Tag: Virtual Worlds

NEWLY UPDATED WITH VIDEO! Your Metaverse Is Too Small: My Keynote Presentation to the 2026 Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) Conference

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!

Part one of my talk, the quotes from Andy Fidel’s keynote speech at last November’s IMMERSIVE X, which inspired me to create and give my presentation last Friday, were taken from a copy of Andy’s speaking notes which she very kindly shared with me, as her TED-style virtual talk on the ENGAGE social VR platform was not posted to YouTube by her request. Thank you, Andy!

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. 😉

The title of my presentation, which I gave as the keynote speech of the conference on its second day, Friday, March 20th, was Your Metaverse Is Too Small: How the Biases and Preconceptions of Virtual Worlds Hinder Their Use in Education. I was inspired by a keynote address at last November’s IMMERSIVE X conference by Andy Fidel, who titled her talk, held on the ENGAGE social VR platform: The State of the Metaverse in 2026. My talk therefore consisted of three parts as follows:

  • 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:

Your Metaverse Is Too Small VWBPE Conference 20 March 2026Download

Please note: while Philip Rosedale’s keynote speech on the first day of the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference on Thursday, March 19th has already been uploaded to the VWBPE YouTube channel, mine has not yet been uploaded to view. When it is, I will update this blogpost with a link to the video of my talk.

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):

UPDATED! Generative AI Update, March 2026: My Updated Presentation on Artificial Intelligence and GenAI, Plus My First Thoughts on the Claude Add-In for PowerPoint, and Yet Another Head-to-Head Comparison Between Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT

I have used (and reported on) my use of generative AI tools extensively in this blogpost, but my writing is all my own, and I have not edited it or polished it using any GenAI tools.

UPDATE March 7th, 2026: I have updated this blogpost a bit, and included some more images and screen captures of the reports generated by Gemin, Claude, and ChatGPT in the head-to-head comparison section (the third part).

I am (as you can clearly tell by this absurdly long blogpost title) trying to do three related things here. If you want, you can skip to the very end, where there will be an executive summary, where I have some thoughts to share about (waves hands) all this.

First, I wanted to share an updated version of the original slide presentation on artificial intelligence and generative AI, which I shared in a December 2025 blogpost. I used to think that keeping track of the many metaverse platforms I blog about was a task similar to herding cats, but let me tell you, it was a breeze compared to trying to stay abreast of all the rapidly changing and accelerating developments in generative AI!

Keeping on top of developments in generative AI is like herding cats, where the cats are multiplying and mutating!
One of the updated comparison charts in my PowerPoint slide deck (see link below to download)

Below is my updated PowerPoint slide presentation, complete with my speaker notes, for you to download and use as you wish, with some stipulations. I am using the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which gives the following rights and restrictions):

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.

BY: Credit must be given to you, the creator.

NC: Only noncommercial use of your work is permitted. Noncommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.

SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.

(The tool I used to determine the appropriate Creative Commons licence can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/chooser/.)

So, with all that said, here is my PowerPoint presentation (please click on the text link or the black Download button under the picture, not the picture itself):

Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI Presentation Ryan Schultz 4 March 2026 Creative Commons for BlogDownload
NEW: Claude a just released add-ins for Microsoft Office

Second, today I installed a brand-new add-in from Anthropic’s Claude GenAI tool, which is supposed to work with Microsoft PowerPoint. This is an initial review of a very beta product.

And I have an actual real-world use case against which I will be trying out this new add-in: the design of an actual keynote presentation which I will be giving in a couple of weeks. (I am also using it in the third section, but in a different test of all three of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.)

Now, before I get into this, I should explain that I have tried in the past with all three GenAI tools on which I currently have paid accounts (OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini) to create a PowerPoint slide deck presentation design—only to get highly disappointing and completely unusable results back. So I was not expecting much here, particularly as this is a still a research beta version of the PowerPoint add-in.

My initial prompt to the Claude add-in to Microsoft PowerPoint was:

Please create a new PowerPoint slide presentation design with the title of the presentation being: “Your Metaverse Is Too Small: How the Biases and Preconceptions of Virtual Worlds Hinder Their Use in Education.” The theme of the talk is educational uses of virtual worlds, social VR, and the metaverse in general. I want to have some nice background images to use in some of my slides, as well as a visually pleasing title slide. I’d prefer blue as a colour in the slide deck theme, thanks!

And Claude chugged away on my request, keeping my posted on what it was doing:

And it even prompted me to be sure I wanted to delete the Claude add-in help slide!

The set-up for the title slide took a long, loooong time, much longer than I would taken to click on the Designer button in the PowerPoint toolbar and just select one of the default options, and a colour scheme. Eventually, I just gave up on waiting and went off to work on another task, leaving Claude to beaver away. After fifteen minutes, I realized that I still had to explicitly okay the clearing of the original slide design (inset Homer Simpson “D’oh!“), which I did, so that the work could continue.

If I could summarize the result in one word, it would be: meh (again, shout-out to The Simpsons):

I mean, I could easily do better than this myself. And two dots do not make, as I asked for, “some nice background images to use in some of my slides, as well as a visually pleasing title slide.” Here’s my section title slide:

Again, extremely underwhelming, and frankly, not an improvement at all over my previous failed attempts to generate a PowerPoint slide presentation design using any of the GenAI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini). Mind you, I have deliberately stayed away from using the image-generation tools in these products; I can spot a GenAI-produced image from a mile away by this point, having been playing around with these tools, off and on, since they first came out in 2022.

Claude continued to generate all the standard versions of PowerPoint slides in this theme, ending with a final slide that, I must confess, I kind of liked the look of (although, again, I would have preferred some sort of background image):

This is where the process got interesting, as I finally decided to stop having to manually okay each individual step, and just gave Claude carte blanche to do whatever it felt was best. (I mean, the worst that could happen was that it come up with something I hated so much that I threw it away and started over.)

Claude was still working away while I took my lunch break, giving feedback along the lines of “Build stunning title slide design.” 🙄 (I’ll be the judge of what’s considered stunning, Claude. Calm the fuck down.)

Here’s the final result, my “stunning” title slide (insert RuPaul’s Drag Race shade death rattle):

The addition of three pieces of clip art in the upper right corner of the slide, plus a few more bubbles/dots. So, yes, this is, once again, a complete fail. I will probably still use this as a basic slide design, but obviously I will be locating and using my own images to illustrate it. This is now the second new tool in a week (first Claude Cowork and now Claude PowerPoint add-in) which has utterly failed at the tasks given it. I am not impressed.

Third, and finally, thank God, I had much better luck was in issuing all three general-purpose GenAI tools the exact same text prompt, a technique I had used before here (and one which I found very useful in comparing and contrasting the responses):

I am writing a keynote presentation on the mistakes companies make when creating, designing, and marketing the following product category: virtual worlds, social VR/AR, and metaverse platforms in general. Please give me a list of failed or shut down metaverse platforms, along with reasons why they might have failed. Please cite both academic and industry sources of information in your answer.

In all cases, I used the latest models as specified in Ethan Mollick’s latest AI Guide:

  • ChatGPT’s GPT 5.2 Thinking with the Extended Thinking option;
  • Claude Opus 4.2 Extended Thinking with the Research option; and
  • Gemini 3 Thinking with the Deep Research option.

Unlike the last comparison, I’m not going to go into great detail on the results (because I will be using some of these results, once they are double-checked against more authoritative sources, in an actual keynote presentation I will be delivering later this month). Instead, I will my general overall impression of each report (and all three did provide a detailed report with citations).

Please note that I deliberately left it up to the specific GenAI tool to define what “failed” or “shut down” means, how far back and how thoroughly to search for failed platforms, and what metaverse platforms to include or exclude from its final report. As always, I find the differences between the reports to be an interesting way to compare and contrast the results, so below I will give some basic statistics:

GenAI Tool# Failed Platforms ListedTime Range of Failed Platforms# Citations in Final Report
ChatGPT152003 to 202623
Claude13(start dates not given) to 2023/”effectively failed, still limping along”30
Gemini92009 to 2024 (but some platforms had no timeline information given)33

While ChatGPT was the most thorough in listing failed metaverse platforms, and seems to have gone the furthest back in time (including There.com, which launched back in 2003!), it also had the fewest number of citations, and most of them were historical, platform-related announcements (e.g. a 2020 announcement of the shutdown of the then-social-VR platform High Fidelity by its CEO) rather than peer-reviewed academic journal articles (although there were a couple of those, too). While Claude had more citations, a review of those showed mostly blogs and news websites, with fewer references to actual academic research papers (probably because much of that content is locked behind academic publisher paywalls, although there were still quite a few academic references to free sources such as ResearchGate and PubMed Central/PMC; see the Claude report image below for one section which did focus on academic sources). Of the three, Gemini’s 33 citations used included the most resources which I would consider academic, from a good range of different publishers (as well as more informal websites). Interestingly, Gemini also included a list of resources which it looked at, but chose not to include in the final report, something which neither ChatGPT nor Claude offered! I thought that was particularly valuable, in case something else caught my eye to follow up on. Gemini for the win here.

Gemini was also notable for the strong, overarching narrative structure to its report, something which I had also noticed in previous queries using this GenAI tool. Gemini has clearly been trained well in telling a cohesive story! However, Claude was also notable for listing, in a separate section of its report, what it called “cross-cutting failure themes” in its 13 examined metaverse failures (which is definitely a phrase I will be stealing for my final keynote presentation!). By comparison, the final report from ChatGPT, while thorough, was jargon-heavy, poorly-formatted, and seemed to lack the final polish of its competitors. For example, there were three separate sections titled “failure themes and comparative analysis,” “theme-to-platform mapping,” (?!??) and “top 10 failures by primary cause.” It was, in my opinion, the poorest of the three reports generated, just in terms of sheer (lack of) organization and narrative. Again, Gemini for the win!

Gemini’s report had a strong, overarching narrative structure—something which I have noticed seems to be a particular strength of this GenAI tool, a sort of final overall polish to the text that ChatGPT, in particular, was lacking in its report (see below).
Claude’s report had a summary section titled “cross-cutting failure themes,” which I am definitely stealing for my keynote presentation!
Compared to the Gemini report, the ChatGPT report was jargon-heavy and poorly-formatted.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: So, here are my final thoughts.

  • It is getting harder and harder (in fact, almost a full-time job) to keep on top of what is fast becoming an arms race between the top three general-purpose generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), not to mention an ever-growing legion of more narrowly-focused applications, which might be better at certain specific tasks, such as writing programming code or generating music.
  • While Claude seems to be good at putting new agentic (e.g. Claude Cowork) and add-in tools (Claude for PowerPoint) into the hands of its users first, my personal experience with these new tools has been very disappointing, even comically bad. However, Claude’s chatbot interface works well for generating detailed answers with citations (although slightly edged out by Gemini).
  • I am impressed by Gemini’s consistent ability to create a strong narrative structure within its generated reports, something in which ChatGPT in particular is noticeably lacking. It also came first in a key metric: actual citations to academic literature, not just freely-accessible websites (blogs and news articles).
  • If I were forced to rank the three GenAI tools by just this one head-to-head-to-head comparison (i.e. the third part of my blogpost), I would rank them as follows:
    • 1st: Google Gemini.
    • 2nd: Anthropic Claude.
    • 3rd. OpenAI ChatGPT.
  • Again, when these GenAI tools work, they work well (sometimes very well!), but they they fail, they fail spectacularly. Which, in my mind, is another reason why it is good to put these tools to the test regularly, and use them in real-life situations, so that you can learn what they are good and bad at!

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

UPDATED JAN. 20th, 2026 WITH EXTRA COMMENTARY: Metaverse Bombshell: NETFLIX Acquires Ready Player Me—What Does This Mean for Metaverse Platforms Using Ready Player Me Avatars?

I somehow missed a major piece of news that dropped last Friday, which will definitely impact a lot of existing metaverse platforms (including big names like VRChat). On Dec. 19th, 2025, Sarah Perez wrote, in an article on the tech news website TechCrunch:

After shifting its gaming strategy to focus more on games played on the TV, Netflix announced it’s acquiring Ready Player Me, an avatar-creation platform based in Estonia. The streamer said Friday it plans to use the startup’s development tools and infrastructure to build avatars that will allow Netflix subscribers to carry their personas and fandom across different games.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Ready Player Me had raised $72 million in venture backing from investors, including a16z, Endeavor, Konvoy Ventures, Plural, and various angels, including the co-founders of companies like Roblox, Twitch, and King Games.

Netflix told TechCrunch the startup’s team of around 20 people will be joining the company. Of the four founders Rainer Selvet, Haver Järveoja, Kaspar Tiri, and Timmu Tõke, only CTO Rainer Selvet is moving to Netflix. It doesn’t have an estimate of how long it will be until avatars launch. Nor does it detail which games or types of games will be first to get avatars.

Following the acquisition, Ready Player Me will be winding down its services on January 31, 2026, including its online avatar creation tool, PlayerZero.

Scott Hayden, in an article written for The Road to VR website, adds:

“Our vision has always been to enable avatars and identities to travel across many games and virtual worlds,” Ready Player Me CEO Timmu Tõke said. “We’ve been on an independent path to make that vision a reality for a long time. I’m now very excited for the Ready Player Me team to join Netflix to scale our tech and expertise to a global audience and contribute to the exciting vision Netflix has for gaming.”

Avatar creation using Ready Player Me in the metaverse platform Spatial

Additionally, Ready Player Me announced its taking avatar creation services offline starting January 31st, 2026.

And, indeed, when I head over to the Ready Player Me website, the banner across the top of my screen declares:

Thank you for the chance to build together with you. Our services will become unavailable starting January 31, 2026. Please reach out to devs@readyplayer.me for any questions.

I pity the poor person on the receiving end of all those emails, because there are countless metaverse platforms which have relied on Ready Player Me as their avatar creation component, rather than try to build their own avatar design system in-house. All of these platforms now have a little over a month to come up with a replacement for the services provided up until now by Ready Player Me, which is shutting down on January 31st, 2026!

Ready Player Me’s avatar creation tools, which have been used by many virtual worlds and social VR platforms, will be shutting down on January 30th, 2026.
Among the tools affected by the NETFLIX acquisition of Ready Player Me are the Avatar Creator SDK, and the newer PlayerZero SDK, which allowed for users to create and sell avatar modifications and updates.

Ready Player Me has been the go-to solution for both gaming and metaverse companies for outsourcing much of its avatar creation process. Among those companies is VRChat. Scott Hayden opines:

Netflix hasn’t intimated it’s getting into XR gaming yet, so it’s pretty safe to say the Ready Player Me acquisition and subsequent shutdown is more or less a blow to one specific group of people: namely, VRChat users.

VRChat beginners looking to make their own avatars over the years were almost always pointed to Ready Player Me, with the platform even allowing users to upload a personal photo and generate a cartoony persona that was easy to mix-and-match with a variety of parts.

And while they weren’t always the most original avatars out there, it’s difficult to argue with the platform’s ease of use, as the web-based tool basically got you a (mostly) unique avatar that was not only cross-platform, but also already rigged for VRChat.

I’m not too worried on the impact to VRChat; as Scott goes on to write in his article, there are alternatives, albeit ones requiring a bit more technical know-how on the part of the user. VRChat also has a thriving third-party avatar creation and sale ecosystem, including a very popular series of Virtual Market avatar shopping events). VRChat will be fine. But it’s the smaller metaverse platforms like Spatial.io, which wholly rely on Ready Player Me’s services, that are now going to have to scramble to find and implement a replacement in very little time.

NETFLIX’s acquisition of Ready Player Me reminds me, at first glance, of when the fledgling metaverse platform Cloud Party (which I have written about on my blog before) was acquired by Yahoo! back in early 2014, over a decade ago. The entire small company (only 3-4 people) was “acquihired” by Yahoo!, and they shut down the Cloud party platform (with a truly memorable sendoff, as they shut down the servers, that made me emotional; this link is from a former Blogger.com blog I used to write about Cloud Party, which is still up!). The staff were absorbed into Yahoo! to work on Yahoo! projects, and God only knows what happened to them, or the projects they were hired to work on. (And, of course, Yahoo! is a shadow of its former self; does anybody still use it?)

It is very clear from this news that NETFLIX has big plans for its gaming service, and they “acquihired” the staff (and assets) of Ready Player Me, in order to use them for some future project. Their gain (for whatever project they are working on) is the loss of the hundreds of virtual worlds, games, and social VR/AR platforms which relied on Ready Player Me.

The fallout from all this is going to be fascinating to watch.

UPDATE Dec. 23rd, 2025: Another thing that came to mind after I posted this blogpost is this: metaverse-building companies who choose to outsource aspects of their services to other companies like Ready Player Me, have to be prepared for the possibility that that other company could be bought out, change the terms of their service, or even shut down. While it might be more time and money consuming to build something like an avatar system in-house, at least it’s under your control, and you don’t run the risk of having the rug pulled from under you.

Thank you to my metaverse friend Carlos Austin for the heads-up on this news.

UPDATE Jan. 20th, 2026: Today I came across an article on LinkedIn by Terry Proto for the group with the lengthy title, Reality Innovators Network for Spatial Computing, Metaverse, AI & XR – Virtual, Augmented Reality (whew, that’s a mouthful!):

8,000 developers. 6 weeks. One lesson. Netflix bought Ready Player Me, and January 31st is the deadline to replace avatar infrastructure for a lot of companies.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Altspace. 8th Wall. The pattern repeats.

The lesson? Interoperable ≠ open.

RPM worked everywhere. But it was still owned by one company. One acquisition later, and thousands of production systems are scrambling.

That’s the difference between building on convenience vs. building on ownership.

I just wrote a new article on why the spatial internet can’t be built on rented land. Have a look here: https://lnkd.in/etu3xpiF

(Note: I don’t know if you actually have to have a LinkedIn account to read this article.)

In the linked article from the above quote, Terry goes to give a very good summary of why relying on a third-party solution (even one that is interoperable), is still not as good as having open standards.

He writes:

Netflix acquired Ready Player Me on Dec 19 and 8,000 developers have until January 31st to rip out and replace their avatar infrastructure.

That’s six weeks.

Six weeks to rebuild identity systems that many teams integrated as foundational layers, not optional features. For some developers, RPM wasn’t just powering avatars. It was powering user accounts, social presence, cross-platform persistence, and the entire notion that their users could carry an identity across virtual worlds.

As Jose Antonio Tejedor Garcia of Virtway put it: “Trust built over years is breaking in weeks.”

As I write this, that six-week window has narrowed to (checks calendar) just twelve days. And, as Terry has stated, many of the 6,000 developers who used Ready Player Me, used it for a lot more than just avatar appearance. He goes on to add what I was trying to get at in my original blogpost, but does it much more concisely:

ack in June 2023, I wrote about “life after Altspace”, exploring which platforms could fill the void when Microsoft shut down one of the oldest social VR spaces. Altspace launched in 2015, got acquired by Microsoft in 2017 and closed in March 2023. The community scrambled to find new homes.

Sound familiar?

But back then, I was asking the wrong question. Finding alternative platforms doesn’t solve the underlying problem. It just kicks the can down the road until the next acquisition, the next pivot, the next “strategic realignment.”

The real question is: why do we keep building critical infrastructure on top of proprietary platforms?

I am not going to quote it all, but I do strongly recommend you read the entire article here (even if I very strongly disagree with any potential solution which requires blockchain, cryptocurrencies or NFTs, all of which by now are tainted beyond redemption by numerous scandals, scams, and rugpulls). And I will watch with keen interest as the deadline of January 31st, 2026 comes and goes.