This morning, at 6:00 a.m., I completed exactly 61 trips around the Sun (this is a correction to my earlier assertion that it was 62 trips; forgive me, I hadn’t had my coffee yet!). I am now 61 years old, and boy, lately I feel it! I am constantly feeling exhausted, and my hips and knees are giving me trouble; I usually take the elevator over the stairs these days. My birthday always falls in
A sampling of today’s news headlines from Google News. Shit is gettin’ WILD, y’all. Today, I wrote the following post on the new Second Life social media platform, Primfeed (which you can currently only read if you already have an account on Primfeed, as I have not yet chosen to make my Primfeed profile and posts publicly viewable): With all the batshit-crazy political news coming out of the U.S. today making me feel anxious and
I’ve had a good run, but it’s time for me to close this blog after a little over seven years and three months. It’s time. Please know that it has been an honour, a joy, and a privilege to write about a subject that I loved: virtual worlds, social VR, and the metaverse, plus virtual and augmented reality in general. This blog has opened many doors for me, and I am truly grateful for the
I am beyond tired; I am EXHAUSTED. Emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted. Everybody from my psychiatrist to my coworkers is telling me the same thing: there’s a LOT going on in my life at the moment, and I am feeling absolutely overwhelmed and worn out. In fact, I have been feeling so run down that I went to see my family doctor this week, who discovered that my blood pressure is too low, and who
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,
You might have noticed that I haven’t been blogging much at all lately. There’s a good reason for that. I have been so completely occupied with my full-time paying job as an academic librarian during this busy fall semester that I have had little time or energy left over to write up blog posts when I get home from work. I have, however, been making very good use of my new Apple Vision Pro VR/AR
Since I received my prescription lenses for my Apple Vision Pro on July 29th, I am nearing the end of my third week using the device almost every day, usually for an hour or two each day. The prescription lenses are magnetically attached to the AVP, so I can very easily remove them if and when I decide to start giving demonstrations of the Apple Vision Pro to other people! I’m still getting used to
Late last Monday afternoon, my prescription lenses for my new Apple Vision Pro arrived via UPS, and I was finally able to set up my AVP and download apps from the App Store (mostly educational and workplace stuff, because I’m not a gamer, and this is not a gaming headset). Here are some of my first impressions of the device, after using it for one week (and from the perspective of someone who plans to
This is not the review that I was expecting to write for the Apple Vision Pro. Last Friday, I took the day off work, and went down to the Apple Store in Polo Park, giddy as a kid on Christmas morning, to pick up my pre-ordered Apple Vision Pro. The demo and walk-through went very well, and I have nothing but praise for the store associate who led me through a basic tour of the
When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp. —Modern proverb, possibly Cajun A picture of the equipment setup in the temporary virtual reality demonstration room in Elizabeth Dafoe Library, with a Meta Quest 3 headset (left, the white headset), and the Vive Pro 2 headset with the “wand” controllers (centre front, the black headset). You can see on the wall-mounted faltscreen monitor