Welcome, welcome. This is Metaverse Monday.

Each Monday, delve into the minds of industry pioneers, cutting-edge developers, and savvy investors in the VR/AR Metaverse space.

🔥💬 HOT TOPIC: 500,000,000 Golf Balls hit in VR.

🕹️⏱️ THE METAVERSE MINUTE: Meta goes head to head with Roblox.

🤖💡PRODUCT INSPO: The future of passthrough.

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🔥💬 HOT TOPIC: 500,000,000 Golf Balls Hit in VR.

Ryan Engle, founder of the hugely popular Golf+, is on a mission to double the size of the golf market by making it more accessible through VR. Find out why it’s working.

What do Jordan Spieth, Tom Brady and Stephen Curry all have in common?

They all invested in GOLF+.

The game, founded by Ryan Engle’s company Golf Scope, strikes a balance between being a simulator and a video game. When playing with a controller, it definitely plays more like a game, but with a controller attachment, it offers an impressively realistic experience, within the limitations of the current technology.

The mission for Ryan is to grow the game of golf by making it more accessible. That’s as simple as it gets. GOLF+ can make golf ten times cheaper, ten times faster, ten times easier to get started. It’s working! Over 1.25 billion shots hit in golf+ since launch! And over 3 million just yesterday!

Ryan’s story and insights can help founders/investors understand what works in VR Sports.

⛳ In Search of The Latest and Greatest

Ryan started his career developing iPhone apps in 2008, and loved how iPhone updates enabled him to get ahead of devs who had been developing for decades, and so he always was going after the latest and greatest technology - eventually Augmented Reality.

Using AR Kit he developed Golf Scope. AR-enabled golf green scanning app to provide guidance for golf putting, it got featured by Apple. When Oculus Quest took off Ryan pivoted in VR golf.

“The more I spend working on it and trying new things, I just feel like I’ve never been learning faster in my life. Once you’re in the VR headset, it’s like, you can do anything. You’re not limited to this tiny little screen of, like, being able to scroll and tap things, you can do anything. So the more I play with it, the more it leads to more experimentation.”

We are still early! There are lots of ‘firsts’ left in VR.

♻️ Getting Users to Come Back Again and Again

Golf+ finds a balance between a game for casual gamers and serious golfers.

But the connection to the IRL component of golf makes it much easier to market. Especially to people who may not have even tried VR yet. And even to people who have tried VR.

“Integrating IP is critical. We've thrived as a niche sport within the VR platform because of our clear value proposition. With Golf+, players can virtually explore iconic courses like Pebble Beach. Leveraging partnerships with the PGA TOUR and famous golf courses, we let enthusiasts experience their bucket-list courses in VR before they set foot on them. Our aim? Grow the sport by merging reality with the virtual world.”

The most important metric for Ryan is Weekly active players - who is playing once a week, who is addicted to the game? That stickiness is the most important. Connections to IP can keep people coming back, in an industry hampered by churn.

💪 Bullish on VR fitness

“Fitness seems to be one of the areas within VR that is creating a lot of value. The main areas seem to be entertainment, training, productivity and fitness. We put ourselves primarily in the entertainment category and plan to expand into training and as part of training, fitness. The fitness focused experiences are incredible. I've used many of them and have friends that use them as a major part of their workout routine, which is awesome.

As we get older, exercise can feel like more of a chore, and VR's ability to make breaking a sweat fun is a big deal. I think the space will continue to grow as headsets shrink in size and weight.”

“There's also the experience of playing the sport, like what we have with GOLF+. That will only get better. The graphics will get better as devices have more power and new techniques are invented. At some point we imagine you'll be able to stand on a course and it'll look photorealistic. You'll be able to run your hands through the blades of grass and see them individually move.”

​Read the full interview with Ryan here and a dive in the sports VR landscape.​

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🔦COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT🔦

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🌍 Community:

​Elijah Tai: He's building an ad network for XR over at ​zesty.market​

• “We currently have about 200k unique users that see our billboards across the spatial web each month (mainly through the Meta Browser). Our ads SDK is loaded 100k times each week.” Visit them here!

​David Urrutia:

• Former Meta (7 years) covering foundational audio capabilities, creative tools, content and new experience design for AR/VR between Spark, Oculus and the FoA. Working on Blast XR to pioneer the power of immersive audio. www.blastxrllc.com​

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🕹️⏱️ THE METAVERSE MINUTE:

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Meta Connect is confirmed for September 27th. Here Zuck will give a keynote, and Meta says the event will include "an in-depth look at new Meta products (we’re looking at you, Quest 3)" as well as "the latest in AI and XR innovation."

Meanwhile, Meta are on a mission to revitalise Horizon’s World (~200k MAU). It aims to achieve this by deploying a new in-house game studio, Ouro Interacrive to develop for the platform - see newly released Super Rumble HERE.

I played it this week and thought it was actually pretty fun. Unlike my previous stints in Horizon’s World, this time it was well-attended; I was in a full lobby!

Significantly, Super Rumble will be the first Horizon’s games beta tested for mobile. The game apparently looks better than most Horizon’s experiences due to being “Built with imported objects, assets and textures, something not previously possible with Horizon’s”. The ability to imported assets will apparently be available to hand-picked devs to start and be rolled out more widely down the line…

It appears Horizon’s is trying to go full Roblox, looking to mobile and UGC, whilst interestingly, Roblox is doubling down on VR. IMO stepping back and assisting Roblox with their IP/Audience to grow their VR segment to sell more Quest 3s and take 30% of Robux cuts would be a more efficient move, especially in light of recent Reality Labs losses, but let’s see what happens!

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Samsung confirmed on their earnings call that “Since last year, we have set up a team dedicated to microdisplays and are preparing for the XR market.”

Samsung is “productivity investing” into creating an “innovative” immersive product with a user experience that separates the conceptual device from others on the market.

Additionally, Samsung noted that the upcoming XR device would be unique to the Galaxy ecosystem of mobile computing devices – perhaps suggesting functionalities between Samsung devices.

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The XReal Beam is the latest innovation from XReal (prev NReal).

The Beam as an adapter for smart glasses, specifically the XReal Air (previously the NReal Air) smart glasses. The a streamlined device looks a little like an original iPod. With a few buttons for controlling audio and display options.

XReal says the Beam technology will empower users to make “everything spatial.” You’ll be able to mirror the display on your PS5 or similar products within your smart glasses and leverage multiple viewing options, including the option to shrink the display and move it to one side to avoid visual interference in your direct line of sight.

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Quick Hits:

• ​Roblox hits 1M downloads on App Lab in 5 days!​
• ​Snapchat launches rewards for AR creators​
• ​Virtuix crowd raises $4.7M for the Omni VR treadmill​

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​🤖💡PRODUCT INSPO:

Follow Us, @VRInvestments or on LinkedIn For More!

Have a great week 🙂

​Don Stein and Laurie Owen.

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