Re: Google Earth Meta Quest Pro
Lorean Hoefert
A fantastic new Meta Quest virtual reality experience immerses The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power fans in the underground dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dm. The Amazon original series depicts the Second Age of Middle-earth, as Sauron slowly rebuilds his empire and plots to craft the iconic One Ring. While a new Lord of the Rings game is currently in development at Private Division, Tolkien fans can now step into Moria during the height of its beauty and grandeur.While The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the latest big-budget adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, the world of Middle-earth has also inspired numerous video games. This includes action and role-playing games based on Peter Jackson's film trilogy, direct adaptations of Tolkien's novels and entirely new stories set within Middle-earth. The longest-running Middle-earth game, TheLord of the Rings Online, first launched in 2007 and continues to receive regular support. There are also several Middle-earth games currently in development, including the stealth game The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and the upcoming dwarf survival game LOTR: Return to Moria which is set within the ruins of Khazad-dm.Related: How Lord Of The Rings Online Fits Into Tolkien's Books & LoreAs announced by The Lord of the Rings on Prime via Twitter, a brand-new Meta Quest virtual reality experience lets fans travel to the cavernous realm of Khazad-dm. The location plays an essential role in The Lord of the RIngs: The Rings of Power, with the elf lord Elrond traveling there to consult with his dwarven friend Prince Durin and find the supernatural metal Mithril. Meta Quest transforms this breathtaking mountain kingdom into a full-fledged digital environment, which users can now visit for a limited time. The amazing caverns and walkways of Khazad-dm are recreated in stunning detail, though fans should keep an eye out for any Balrogs skulking around.
While previous Meta Quest headsets will let players retrace Elrond's footsteps and explore Khazad-dm, the upcoming Meta Quest Pro VR headset could make this journey even more awe-inspiring. Currently available to pre-order for a staggering $1,500, the Meta Quest Pro boasts a number of innovations and advancements compared to Meta's previous VR platforms. The upcoming headset includes a streamlined profile and counterbalanced design, making journeys to Middle-earth much more comfortable and immersive. Balanced self-tracking controllers will also make entering virtual reality with the Meta Quest Pro truly intuitive when it launches on October 25.
The Lord of the RIngs: Return to Moria will let players reclaim Khazad-dm for the dwarves, but Meta Quest gives fans the opportunity to truly immerse themselves in the iconic Tolkien setting. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power portrays the dwarven kingdom at its most gorgeous and grand, and now fans can step into the realm's hallowed halls themselves. Virtual reality headsets like the Meta Quest specialize in immersion, and the limited-time Khazad-dm experience looks to be particularly jaw-dropping.
The metaverse refers to the convergence of physical and virtual space accessed through computers and enabled by immersive technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. Described by proponents as the next iteration of the internet, this 3D virtual world is envisioned as a persistent, collective, shared space where digital facsimiles of ourselves, or avatars, move freely from one experience to another, taking our identities and monetary assets with us.
Visions of a parallel digital universe where humans can experience life in ways both akin to and not possible in the real world aren't new -- they predate the internet. But the concept of a blended physical and digital reality became more tangible in recent decades as technological advances -- from the near-universal adoption of mobile phones and rollout of high-speed internet to popular games such as Pokmon Go -- made the metaverse seem less far-fetched.
Hefty industry investment in metaverse-enabling technologies, the growth of online video games, breakthroughs in AI and the acceleration of remote work and socializing driven by the COVID-19 pandemic spurred more tech innovation and increased user adoption of online life.
In November 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta and announced a $10 billion investment in developing virtual experiences, prompting enthusiasts to anoint the metaverse as the world's new computing interface. Bill Gates jumped on the bandwagon, predicting that meetings would move from screens to the metaverse in two or three years. The hype was premature, though.
In late 2022, about the time ChatGPT captured the world's attention, the metaverse bubble popped. Financial losses ensued, notably Meta's $13.7 billion operational loss in its Reality Labs division for 2022 as a whole. Microsoft laid off employees from its Mixed Reality Toolkit and HoloLens teams, cryptocurrency collapsed and consumers, eager to return to their pre-COVID lives, were not clamoring for extended reality devices.
The losses at Meta's Reality Labs unit increased to $16.1 billion in 2023, and Disney cut its metaverse division. Media reports proclaimed the metaverse was dead. The backlash to metaverse overmarketing included industry repudiation of the term itself. In its 2024 debut of the Apple Vision Pro headset, Apple, for example, took pains to disassociate the device from the metaverse, calling it instead an entre to spatial computing.
Although the vision of a rapid gestation of fully-realized virtual worlds where humans work, shop and socialize from the comfort of their couches has dimmed, the metaverse isn't dead. Components of it are gaining traction as graphics and capabilities for virtual and augmented reality, bolstered by AI, rapidly improve. The development of new technology such as eye tracking, which uses sensors to monitor and record eye movements, promises to make visual experiences more engaging.
In the area known as the industrial metaverse, epitomized by the Nvidia Omniverse platform, companies are building digital twins to design and monitor physical objects. Businesses are also using virtual reality (VR) to train employees and applying augmented reality (AR) to overlay information on real-world objects, helping their employees work better.
What are companies to make of a technology phenomenon that's hot one day, cold the next and in the throes of rebranding itself? TechTarget's guide to the metaverse breaks down where this rapidly evolving set of technologies stands today and where it's headed.
Topics covered include the various technologies and platforms that support the metaverse, ongoing challenges, real-world use cases and the metaverse's impact on the future of work. Readers can follow the hyperlinks to other TechTarget articles for deeper dives into these and other topics, as well as to our in-depth definitions of key metaverse terms and novel techniques such as digital threads and Gaussian splatting.
Author Neal Stephenson coined the word metaverse in his 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash to describe a virtualized environment where people gained status based in part on the technical skill of their avatars. In addition to popularizing the concept of digital avatars, the novel's depiction of a networked 3D world is said to have influenced real-life web programs, including Google Earth and NASA World Wind.
Another novel that popularized the metaverse was Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, published in 2011 and later made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. It depicted a future where people escape real-world problems by entering The Oasis, a virtual world accessed using a VR headset and haptic gloves that provide tactile sensations. Such haptic feedback also became a key metaverse building block.
Fiction aside, the foundational technologies supporting an actual metaverse date back to the 1960s. The metaverse's legacy includes two other hype waves that are all but forgotten -- the first one in the early 2000s when use of the pioneering Second Life virtual community plateaued after initial growth, and the second in 2010 when the first VR headsets proved not to be the gateway to the metaverse that inventors anticipated. Both busts led to significant technological advances, though.
Here is a sampling of the inventors whose pioneering work proved integral to the current concept of the metaverse. A graphic showing a comprehensive timeline of metaverse technology milestones follows.
American cinematographer and inventor Morton Heilig built the Sensorama in 1962. The mechanical device simulated the experience of riding a motorcycle through New York City by using a 3D movie, vibrating chair, a fan and piped-in smells, providing one of the earliest immersive multimedia experiences.
American computer scientist and Turing Award winner Ivan Sutherland created his revolutionary computer program, Sketchpad, in 1963 as a student at MIT, laying the foundation for modern computer graphics and human-computer interaction.
Jaron Lanier, another American computer scientist, began his pioneering work in virtual reality in the mid-1980s, developing some of the earliest commercial VR headsets and data gloves.
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the first open source web server, browser and editor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, inventing the World Wide Web, a linked network of webpages, graphics and other media making information accessible and navigable.
In 2003, computer programmer and entrepreneur Philip Rosedale and his team at Linden Labs launched Second Life, an online platform for creating immersive, persistent, user-created virtual worlds.
Advances in virtual reality technology in the 2010s led by the likes of Palmer Luckey of Oculus VR -- now part of Meta's Reality Labs -- and developers at Sony, Google, Unity, Epic Games and other independent studios popularized VR use.
d3342ee215