Visit Wales launches a Spatial experience with questionable claims

Executive summary

Welcome to your weekly briefing on the metaverse and spatial computing. Here are your snippets to sound smarter in meetings this week:

• Headline: Visit Wales launched a metaverse experience to promote tourism.

• London Event: The Immersive Wire is jointly hosting a networking event in London on 20 June. Come for free snacks and drinks, stay for good networking opportunities, and say hello to the London community.

• Other stories: The UK Navy explores using VR for navigation, Meta launched an experimental travel mode, and Marvel Studios unveiled a new story for the Apple Vision Pro (more stories below).

Analysis

Visit Wales launched a metaverse experience to promote tourism.

• Why are we talking about it? For one, it is a good example of PR plumping. The press release says there are over 600m visitors each year, though it's unclear how they got to such a large number. It also said that Wales is the first UK nation in the metaverse, which makes no sense and is not true. 

• How is the experience itself? It's good. Players can learn fun nuggets about Wales, and explore a world that reminds me a lot of Super Mario 64. As something that can be embedded into a website, I can see it being a fun way to engage potential visitors. But the amount of unnecessary plumbing it got by the PR team leaves more to be desired. 

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Other notable stories

Got any stories? Let me know at tom (at) immersivewire (dot) com.

• Loud Minds explores VR and immersive experiences in a new partnership with White Spark Pictures.

• Marvel Studios and ILM Immersive announce What If…? – An Immersive Story, the first-ever interactive Disney+ Original story coming exclusively to Apple Vision Pro.

• Meta launched an experimental travel mode.

• Some Assembly Required, a VR robotics sandbox game, will launch on the Meta Quest on 16 May.

• Ultraleap launched Hyperion, a next-generation tracking software platform.

• UK Navy explores using VR for navigation.

Got a news story? Contact me with the details here.

Note: The Immersive Wire is run by Tom Ffiske, who also works within Accenture’s metaverse group. The contents of the newsletter should not be regarded as Accenture’s views.