Tag: Virtual Reality

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):

Editorial: Changing Gears, Letting Go, and Embracing Change

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

NOTICE: Except where explicitly stated in this blogpost, I have not used AI to write this editorial. This is me, Ryan, writing (and yes, I have been using em-dashes long, long before ChatGPT was a thing—and I will continue to do so!). See what I just did there? 😉

While my continuing neck and shoulder pain unfortunately limits the amount of time that I can spend sitting in front of a desktop computer (both at work and at home), I wanted to set aside some of my precious “good neck” time to talk a little bit about this past twelve months, and where I am planning on taking this blog in the future. Because, yes, I do have plans moving forward. (Update: as it turns out, because of my neck and shoulder pain, I had to split up the writing of this post over a couple of days, rather than one hours-long marathon sesssion.)

As many of you know, I took a lengthy hiatus from blogging, starting late last year, up until very recently. Part of the reason was that I was juggling a lot of responsibilities at work, notably being part of a virtual reality lab which was being set up in one of the libraries of the university library system in which I have been working for the past 30-odd years (yes, it’s really been that long; I started in 1992!).

I am happy to report that, although I am no longer involved with that particular project, the virtual reality lab at my university library system has already had a successful soft opening, with a dedicated staff person hired to manage it (not me; as I said, I already have my hands full being a liaison librarian for both the faculty of agricultural and food sciences and the computer science department at my university!). In fact, I have been so busy at work that I haven’t even had time to sit down and use any of the equipment in the new lab, although I have chatted a few times with the new manager. Everything is moving along fine without me.

As part of my responsibilities as agriculture librarian, I had volunteered to give a presentation to an upcoming faculty council meeting about artificial intelligence in general, and generative AI in particular. I have only myself to blame for getting myself into this situation! You see, the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the University of Manitoba still has an active library committee, and at a recent in-person meeting, I was talking about how I have had to add a few slides to the PowerPoint presentation which I give to students about how to use the U of M Libraries, talking about AI. One thing led to another, and lo and behold, yesterday afternoon, I gave a half-hour presentation on artificial intelligence in general, and generative AI in particular, to a room full of agriculture and food science professors!

I spent a significant chunk of my summer reading through books and websites, working through online courses, and essentially getting myself up to speed (it helps that this librarian has an undergraduate degree in computer science!). And I had the good fortune to be able to give a version of my presentation to a class of graduate student advisors, and to a class of graduate students, as part of a series of special courses targeted to U of M grad students, before yesterday afternoon’s talk. Both times it was well received, as it was yesterday. (I have already shared my slides and notes with my fellow librarians and agriculture professors, and I might decide to also share a version of them with you, my faithful blog readers, as I have done in the past with presentations about virtual reality in higher education, and the virtual world of Second Life. But I think I will make that a separate blogpost, perhaps my next one.)

At this point, I will draw your attention to the tagline of my blog in the upper left-hand corner of the screen if you are looking at this page on a desktop computer. You might notice that it has changed.

It used to read, pretty much since I began this blog in 2017:

News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse

As of yesterday, it now says:

News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse, plus Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI’s Impact on the Metaverse

Now, that’s rather a mouthful (and yes, I might need to edit it a bit), but essentially, it’s all a part of the “embracing change” which I mentioned in the title of this blogpost.

As a matter of fact, I was having a bit of a brain fart coming up with a suitable title, so to assist me with the wording of the title of this blog post (and only that), I pulled up Anthropic’s generative AI tool, Claude, for a little chat, asking it:

I need a way of saying “to add something new” to contrast with the opposite idea of “letting go of something.” What are some ways that I could say that?

And here are screen captures of the resulting conversation:

Now, could I have done this without generative AI? Absolutely; thesaurus websites have been around since the earliest days of the World Wide Web (trust me, I was around then!). But I doubt I could have actually had a back-and-forth conversation with a tool that presented the information in such a helpful, tabular way, prior to November 2022, when the first public version of ChapGPT was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. I could pose my question in dozens of different ways, asking for countless ways of expressing the concept of “letting go of something,” and the Claude GenAI (generative AI) tool never gets bored or impatient or irritated with me.

Simply put, I will now be writing about artificial intelligence in general, and the new wave of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude in particular, as part of the RyanSchultz.com blog. In particular, I will talk about how these fast-developing and evolving tools will inevitably impact the metaverse.

I will give two quick examples of how GenAI is already impacting the metaverse. First, in my recent write-up of virtual sessions I attended as part of the Berlin-based Immersive X metaverse conference i attended a couple of weeks ago, there was a proof-of-concept working demonstration of a generative-AI-driven virtual diabetes counselor in a virtual world platform called Foretell Reality.

Second, were you aware that there is already a website called MeshZEUS, which will create a three-dimensional object for you from a text description, in a format ready to be uploaded to Second Life and sold on the SL Marketplace or an in-world store?

The MeshZEUS website

Yes, that’s right! You may choose, if you wish, to no longer work your way up the rather steep learning curve of Blender or Maya or 3Ds Max to painstakingly create an object from scratch; instead, all you have to do is describe your desired 3D object in enough detail, and hey presto, it gets delivered to you! (Provided you buy enough credits, and have enough patience to go through multiple iterations of text prompting, that is. But we’ll also leave that discussion, plus the whole enchilada of issues that using a GenAI tool like this raises, for another day, shall we? Trust, there’s lots to talk about.)

It’s now pretty obvious to me that the current hype cycle of artificial intelligence, which was ignited by startling new leaps forward in the capabilities of AI tools since 2022, is going to have an impact on the metaverse. And, unlike the previous short-lived hype cycle of the metaverse itself (which, hello, I was around for—beginning, middle, and end!— documented on this very blog), this new, AI-powered hype cycle might actually have a more direct impact on society than the still-somewhat-nebulous concept of the metaverse, sooner than any of us might have expected. Buckle up, folks, I predict that things are about to get deeply, deeply weird.

So, I have talked about changing gears for the RyanSchultz.com blog, returning to blogging, and also about embracing change, i.e., adding the topic of AI and GenAI to the subjects I will write about. Now I come to the part where I talk about letting something go.

Unfortunately, because of my neck and shoulder pain, I regret that I must conserve the time that I can spend productively sitting in front of a desktop PC. Obviously, first priority goes to the paying job, which keeps the lights on, the internet bill paid, and puts food in my belly and gas in my car. Second priority will likely be writing this blog, now that I have decided to keep blogging. Between these two, that probably is the limit of what I can reasonably accomplish.

What I am choosing to let go of is writing aboutt the virtual world of Second Life on this blog (in particular, reporting on fashionista freebies and bargains). I have made a similar announcement on Primfeed, which over the past year is where I have usually posted my freebie fashionista finds rather than on my blog. Because my Primfeed account is deliberately set to private (i.e., you need to have a Second Life account to join Primfeed, follow me, and read what I post there), I have done a screen capture of that particular post, plus a transcription:

Every December, I try to juggle four tasks (not very successfully, mind you):

1, Drag my small army of alts through a curated selection of Advent and 12 Days of Christmas calendars to vacuum up some fabulous gifts, every day from December 1st to December 25th;

2. Do the same thing at the annual Holiday Shop and Hop event;

3. Pick up free heads and skins during the LeLutka December event; and

4. Navigate real-life Christmas events, shopping, and other obligations. (My family, God bless them, finds #1-3 above to be very amusing, and last Christmas, they all chipped in to give me a cash-filled envelope marked “L$”, since they couldn’t actually buy me a gift card to buy Linden dollars. (Second Life, you need to look into this! There’s an untapped market here.)

I’m sure some of you here on Primfeed can relate to this! Often I ask myself: why am I doing this? But I still do get a great deal of personal satisfaction and fulfillment from designing a complete avatar look from head to toe, looking great while doing it as inexpensively as possible. And in order to do that, you need to acquire the knowledge and expertise to sniff out freebies and bargains (which I have often shared with you, either here on Primfeed or via my blog). I’ve loved doing it for years!

But, as I said, something has to give. I can no longer spend extended hours sitting in front of a desktop PC without significant, and sometimes severe, neck and shoulder pain. Therefore, in addition to NOT doing as much of numbers 1 through 3 as in previous years, I have made the difficult decision to cut back on telling all of you about the great deals I find. It’s not a decision I take lightly, but I do need to listen to my body, and my body is telling me to rest. And I need to pay attention.

So if you don’t see me post as often here, that’s why. ❤️ I’m just trying to rebalance my life a little better, that’s all. I’ll still be around, reading, scrolling, liking posts, following people and stores, but not posting so much. Thanks for understanding.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not leaving Second Life! In fact, I need SL as a sort of counter-balance to deal with all the batshit-craziness happening in my real life. Second Life is my temporary escape from the hamster-wheel of worry, anxiety, and despair inside my head, where I can reliably get into a pleasant flow state for an hour or two, and escape from the real world (where I have little to no control over what is happening).

In fact, one of the reasons I love SL so much is that it is such a vast, three-dimensional creative canvas over which I have so much control over what happens, where I choose to go, who I choose to interact with, and even what I look like to others! I still derive an inordinate amount of personal satisfaction from styling a complete avatar look from head to toe, as inexpensively as possible while still looking fabulous, darling! I call it “digital drag” 💅 (and yes, I do have a drag queen alt, whom I have written about numerous times on my blog, and who is about to embark on various antics, drama, and misadventures in a roleplaying region based on the U.S. Deep South). To my friends and acquiantances in Second Life: I am not going anywhere. I’m just not going to write about it here any more, that’s all. (I’m also cutting back on my Primfeed posting, but I’ll still be there, too.)

So, to sum up:

Yes, I am back.

Yes I will be blogging about the metaverse in all its forms and manifestations again, but with the added wrinkle of AI/GenAI and its potential impact.

No, I will no longer be writing about Second Life, although yes, I still will be playing it.

Stick around, folks, this should be both entertaining and educational! As RuPaul herself said:

A Pain in the Neck


Photo by Teslariu Mihai on Unsplash

I have been postponing writing this blogpost, hoping that I would have more positive news to share, but I regret that I do not. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot of good in my life, and I have much to be grateful for. Compared to most of the eight billion people I share this planet with, I am a lucky man.

When I wrote that last sentence, tapping away on my iPad while lying on the sofa, I accidentally wrote, “I am a lucky pain.” Freudian slip? I do feel like one huge walking pain lately.

You see, for the past several months, I was been experiencing neck and shoulder pain. This pain ranges from mild to severe, and when it is severe, it is bad enough that I need to take a sick day from work (usually a half-day, sometimes a full day), go home, and either go to bed or lie on the sofa, my neck propped up on a good pillow. Which is what I am doing right now as I compose this post. I have taken a lot of sick days in September, which is my busiest time of year. THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING.

In order to find relief, I have paid several visits to my family doctor. He has suggested a regimen of over-the-counter painkillers, which has needed to be adjusted, and probably will continue to be adjusted in my quest to achieve effective pain management. He also sent me for X-rays, which indicate a deterioration in two of the neck joints in the cervical part of my spine. In other words, my neck is starting to wear out.

My doctor sent me to the physiotherapist with a letter, and I have been going once a week so far for treatment (starting twice a week next week). The physiotherapist has given me several exercises to work out and strengthen my neck and upper back muscles, but I am still sometimes in a lot of pain. As with the painkillers, it’s been a lengthy trial-and-error process these past few months to figure out what works and what doesn’t, what makes things worse and what makes them better. I am exhausted.

My neck and shoulder pain is not only affecting my work; it’s also affecting my off-work hours, too. Yesterday, I posted the following message to Primfeed, which is best and most concisely described as “Twitter for and about Second Life.” (Please note that I have completely given up on all social media in these batshit-crazy times in which we live, except for Primfeed and Reddit. In my opinion, real-life social media platforms have become a toxic cesspool and an utter dumpster fire, and are a major contributing factor to a more uncivil, divisive, and polarized society beset by misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. But I digress from the topic of this post; I will save that particular rant for another day.)

Because my account is private, I’m just going to post a screen capture of the post, along with the actual text:

OMG, I checked my usual lineup of freebie blogs this morning, and I completely forgot about the Halloween Shop and Hop!!! 🤯

Because my neck and shoulder pain still limits how much time I can spend sitting in front of a desktop PC (and, obviously, that limited desktop PC time needs to be devoted to the full-time paying job that keeps a roof over my head, puts food on the table, pays my power, water, sewer, and broadband bills, and sustains my Second Life obsession), I will NOT be doing my usual notecards with gift descriptions, sizes, and exact SLURLs for this event. Please accept my apologies. I need to listen to my body, and my body is telling me to rest.

Instead, I will be relying on the ever-efficient FabFree folks’ spreadsheet, and on Naria Panthar’s fantastic unboxing videos on YouTube! I will direct you to those resources instead; when those links have been posted, I will update this Primfeed post accordingly. UPDATE: Here’s the FabFree spreadsheet: https://fabfree-hopandshop.vercel.app/

No freebie fashionista notes for the Second Life Halloween Shop and Hop this year, folks!

And it’s not only Second Life that I now have to severely cut back on. The last thing I want to do right now is add the weight of a virtual reality headset to my already aching neck and shoulders! So, for now, I am going to have limit my VR usage as well. However, I have read (via the r/AppleVisionPro and r/VisionPro subreddit communities on Reddit) several reports of people with neck and back problems who have successfully used their Apple Vision Pro AR/VR headsets while in a reclining position, either sitting in an armchair with good neck support or lying in bed, so I might look into that.

I have been spending a lot of time lying on the sofa lately, my head propped up on a good pillow, listening to various podcasts. I think I’ve listened to or watched every episode of the excellent Fall of Civilizations podcast, and I’ve started listening to the Literature and History podcast episodes, starting from the very beginning in 2016 (the podcaster, a Classics professor, is working in chronological order, starting with the surviving writings of the ancient Assyrians, Egyptians, and Greeks). Literature and history are subjects which I feel I have neglected in my personal post-high-school education, and now I have an opportunity to learn more about them!

I’m also feeling extremely fortunate that I can visit many clubs and other musical venues in Second Life via the steadily-improving Mobile app on my iPad (I am still in the alpha test program via TestFlite). The music stream is clear and sharp, and I can listen to my favourite deejays and musical performers, even while resting in bed or on the sofa! In the Mobile app, I can even use the performer’s tip jar on stage to send them a tip in Linden dollars, Second Life’s in- world currency, which of course is exchangeable into real-world U.S. dollars!

I’m also spending more time lately off-world, perusing and participating in both the long-running Second Life community forums and the newer, previously-mentioned Primfeed (again, both via my trusty iPad on the sofa). Even if I am not actually logged into the Second Life grid as one of my avatars, I can still keep up-to-date on SL news and events!

Finally, on the advice of my physiotherapist, I’m getting outdoors more and going for walks to the pharmacy, or my local café, or just around the neighbourhood. My plans to walk to and from work are currently on hold, because I don’t want to aggravate my neck and shoulders further with my backpack, even though it was purchased using advice from one physiotherapist, and properly fitted by a second one, last year.

This was after I had experienced numbness and tingling problems in my right arm and hand, due to a pinched nerve, which was caused by a cheap backpack I had bought a couple of years ago. Yes, folks, my sexagenarian body has been complaining for a while now, and now I have ergonomics on my mind for everything! Last weekend, I purchased and assembled a brand-new, high-end office/gaming chair with adjustable lumbar and neck support pillows, for use in front of my Windows desktop PC at home. I have also scheduled an appointment with the ergonomics office at my university, for a professional ergonomics assessment of my workspace.

As I stated in my Primfeed post above, I now have to stop and listen to my body, and my body is telling me that business-as-usual is not gonna cut it. This means that my self-imposed hiatus from blogging is likely to continue, at least for the short term. However, as I have just demonstrated, I can still blog via WordPress via my iPad while reclining on the sofa, which is how I wrote this entire blogpost today (using the handy Jetpack Mobile app).

Everything in my life has been thrown up into the air by my pain in the neck, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get through all this, and how my life is gonna look moving forward. Stay tuned for updates!

Yes, I am also looking into massage therapy, in addition to my regular physiotherapy appointments (Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash)

Taking a Moment to Catch My Breath and Figure Out Where I’m Going Next

So, as I have mentioned, I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I have been so busy with my full-time paying job as an academic librarian at my employer, the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Now that the annual rush of training hundreds of students on how to use the university libraries effectively and efficiently has ended, my attention turns to my other big project: specifying hardware and software for a virtual reality lab, which we are calling the XR Lab (the XR stands for eXtended Reality, a sort of umbrella term used for virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and what Apple is now calling spatial computing).

The purpose of this lab is to provide virtual reality and augmented reality hardware and software (both VR/AR experiences and content creation tools) to University of Manitoba faculty, staff, and students to support their teaching, learning and research. I have been working on this project for the past two and half years, and it is a weird feeling to finally see the computers removed from the room which we have designated as the future home of the XR Lab, in preparation for the necessary room renovations (which are to start soon, and are supposed to be completed by spring next year):

The former computer lab which will be renovated to create the XR Lab

In the meantime, I have been cross-training another Libraries staff member on the hardware and software which I am proposing for the XR Lab. In other words, if (God forbid!) I should get run over by a bus, the idea is that somebody will be able to give VR/AR demos in my place. There is a lot of information which has to be shared! For example, our last training session included a section on how to set the correct interpupillary distance (IPD) on both the Vive Pro 2 and Meta Quest 3 headsets (thankfully, the Apple Vision Pro automatically scans your eyes and sets the IPD automatically!).

Just another day in the office: the Vive Pro 2 VR headset is sitting on the Windows desktop PC it is tethered to on the right, the Meta Quest 3 is to the left near the back of the table, and the Apple Vision Pro is sitting at the centre, near the front of the table.

There’s a lot of balls to juggle, and I must confess that I often feel exhausted and even overwhelmed at times. When I come home from work, the last thing I want to do is write a blog post! So my formerly feverish blogging pace has unfortunately slowed to a crawl. Also, my blogpost viewing stats are way, waaay down. Where I used to get 1,500 views a day, now I’m lucky to reach even one third of that:

Partly it’s because the metaverse hype cycle has crested and crashed (and everyone has jumped on the artificial intelligence bandwagon), and partly it’s because longform blogs seem to be an increasingly outdated—even quaint—means of communication in the current short-attention-span era of Instagram pictures and TikTok videos.

Which means I seriously need to pause and think about what direction in which I want to take this blog, and who I want my audience to be. One of the things that I have always said is that, in a blog that literally has my name in the URL, anything I want to talk about here is on topic! However, I am wondering if perhaps I have cast my net a little too broadly, and it might be time to narrow the focus of the RyanSchultz.com blog somewhat.

I don’t think that I will cease blogging completely; I still feel the need to write, but I need to reflect a bit on what I want to write about, and why. I still do get a sense of accomplishment when I craft a well-written blog post on a topic that I care about and, as always, I read and appreciate all the comments and feedback I receive on my blogposts!

So please bear with me as I figure out where I am going next with (gestures broadly) all this.

It can be difficult to choose the next direction in which to go (Image by Rama Krishna Karumanchi from Pixabay)