The Valspar Color-verse web experience is a virtual house in the metaverse.

Paint and coatings brand Valspar, part of The Sherwin-Williams Co., is making itself at home in the metaverse.

On Wednesday, Sept. 7, it unveiled the Valspar Color-verse, a virtual house in the metaverse that highlights the brand's recent 2023 Colors of the Year announcement. Visitors to valsparcolorverse.com can check out those hot colors, create their own art with them and play a game called "Dash to DIY."

The goal, Valspar says, is to provide customers with "inspiration for their next project after experiencing the colors firsthand in the metaverse."

Gus Morales, vice president of brand marketing for Sherwin-Williams, said in a statement that the virtual home is "an engaging space for visitors to create art and play games" that "encourages visitors to order color chips to see how their top color picks look and feel in their home."

There are three wings in the Valspar Color-verse:

• The Paint Wing, where visitors choose Valspar's Colors of the Year and select walls of the living room, dining room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen to be repainted. Within this wing, visitors can order free paint chips of the 12 colors and try them out for themselves at home.

• The Art Wing, where guests can create art of a 3D panorama nature scene using the 12 Colors of the Year. Other guests can "like" the artwork they see, and the artwork can be shared on social media.

• The Game Wing, featuring the "Dash to DIY" game, where visitors maneuver a multi-lane road to Lowe's and pick up points for connecting with paint chips and avoiding obstacles.

Is Cleveland the next Venice?

That's the question posed by Forbes in this piece, which focuses on the impact of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. The second edition of FRONT, featuring art spread throughout the region, runs through Oct. 2.

Fred Bidwell, executive director of FRONT, draws the historic parallel this way: "In 1894, Venice, which these days we think of as a tourist location, a sparkling jewel on the Adriatic, was down at the heels–failed port city, a backwater of Europe, looking for a purpose. They needed to do something to rebuild and reimagine what that city meant and that was the origin of the Venice Biennale. ... That idea of a World's Fair of art changed Venice from being a has-been city to a really important destination. That's my dream for Cleveland."

Forbes says Cleveland "is better positioned to become 'the next Venice' than Venice was to become the first Venice," given its established art resources including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Transformer Station and others. (Not to mention cultural heavyweights including the Cleveland Orchestra and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

"Cleveland has these fantastic arts institutions, but often they don't get visited as much because (Cleveland's) not on the coast. It's not a big tourist city," Bidwell tells Forbes. "The birth of (FRONT Triennial) was what would happen if we brought all the museums of the region and some of the most important educational institutions together to do a contemporary art exhibition, united around one theme, led by one artistic director, for an entire summer every three years."

He adds that FRONT is "driven by ideas and free and open to the public, paid for by philanthropy. We are giving artists freedom to do work without a commercial motivation, outside of the pressure cooker of the commercial art world and providing the public with an experience that's very high quality."

Case Western Reserve University is in elite company in a new innovation ranking.

The university ranks No. 21 globally for the number of U.S. Utility Patents awarded to the university and its researchers, according to 2021 data compiled by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

CWRU in a story posted on its The Daily site noted that the report, published annually since 2013, ranks the top 100 universities worldwide named as the first assignee on utility patents granted by the Patent and Trademark Office.

The top institution for securing patents in 2021 was the University of California system, with 589 patents. Other schools in the top 10 included the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (335 patents), the University of Texas (203) and Stanford (181). CWRU, at 97 patents, was just behind No. 20 on the list, the University of Maryland, at 98 patents.

"The role of leading research universities in technology transfer and ultimately commercialization is greatly under-appreciated," said Michael Oakes, CWRU's senior vice president for research and technology transfer, in The Daily article. "The distinguished history of discovery and innovation at CWRU is only surpassed by our renewed focus on growing the research enterprise by solving tough problems in health, manufacturing, natural security, sustainability and community development."

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