” here are the two slides, plus speaker notes:
Your metaverse is too small because it requires you to use a virtual reality headset.
It is not a surprise that many of the most popular social VR platforms (e.g. Rec Room, VRChat) also allow for non-VR users to participate. The VR headset market still has not taken off. Even the best-selling Meta Quest line of wireless virtual reality headsets (which make up an estimated 70% of the global VR headset market) has sold only approximately 30 million units around the world, and many of those devices land up collecting dust after the initial novelty of the product wears off. Apple’s Vision Pro, launched to enormous fanfare, does not publish sales figures, but industry reporters said that the company shipped approximately 390,000 units in 2024 and approximately 90,000 units in 2025. VR hardware remains bulky, heavy, and uncomfortable for extended wear. Nausea continues to affect a significant proportion of users. A VR headset isolates the wearer from their physical surroundings and from the facial expressions of the people around them—an anti-social device, in practice, even when its purpose is socialization via social VR.
The PC-tethered VR headset market—the high-end, high-fidelity segment that many early social VR platforms had built toward—proved especially stagnant. The dream of millions of consumers owning gaming-grade PCs with tethered Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headsets never materialized. Even the shift to standalone headsets like the Meta Quest series failed to generate the consumer mass-market that had been anticipated. Sansar is perhaps the most instructive case study in the danger of building a platform around assumed headset adoption. Developed by Linden Lab—the company behind Second Life—Sansar was announced in 2014 and launched in beta in 2017, timed almost precisely to coincide with what seemed like the dawning of the VR era following Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus. But the bet on tethered PCVR headsets never paid off. In March 2020, Linden Lab sold Sansar to a little-known startup called Wookey and pivoted to focus on live music events and virtual concerts, attempting to find a more sustainable niche. That hasn’t worked, either. Sansar still exists, but it is only being kept alive by volunteers at this point.
Research on technology adoption consistently shows that devices requiring behavioral change—for example, for VR, wearing something on your face, isolating yourself from physical surroundings—face much higher adoption friction than technologies that integrate into existing habits. The iPhone and Android phones succeeded partly because they fit into already-established phone-carrying behavior. VR headsets require building a new behavior from scratch.
The failure of the last metaverse hype cycle does not mean that immersive technology has no future. What failed was the specific prediction that millions of people would soon be spending significant time in virtual worlds accessed primarily through VR headsets; that this would create platform-scale opportunities comparable to social media or mobile devices.
Don’t hate me for speaking facts. No VR/AR headset (even the Meta Quest line of headsets) has taken off in the way that iPhones/Android phones and tablets and smartwatches have. In particular, the developers of those platforms who bet the farm on widespread adoption of high-end tethered PCVR headsets (hello, Sansar and High Fidelity!) lost that bet badly; Sansar is essentially moribund, and High Fidelity is now closed (although it does live on in its successor social VR platforms Vircadia and Overte, which were based on HiFi’s open-source codebase, but are also not heavily used). This failure is one of the reasons why Second Life is still going strong (or strong enough) to endure and still be profitable for Linden Lab, for over 22 years now.
And speaking of SL…
I want to make one thing very clear: in some educational applications of the metaverse (especially those intended for children and teenagers, i.e. K-12 education), a ban on adult content is absolutely necessary.
However. As my speaker notes for this last slide in my presentation state:
However, in any institution of higher learning (e.g. a university). you will find faculty, staff, and students teaching about, learning about, and doing research on topics which may include controversial or adult topics. I have argued that one of the most significant strategic errors a metaverse platform can make is the outright refusal to host adult content (or do some other sort of heavy-handed sanitization of adult content, like imposing baked-on underwear on the base male and female adult avatars).
In my blog, I’ve pointed out that for some successful virtual worlds, adult communities are not just a niche—they are the economic and social engine that keeps the lights on. I have frequently cited Second Life as the prime example of a platform that understands the value of adult content. On my blog, I’ve noted that the adult-rated regions of Second Life generate a good portion of the platform’s revenue through land tier fees and the sale of virtual goods (clothing, skins, animations). In contrast, I wrote about Sansar’s early decision to strictly moderate content and its struggle to establish a clear policy on adult material. I argued that by trying to keep the platform “brand-safe” for corporate partners, they essentially “cut off their nose to spite their face,” alienating a potential demographic of creators and consumers who were ready to spend money on higher-fidelity adult experiences. And the corporate clients never came anyway!!
I believe that the ability to explore one’s identity—including its sexual or adult aspects—is fundamental to the metaverse experience. For example, both Second Life and VRChat tend to attract the trans community, giving them a way to experiment with how they represent themselves in a way that might be difficult or impossible to do in real life (particularly at a time when trans people are increasingly under attack in certain jurisdictions). Platforms that ban adult content often end up banning people by extension. If a platform’s moderation is too aggressive, it can lead to the marginalization of subcultures (like the furry community or the trans community) who use virtual worlds as a safe space for exploration. This aligns with Andy’s focus on “presence” and “feeling seen”. Andy argues that gathering spaces should be “smaller, weirder,” and more human. I have argued that by refusing to host adult content, platforms are choosing “corporate safety” over “human authenticity.” They are creating “noise” for brands rather than “spaces that matter” to real people.
One of my core arguments is that you cannot impose a culture on a virtual world; the users bring the culture with them. I’ve pointed out that in almost every successful social VR platform (like VRChat), “NSFW” content and communities exist regardless of official policies. Trying to ban these things is like trying to stop the tide with a broom. Platforms that fight their own communities on this issue usually lose the “heart and soul” that Andy Fidel says is required for a space to be successful. Andy speaks about “architecting belonging” and building spaces like cities. A real-life city has red-light districts, gay bathhouses, private clubs, and adult stores. By refusing to allow these “niche micro-communities” to exist, platform owners are failing to be the architects of a real society and are instead acting as corporate landlords of a sanitized shopping mall.
Okay, enough ranting. Here’s my slide presentation, which you can download to read the rest of my slides and my speaking notes:
UPDATE March 30th, 2026: The video of my presentation in Second Life has now been uploaded to the VWBPE YouTube channel! Here it is (and I haven’t even watched it myself yet):
