An invading force, 10,000 strong, marches through a storm toward a fortress built into the side of a mountain. From a distance, the combatants look like ants -- menacing and alarmingly well organized. They rattle their spears and snarl through teeth that have never known modern dentistry, and when lightning strikes, it reveals their sheer numbers. Volleys of arrows fly, swords find their way to the weak spots around breast plates. Bodies on both sides hit the ground. This bloody affair is the Battle of Helm's Deep, from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Andrew Glassner is a Senior Research Scientist at Weta Digital, where he combines deep learning and computer graphics to help artists produce amazing visual effects for movies and television. Glassner has served as Papers Chair of the SIGGRAPH '94 Papers Committee, Founding Editor of the Journal of Computer Graphics Tools, and Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics. A popular speaker, Glassner has delivered invited addresses to groups around the world on topics ranging from computer graphics and deep learning to story structure and narrative. Glassner has written and directed live-action and animated films, and was creator-writer-director of an online multiplayer murder-mystery game for The Microsoft Network. He has written novels and screenplays, and is developing a serialized story for podcast.

The term "metaverse" has spread through the internet and become a very hot topic. The idea of a huge, virtual online world is certainly exciting, and hundreds of companies have seen the apparent potential that the metaverse holds. But which big tech companies are making big investments into the metaverse, and why are they doing so? As a long-standing player in the tech game, it's no surprise that Microsoft is taking further steps into the metaverse. In January 2022, the company announced that it would be acquiring Activision Blizzard, the enormous video game developer and publisher, as a segue into securing a major spot in the metaverse.