With Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter each in a state of disrepair, it should be no surprise that competitors are not just emerging but taking off. The first and most prominent competitor is TikTok, an international version of Douyin, which was released in the Chinese market in September 2016. TikTok was then released worldwide following a merger of its parent company with Musical.ly on August 2, 2018.

I write this post amidst ongoing chaos at Twitter HQ. It is November 21, 2022, and a few dozen more Twitter employees have flown away from the nest. Elon Musk is the company’s “Chief Twit”, and his latest decision to reinstate former President Trump’s Twitter account has the world chirping. Since Musk’s ownership, Twitter has shed 60% of its employees between layoffs and attrition, cut 80% of its contractors, and experienced a humiliating Twitter Blue product reconfiguration.

Founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram was an instant success. The app reached over one million users just two months after its release and reached ten million users in its first year. In some respects, its success should have been anything but a surprise: Mark Zuckerberg was an early courter, Jack Dorsey was an avid user, and Marc Andreessen and Chris Sacca had advised from the sidelines.

The year is 2004: Facebook is “open for popular consumption at Harvard University,” but Zuckerberg is anything but a household name (Wayback Machine, n.d.). The dominant social media platform is Myspace, and this continued to be the case for several years. In fact, by the time 2006 came around, Myspace was the most visited internet site in the United States (Lagorio, 2006).

I believe it would be wise to start off this series of posts by stating for the record that I am both a shareholder of Meta and, more importantly, have long been taken with the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I am fascinated by the company, formerly known as Facebook, as well as its founding. I fundamentally believe that it has changed social media forever and has made storytelling a pervasive phenomenon.

I believe that the small stories we imbed into our everyday products, services, and media are what transform our ordinary world into a place of intrigue and wonder. The small stories are not…boring. They are what makes the mundane extraordinary.

I joined the BMPD Storyteller team to help create the vehicle for sharing stories. This post describes how did I tell stories and convey the meaning behind a project through visuals and websites?

Technology and media surround us. What are the different ways of consuming media and are some more effective in immersion than others?

Photographs are known to be one of the earliest methods in which we capture media. Photography has evolved from its early days and continues to evolve as technology progresses. From your phone to a 360-degree camera, the levels of immersion vary from what kind of technology is present.

Videography, similar to photography, captures media within a frame. There are many ways to capture video, through a phone, drone, and even using smart glasses. Since video is a form of media that can capture more than a still, it is considered to be more immersive than photography.

360 photography captures a scene. It can capture more than a typical camera, offering more to see. We can see things that may not have been visible before, allowing us to take in all a scene.

Augmented Reality, shortened as AR is an experience where virtual objects are overlaid on top of the real world. This creates an experience that merges the real world and virtual items, creating a somewhat immersive experience, depending on the factors used for the AR. Popular and well-known examples of AR include Pokémon GO, and filters on Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok.

In the last technology used on the continuum, we explore virtual reality and its level of interactivity. Virtual reality is when a virtual environment is created using purely virtual objects. Things may appear to look real, when they are in fact 3D created objects with some kind of hyper-realistic material on them. Virtual reality can be used for many applications such as gaming, training, and educational purposes. Popular mentions of the word virtual reality include Metaverse, Facebook and Oculus.

Adding on to the last post of Learning in a Virtual World, we will be adding the finishing touches to our virtual environment. Assets and materials will be imported from the Unity Store into our scene, helping to recreate the classroom used during the beginning of the series. We will be also speaking about the repeated narrative of a Covid classroom while analyzing it with the reality virtuality continuum.