Tencent Rethinks Its VR Strategy - Tech Insiders News, February 2023
A curated collection of «signal over noise» links about interactive technologies, AI, web3, sense-making, entrepreneurship, and psychology.
- Tencent, the China-based tech giant, is adjusting its Virtual Reality strategy.
As its competitor ByteDance’s Pico VR headset sales are skyrocketing, Tencent is rumored to be discussing with Meta to bring Meta’s headsets to China; while stopping all developments on its hardware.
It makes sense: Tencent, like Microsoft, is a software company, and both seem to have adjusted their focus in the past month.
Is it a sign that the VR market is shrinking? I don’t think so.
To me, the large movements that we are currently seeing in the VR industry are a rationalization; the hype has passed, and it’s now time for market-fit offers.
Tencent VR - The generative AI keeps getting better at exponential speeds. It will be too long to cover all updates here, so I’ll choose a thought-provoking one.
Control Net was released. It’s a new type of image generation tool that allows more control of the desired output image.
Someone posted an interesting thought (I’m paraphrasing and selecting): Can you imagine the (near) future where kids can turn their drawing into a high-detailed illustration, possibly a movie, or maybe a virtual world?
What was your feeling when imagining this? Amazed or scared? Maybe both? We often see statements like «Technology is neither good nor bad; there are only bad users.» I don’t really like that phrasing; it’s divisive and superficial.
Here is my take, inspired by this article: technologies are not values neutral. Every high technology impacts our society in deep and complex ways and have often unintended consequences.
We must stop developing technologies for their own sake as if they were isolated; instead, we need to think deeply about their impacts and relations to us, our society, and the earth, with human values in mind.
Credit https://www.reddit.com/user/metacryptom/ - Ok, this is really out of my area of expertise, but this newsletter is here to make you think, so bear with me: Cultured Meat is coming! This meat is grown in the lab from animal cells.
Let’s use the thought framework outlined above; what would be the impact or unintended consequences?
The end of factory farming? A radical shift in our alimentations, leading to global health changes? A different relationship between humans and animals? Shift in the economic balance if every nation can produce its meat cheaply? A cultural (pun intended) war with only two sides without nuance?
Oh, and since this is based on animal cells, maybe we will have lion meat or tiger meat, or… human meat?
Upside Foods
And today’s image, thanks to Midjourney: «A civilization realizing that technologies are not values neutral, but is it too late?».