Ultraleap in Haptics
Ultraleap, a company focused on developing hand-tracking haptic interfaces (vital for a fully immersive experience in XR) announced it completed a £60 million ($82 million) Series D round of investment. This will allow the company to better commercialize their technology for XR platforms.
Niantic’s Metaverse
Joining the train of tech companies announcing their own development of the “Metaverse”, Niantic (the company behind the AR game Pokémon GO) announced it gathered a $300 million Series D investment which values the company at $9 billion. The Metaverse can be thought of as an immersive internet, which would involve digital overlays on your real world surroundings, not just virtual reality. Niantic wants to develop on that part.
Disney (A Whole New World)
There is 0 surprise that Disney wants to put a piece of itself into the Metaverse. Japanese social VR startup HIKKY has a virtual Disney Store. The Walt Disney Company is also hopping on the Metaverse train and announced they would be creating their own branded version of it.
Resident Evil
Meta announced that Resident Evil 4 VR is the fastest selling game on Quest to date. The game Resident Evil didn’t need much introduction when it was developed in VR, as the game already had plenty of fans and a film series based on the game. Still, Meta had done lots of marketing for the game before its release.
Side note:
Companies have still been riding high on Metaverse marketing the past month, claiming that the private VR / AR network they’re developing is in fact, a “Metaverse”. History will likely see that as a misunderstood buzzword for 2021 that tech companies capitalized on, while the real Metaverse in the coming years emerges as an evolved, immersive internet.