ANNOUNCEMENT: My One-Year Research and Study Leave Project

Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium—digital or otherwise—that either reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. While many think of OER as referring predominantly to open textbooks, OER includes a vast variety of resources, such as videos, images, lesson plans, coding and software, and even entire courses. In order for a resource to be considered open, it must fulfill the following criteria:

• Modifiable: The resource must be made available under an open license that allows for editing. Ideally, it should also be available in an editable format.

• Openly-licensed: The resource must explicitly state that it is available for remixing and redistribution by others. Some open licences may include restrictions on how others may use the resource (see: Creative Commons).

• Freely Available: The resources must be available online at zero cost.

—definition adapted from Introduction to Open Educational Resources, Open Education Alberta.

Not long ago, on my 62nd-birthday blogpost, I wrote:

…although it is not official official (and I really should wait until I get the official letter from university administration, which I was told should happen about the end of March), the University of Manitoba Libraries has approved my application to take a one-year Research and Study Leave (at full salary) to start later this year, where I am relieved of my regular academic librarian duties, and can work on a special project. Academic librarians at the University of Manitoba are members of the faculty union, and just like the professors, we have the right (and the opportunity) to pursue research. Again, more details later. I’ve only mentioned this to a couple of people so far, but I think I can share that much detail at this time.

Well, I am very happy to announce that it is now official official: I have formally been approved to take a one-year research and study leave, at full salary, from my employer, the University of Manitoba Libraries, to pursue a special project.

What is that special project, you may ask? Well, I’m just going to quote from my approved application form:

During my Research Leave, I will create a comprehensive Open Educational Resource (OER) addressing a critical gap in scholarly literature: a rigorous, pedagogically-sound introduction to virtual worlds, social virtual reality, and the metaverse, with particular emphasis on applications in higher education. This project builds directly on my expertise as the writer of a popular blog on the topic over the past eight years (https://ryanschultz.com), as well as the owner and moderator of an associated Discord server, representing over 700 members who are actively using various metaverse platforms. The research phase will involve a literature review, plus case study analysis of specific metaverse platforms. The OER will consist of several modules, including topics such as: the history of the concept of the metaverse; how the current wave of generative AI will impact the metaverse, etc. This project requires a dedicated research leave because the rapidly-evolving nature of the field requires intensive, concentrated research and focus. Released under a Creative Commons license, this resource will serve UM faculty and the global educational community, providing a freely-adaptable foundation for teaching, learning, and research.

Yep, that’s right folks, I am taking a full year off from my regular academic librarian duties to write a book about what I know best, and have been blogging about for many years now: virtual worlds, social VR, and the metaverse! (Throwing in a little bit about artificial intelligence and generative AI, as it applies to those topics.)

My leave runs from July 1st, 2026 through to June 30th, 2027, and the best part of it is, since it’s about the metaverse, I can literally work from anywhere: at home in Winnipeg, while visiting the rest of my family in Alberta, on the beach at Bora Bora (highly unlikely, although the Apple Vision Pro provides a suitable substitute in a pinch!), etc. The only rule is you have to vacate your current office at the university for whoever is filling in for you while you’re away on research leave, which seems pretty reasonable to me. However, I will be borrowing some of the VR/AR equipment which I had purchased on previous years’ travel and expense funds (T&E funds for short; essentially, extra money allocated to faculty and librarians for things like conference travel, books, computers, etc.):

Because part of this research work will involve social VR, I will have to move some virtual reality equipment purchased on previous years’ T&E funds from my office in Elizabeth Dafoe to my home. This equipment will be returned to my office after my Leave ends.

Oh, and I also have to promise that I will come back to my job at the University of Manitoba Libraries after my leave ends, which is fine, since I am planning to stay until I retire at age 65, in January 2029. This will, of course, be the last research leave I take before I do retire.

Best of all, after my OER is complete, anybody can use it for teaching, learning, and research purposes, including editing. remixing, and repurposing it (the exact rights will depend on which Creative Commons license I choose to publish it under).

Watch for updates on this project as I get closer to July 1st. Stay tuned!

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

Why Second Life is My Radio Station

Classical guitarist Joaquin Gustav performs on The Rooftop at NO DUMPIRE on Saturday morning.

Ladies and gentlemen and fabulous people of all genders on the internet, I have been having a VERY bad couple of weeks. I was in a car accident two weeks ago, which aggravated the neck and shoulder pain I am experiencing, due to the deterioration of a couple of joints in the cervical part of my spine. On top of the stress of dealing with the worsening of my pain, and the additional stress of dealing with insurance agents and arranging to get my car repaired, this week I accidentally deleted several directories in my Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage while transferring files from my old Windows notebook to my new one. On Friday I had a meltdown while I was on the phone with my university’s tech support, while I was struggling with my neck and shoulder pain, made worse—of course!—by stress. Frustrated, overwhelmed, embarrassed, and in pain, I finally threw in the towel, took the rest of the day off sick, and went home and to bed. I am ashamed at how poorly I am coping with everything happening in my life these past two weeks.

All of which is a very roundabout way of saying that I am grateful for Second Life, which is still, to this day, one of my preferred escapes when reality becomes a bit too much. I know that some of my readers are probably wondering why I choose to spend much of my free time in a 22-year-old virtual world, which the mainstream media likes to portray as quaint, outdated, and populated by weirdos. (Hey, as I say, embrace your weirdness. Be a professional weirdo. This world is not served by billions of cookie-cutter humans who think alike, look alike, and act alike.) But I digress.

Second Life is the perfect model of a fully-mature, ever-evolving metaverse, which many newer entrants would be wise to study, learn from, and emulate. One thing that the mainstream media gets wrong is the reason for Second Life’s appeal. That appeal—what keeps its userbase coming back—is not its weirdness (although that is certainly part of it). Second Life’s main appeal is that it is an unparalleled blank canvas for people to be whoever or whatever they want, and create whatever they want. And nowhere is that more evident than in SL’s vibrant music scene.

For example, first thing this morning, my main avatar, Vanity Fair, ascended the ladder to get to The Rooftop, one of several venues located in a region called NO DUMPIRE, created and maintained by a dinkie raccoon avatar named Zed. This morning, I enjoyed a one-hour live music set from classical guitarist Joaquin Gustav, chatting with friends in SL while sipping my morning coffee.

Second Life is packed with musical venues, where I can park Vanity (or another avatar from my small army of alts) down in a club, to hear a deejay or a live musical performer or a singer/songwriter. Everything from fancy ballrooms like LOVE, to the decidedly anti-consumerist dumpster chic of NO DUMPIRE’s many venues.

As I write this, Joaquin has packed up his guitar and now DJ Zed is spinning an eclectic set of chill music. His usual avatar is a dinkie (i.e. tiny avatar) raccoon:

DJ Zed
The Rooftop at NO DUMPIRE during Zed’s deejay set

It beats the hell out of just turning on the radio, and listening to whatever limited set of music that radio station serves. Why do that, when you can support a live deejay or musical artist in Second Life, AND serve a fabulous look? Here is Vanity Fair dancing to the tail end of a song during Zed’s DJ set:

Second Life and its many clubs, venues, festivals, and other events exposes me to musical artists and deejays from all around the world (for example, Joaquin Gustav hails from from Buenos Aires, Argentina, a far cry from wintry Winnipeg, Canada where I live). I can join SL groups (like Joaquin’s group) for my favourite artists, so I’m alerted as to when and where they are performing next. And I can tip those performers whose music sparks joy and gives pleasure, using Linden dollars which artists like Joaquin can cash out into their local currency. AND NO ADVERTISING.

And it’s not just on a Windows, MacOS or Linux desktop that you can log in and listen to a virtual world venue’s music stream. Second Life’s new Mobile client (available for both Android and iOS phones and tablets) allows you to bring your music with you wherever you happen to be! Even on Mobile, the sound quality is excellent.

So, that is why Second Life is my radio station. Ladies and gentlemen (and fabulous people of all genders), I hereby rest my case. 😉 Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

My Top Ten Most Popular Blog Posts in 2025

I was curious this morning, so I went into WordPress and checked out my blog viewer statistics. I used to check them much more frequently during the heady heyday of the metaverse boom-and-bust, circa 2019 to 2022, when traffic to my blog surged to unprecedented levels and then crashed, as shown by a screenshot I took of my WordPress statistics last March:

One notable event during that time period was Facebook rebranding itself as Meta on October 28th, 2021, amid Mark Zuckerberg’s expensive push to transform his company into a metaverse powerhouse (with somewhat mixed but still undeniable success, notably on the hardware side, with its Quest line of wireless VR/AR headsets).

Then, in 2022, the hype cycle for artificial intelligence started, an unexpected surge of interest driven by a tidal wave of new, generative AI tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT, and the world seemed to move on—as seen by a noticeable decline in visitors to the RyanSchultz.com blog! (It also didn’t help that through most of 2024 and 2025, I was swamped at my paying job as an academic librarian, having to put my blog on hiatus for a while as I went on half-time sick leave for six months for treatment of burnout. As a result, I barely posted anything during most of 2025.)

Anyway, as I said previously, I was curious, so I checked to see what my top ten most popular (i.e. most viewed) blog posts were last year.

One of the things that never ceases to amaze and amuse me is how much traffic certain blogposts receive: the relatively rare ones where I write about sexual topics! Let me be clear: while I am not a prude, I am also not that terribly interested in writing about adult/sex-oriented metaverse platforms, because I find pixelsex boring. Therefore, I will leave that particular niche of the metaverse to others to chronicle. 😉

Anyway, 2025 was no exception to the rule, with three of my top ten most popular bloposts being about such adult topics (by the way, all three links are quite safe for work):

Which just goes to prove the old adage: sex sells. Or, at least, that there’s lots of people searching for sex on the internet. (I really should rent out prime advertising space on that sex-in-VRChat blog post; I bet I’d make some income off that! Even though I freely admit in that blogpost that I have absolutely no idea where the sex is in VRChat. Sorry, folks. 😂😆🤣)

In the number two slot is the count of people who just went straight to my homepage at https://ryanschultz.com, without clicking on a link to specific blogpost. No surprise there.

My coverage of the many changes in Second Life during 2025 (most notably, the new Avatar Welcome Kit with its LeLutka Lite heads and Legacy Basic bodies) takes up four of the top ten spots:

And, as I have said previously, I’m cutting back on my Second Life coverage (even though I have already broken that rule once so far in 2026!).

And the final 2 slots in my Top Ten are the two lists I maintain, the first of virtual worlds and social VR platforms, and the second of non-combat, open-world exploration games.

Both lists seem to be referred to a lot by other writers on the internet (and, increasingly, by generative AI tools which scrape the web, including my blog). For example, ChatGPT has referred its users to my blog 448 times in 2025 (and, to be honest, I’m not quite sure how to feel about that):

Speaking of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, I do have plans to write more often on this topic, both as it applies to the ever-evolving metaverse, and more generally as well. Stay tuned!

Another One Bites the Dust: MeetinVR to Close on April 30th, 2026

Official announcement from the MeetinVR website.

I first read the news on LinkedIn this morning: MeetinVR, a social VR platform I last wrote about on my blog back in 2022, has announced that it is shutting down its services as of April 30th, 2026:

The technology landscape is characterized by constant change. As we look ahead, we recognize significant shifts occurring in the enterprise sector:

  • Industry Focus Shift:Key platform providers are strategically re-aligning their enterprise VR initiatives.
  • Market Maturity:The core VR market is evolving, allowing new forms of spatial computing to emerge.
  • The Rise of AI-Enabled Glasses:We are seeing an acceleration in the development and focus on AI-enabled glasses and next-generation augmented- and virtual reality, signaling the next generation for workplace collaboration.

In light of these industry dynamics, and to finish strong, we have made the strategic decision to conclude MeetinVR services.

MeetinVR services will officially cease on Thursday, April 30, 2026.

Now, there is enough technojargon in this press release to make me grit my teeth (and we are far, FAR away from “the rise of AI-enabled glasses,” in my opinion). And the “industry focus shift” gobbledygook of “key platform providers are strategically realigning their enterprise VR initiatives” can brutally be summarized as metaverse companies are folding because there’s still not a market for business users.

Let’s face some brutal facts in the harsh and unforgiving light of the inevitable crash of the artificially-heightened expectations of the recent metaverse hype cycle (of which I, being the writer of a popular blog on just that very topic, was actually around for during the beginning, middle, and end.) Still with me? Good.

Facebook (which had gone to all the trouble and expense of rebranding as Meta during this ridiculous hype cycle) has dropped literally hundreds of millions of dollars into acquiring Oculus and trying to build a business metaverse platform, and failed to even to entice its own employees into using it (let alone anybody else). Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life), a much smaller company than Meta, poured millions of dollars into building a shiny new social VR platform called Sansar, which never took off, and now languishes in a near-moribund state, supported only by a passionate cadre of volunteers determined to keep it alive. (Now, Sansar was designed for consumer as opposed to business use, but I’m quite sure the original development team would have been happy to see it take off for corporate use, too. Aside from a few music festivals, that never happened, though.)

And frankly, given the perilous political and economic times in which we now live, people have far greater concerns on their minds than whether they can meet up as avatars to conduct business in a flat-screen virtual world or on a social VR/AR platform accessible via a headset. The learning curve/cost of entry is still too high, compared to alternatives like Microsoft Teams, Cicso WebEx, and Zoom.

The current tsunami of generative AI tools like ChatGPT threatens to lead to massive layoffs among lower- and middle-management white-collar jobs (something that’s not being talked about enough, in my opinion). And if metaverse platforms weren’t able to sell themselves during a pandemic, when everybody was forced to sit at home, they certainly won’t be able to sell themselves now, when businesses are cutting costs, trying to stave off insolvency in some cases, and people are worried about keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads.

I predict that we are going to see a “metaverse winter,” much like the previous “AI winters,” when the initial promise and hype of the technology hits what the Gartner Group politely calls “the trough of disillusionment.” And I predict we are going to see a lot more shutdown announcements like this throughout 2026.

All the PR spin in the world (“to finish strong”? Really? Really??!?) cannot hide the fact that the metaverse business is in a period of retrenchment, possibly a long one. And no, generative AI is not suddenly going to be some sort of magic wand that can make everything all better again. That’s just laughable.

It’s time to go back to the drawing board, for a rethink (that, I can agree with in this press release). And, despite my sarcasm, I do wish the team behind MeetinVR every success in whatever they decide to do next.