Tag: Spatial

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.

UPDATED! A Report from the IMMERSIVE X Conference, Nov. 11th, 2025

If anything, I urge everyone in our industry to build our digital spaces the way we design cities: with flow, gathering spots, heart and soul. Places that invite people to linger, not just scroll. It’s not just about what people see—it’s about where they feel seen.

—Andy Fidel, State of the Metaverse in 2026 keynote presentation, IMMERSIVE X Conference, November 11th, 2025 (in ENGAGE).

Julian Reyes delivering his talk titled Preserving the Legacy of Digital Culture: The Virtual Worlds Museum Living Archive, which took place yesterday evening my time in a virtual world in Spatial (I’m the blonde in the green T-shirt, sitting in the front row, near the centre bottom of this screen capture).

Yesterday, November 11th, 2025, I had the opportunity to attend three sessions of the IMMERSIVE X conference, held on three different platforms:

  • IMMERSIVE X 2025 Warm-Up: Curator’s Remarks (held in VRChat)
  • Andy Fidel’s keynote, The State of the Metaverse in 2026 (held in ENGAGE)
  • Julian Reyes’ presentation, Preserving the Legacy of Digital Culture: The Virtual Worlds Museum™ Living Archive (held in Spatial)

Warm-Up: Curator’s Remarks (Thomas Zorbach)

Set in a custom-built theatre surrounded by lush rainforest. Thomas Zorbach set the tone and agenda for the conference sessions to follow over the hree days of the conference. My friend Carlos Austin was the videographer for the event (as he no doubt will be for many of the conference sessions!), and he produced the following video of Thomas’ speech, which was posted to the IMMERSIVE X YouTube streams channel (I also took some photos using VRChat’s built-in camera, but I first have to figure out how to transfer them from VRChat to my blog!).

UPDATE Nov. 13th, 2025: I was finally able to add some photos I shot while in VRChat to this section of my blog post (please see the pictures above).

The State of the Metaverse in 2026 (Andy Fidel)

Andy’s keynote was prefaced by a half-hour red carpet awards session where various people were introduced, and several awards were given out (I arrived late for this part, but here’s the 35-minute video from IMMERSIVE X’s YouTube channel). Here’s the blurb from the conference program:

What an entrance! Dress your avatar to impress and flash your most dazzling smile for the photo. Once again, the path to the Opening Keynote leads across the legendary red carpet of the Polys Theater, home of the annual Polys Awards. Thanks to Ben Erwin and his incredible Polys team, this festive event marks the official start of IMMERSIVE X 2025. Don’t miss this prestigious social event in the Metaverse — you might just be in for a surprise or two.

After the red carpet, we all moved over to the main stage where Andy Fidel, the founder and creative lead at Spatial Networks, shared her insights on where the metaverse stands today and where it might be heading.

Andy Fidel on the virtual stage, giving her keynote address in ENGAGE (it was giving TED Talk!)
I took a selfie of my avatar in ENGAGE at the red carpet event prior to Andy’s keynote!

Because I attended the event in my Vive Pro 2 VR headset, I did not take written notes of her talk, but it was excellent! Also, Andy has asked that her talk not be streamed to YouTube, a decision which I can totally understand and respect. However, Andy was happy to share her speech notes with me, so I did not have to rely on my notoriously faulty 61-year-old memory to share a few quotes which especially resonated with me!

Andy started her presentation off with a sigh, stating:

I’m tired of the [metaverse] hype cycle. I don’t know what we’re all waiting for. Because I’ve seen us create real, human digital experiences—moments of presence—every day for the past ten years. This isn’t a sci-fi episode. The metaverse is already here. It’s in your browser tab. It’s not just a concept, a game, or a place. It’s how we’re choosing to show up online.

And my favourite [metaverse] misconception? We’re not escaping reality—we’re extending it.

There were more of Andy’s quotes which I really appreciated. In talking about the shift away from massive metaverse platforms to micro-communities, she said:

We’ve got to find new ways of measuring success when we talk about connection. Every social metric measures visibility, impressions, clicks, followers…that’s activity, not authenticity. And I don’t know about you—but I’m done chasing mass engagement and empty distribution. Because connection isn’t content. It’s presence.

And she talked about how, perhaps, we are a little too narrowly focused on what the “metaverse” is:

Let’s be honest—the metaverse didn’t start with VR. We’ve been building shared digital worlds for decades: Second Life, World of Warcraft, Minecraft…The only difference now? The new emerging tech finally lets us feel presence. VR, AR, digital—these are just new layers on something deeply human. “Metaverse” is just a new name for something we’ve always done: to gather. And to gather, we need space to do so. What’s different now? We have the technology to do it remotely, and feel like we’re right there. With embodiment, body language, haptics, even phantom touch—we’re tapping into all the little things that make our digital space feel more immersive and real.

And:

Virtual presence has become its own form of togetherness. We show up not just in person, but in-world. Because let’s be honest—why show up at all? Because you can feel it.

The metaverse isn’t here to replace the real world. It’s here to layer it with new forms of meaning. It’s not just a playground, [and] not just a marketplace. It’s a new layer of human communication.

And look—if you say, “the metaverse isn’t for me,” that a bit like saying “the internet isn’t for me” in the 1990s. You don’t have to love every corner of it. You just have to find the part that resonates. Because this isn’t about tech for tech’s sake. It’s about connecting—more intimately, across space, time and medium.

UPDATE Nov. 13th, 2025: I was finally able to add some photos I shot while in ENGAGE to this section of my blog post (please see above).

I want to thank Thomas Zorbach for shoehorning me into this avatar-packed session, after I personally begged him to let me in, even though the event was fully booked and no longer accepting signups. I did not want to miss Andy’s speech, and I was not disappointed!

Preserving the Legacy of Digital Culture: The Virtual Worlds Museum™ Living Archive (Julian Reyes)

I was not sure if I was going to be able to attend this session (I was having all kinds of trouble getting Spatial to work for me, and I eventually threw my hands up, gave up on attending in virtual reality, and instead visited via my flatscreen monitor on my Windows home computer instead). However, I am so, so glad that I did! A video stream of the 45-minute presentation has already been posted to the IMMERSIVE X YouTube channel, but I will also add some of my own remarks (since I was on desktop, I took written notes).

This blogpost will be updated as I add pictures and more of my impressions, so check back later today for those updates! I enjoyed all three sessions, and I am very much looking forward to the sessions I will be attending today and tomorrow!

With the deepest thanks to Andy Fidel for sharing her speaking notes with me. Thanks, Andy!

The IMMERSIVE X Metaverse Conference, November 11-13, 2025

I’m laid up with severe neck and shoulder pain, off sick from work today again, lying on the sofa and blogging via iPad, my neck propped up on a good pillow. In addition to visits to my family doctor and my physiotherapist (who also does acupuncture), I’ve started seeing a massage therapist. I had a one-hour massage session Friday morning, and felt wonderful afterward—only to have rebound neck and shoulder aches and pains which scuppered my Friday night plans and put me in a foul, cranky mood all weekend.

This is all coming at a time when I need to be well enough to attend a metaverse conference coming up this week! It’s the IMMERSIVE X Conference, organized and run from Berlin, Germany, but with events taking place in various social VR platforms and flatscreen virtual worlds. Instead of getting on a plane to go to a physical conference in meatspace, I just put on a VR headset and attend in cyberspace!

However, my physical pain today does not bode well for my metaverse excursions on Tuesday (Remembrance Day here in Canada, if not in Germany), Wednesday, and Thursday. Wish me well! I’m probably going to have to take breaks between sessions to pop painkillers, apply cold and heat packs, and do my prescribed physiotherapy exercises to get through this. But come hell or high water, I am going!!

I started preparing for the conference last week, revisiting some social VR platforms that I had not visited in many months, and making sure that I could still remember how to log in and move around in my Vive Pro 2 PCVR setup in my office (sadly neglected since I began my well-documented love affair with my Apple Vision Pro).

I must admit that I was surprised when I signed into my VRChat account on their website, to discover that I first joined VRChat 8 years ago! (You can find all my blogposts about VRChat here.)

And likewise, I had first joined ENGAGE in July of 2018, which means I have been using the metaverse platform for over seven years at this point! (You can find all my blogposts about ENGAGE here.) I am especially excited that the organizers were able to squeeze me into Andy Fidel’s keynote State of the Metaverse presentation in ENGAGE (a big thank you Thomas Zorbach and his team!).

In addition to VRChat and ENGAGE, I signed up for sessions being held on three other metaverse platforms: Spatial, Foretell Reality, and Hubs. I’ve been in Spatial and (formerly Mozilla) Hubs before, but Foretell Reality is new to me.

So I hope to be able to post my session notes to the blog, starting tomorrow. And, in the meantime, I will rest, take painkillers, do my physiotherapy exercises, and pray my body holds up. Stay tuned!

Spatial, Originally a Social Augmented Reality Platform, Expands to Virtual Reality and Offers a Free Version During the Pandemic

When I first wrote about Spatial back in October of 2018, it was a social augmented reality (AR) platform which only ran on the first generation of AR headsets available for purchase by consumers: the much-hyped Magic Leap and Microsoft’s HoloLens.

(By the way, if you are looking for definitions of terms such as augmented reality, I have compiled a handy list of definitions for my blog readers.)

Since I wrote that first blogpost, Magic Leap has struggled, laying off about half its employees in April 2020, and choosing to focus on enterprise users instead of chasing the consumer market. (It is interesting to compare the recent troubles of Magic Leap with that of Sansar and High Fidelity. In all three cases, the lack of the previously-confidently-predicted massive consumer uptake of VR/AR/MR/XR headsets led directly to their downsizing and restructuring.)

Well, VentureBeat reported on May 13th, 2020 that the company is making Spatial available for free during the pandemic, and they are now supporting the Oculus Quest standalone VR headset:

First, the company is offering multiple months of free access to its premium-level Spatial Pro enterprise service, including support for users without full-fledged AR or VR devices. Businesses will be able to share any Spatial room with team members using just a web link, enabling desktop, laptop, and small device users to join meetings with a web browser, no download or headset required. Spatial’s headset UI has been carried over to the web, enabling 2D screen users to easily observe the 3D spaces.

…

Second, Spatial is making an Oculus Quest app generally available today, including a “much improved experience” compared with the prior private beta. Although Facebook hasn’t announced sales figures for the hybrid standalone and PC-tethered headset, Spatial characterizes the repeatedly sold-out Quest as “the most widely available XR device today” and says it has refined its user interface to make the experience easier for new users.

Here’s a screencap of Spatial’s pricing page, reflecting this change:

Spatial is free during the coronavirus pandemic!
Spatial is now available on the Oculus Quest, Microsoft HoloLens 1 and 2,
Magic Leap One, and Via Desktop/Flatscreen Web and Mobile Devices

Now, choosing to expand to include the popular Oculus Quest wireless VR headset is a smart move. Facebook does not disclose sales figures for the Quest, but some have estimated (based on game sales) that the company has sold approximately 425,000 Quests in 2019. Contrast this with the poor sales reported of the Magic Leap One:

The Information‘s Alex Heath is reporting that Magic Leap managed to sell just 6,000 units of its $2,300 Magic Leap One headset in its first six months on sale, a figure made worse by CEO Rony Abovitz’s internal claims that he wanted the startup to sell at least one million units of the device in the first year, a goal the report states he was later convinced to rethink — Abovitz later projected the company would sell 100,000 units in the first year.

Of course, such sluggish sales were one of the reasons that Magic Leap essentially gave up on trying to sell to the consumer market, and focused squarely on the corporate market. (Microsoft is a little more forthcoming with its HoloLens sales figures, but at roughly 50,000 units reported sold in 2018, they also are dwarfed by Quest sales.) It only makes sense for the company to add a headset which beings more potential customers—and, hopefully, enterprise sales—to the table. Spatial already boasts Ford, Mattel, T Mobile, Purina and Pfizer among its corporate clients.

Here’s an 11-minute YouTube video demonstrating how Spatial works on the HoloLens 2 AR headset, from 2019:

I happen to own an Oculus Quest, and normally I would leap on an opportunity to test-drive Spatial, except for one small problem: the large space I cleared in my bedroom for my Oculus Quest is now piled high with my pandemic stockpile of non-perishable food, Lysol disinfectant wipes, and toilet paper! So obviously, that’s not going to happen. So I am going to have to rely on second-hand reports on how well Spatial works with the Quest (I am rather curious to know what differences would appear in someone using Spatial in virtual reality as opposed to augmented reality.)

In a separate VentureBeat article, reporter Jeremy Horwitz waxes rhapsodic about his experience using Spatial on his Oculus Quest:

I’m not often at a loss for words, but as I re-entered the real world after my second holographic media briefing this month, I realized that I was struggling to speak or type. Mentally, the sensation was awe — my sincere belief that I had just experienced the future of remote work and meetings…

The breakthrough here is Spatial, a collaborative workspace app that just became available for the popular Oculus Quest VR headset. It’s not hyperbole to say that Spatial has unilaterally reignited my enthusiasm for the Quest, which has recently gathered dust on my desk, as the potent pairing enables me to quickly participate in 3D group meetings filled with multiple realistic participants. Instead of using cartoony avatars or floating video tiles, Spatial users appear as “holograms” with real faces, motion-sensed head and hand movements, and even lip motions keyed to their live voices.

The text under the three smaller pictures along the bottom of this image, which is a bit hard to read here, says:

– Create your 3D-realistic avatar from a single selfie in second
– Your avatar comes to life as you talk, move and interact
– Shake hands and high-five each other

So, if anybody out there wants to try the free version of Spatial on their Oculus Quest, and write up a review, I would be happy to provide the blogpost for a guest review! Thanks! I hope somebody takes me up on my offer.

If you want to learn more about Spatial, you can visit their web page, or follow them on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.