AltSpaceVR held it’s final official Good Bye gathering on Thursday, August 3rd as they announced on July 27th that they had run out of money and their investors decided to not invest any more. News of AltSpaceVR’s closing rippled throughout the VR community over the past week, and some are wondering if it’s any type of bellwether about the overall health of the VR ecosystem. There have been a number of discussion threads on Oculus subreddit, Vive subreddit, Twitter that had employees chiming in on imminent plans and the challenges of dealing with trolls and harassment in VR.
I dug through my archives of unpublished Voices of VR interviews to pull out a discussion that I had with Amber Roy in March 2016 talking about the AltSpaceVR JavaScript SDK that she was working on at the time. She ended up leaving AltSpaceVR in July 2016 to go to work at Oculus on the React VR framework, but this discussion we had before GDC 2016 highlights the technical innovations AltSpace made with integrating web technologies within their social spaces. AltSpaceVR may have been too early with their three.js integrations as WebVR will be finally officially launching on Firefox this August with the release on Chrome hopefully coming later this year.
At the end of this podcast wrap-up, I share some of my reflections and lessons learned from AltSpaceVR including if optimizing for both mobile & high-end PC was too limiting, the potential importance of more robust options for identity expressions and world building, the importance of virtual economies being built into large social VR applications, and the challenges around harassment in VR. I also compare and contrast AltSpace VR with other social VR applications including Rec Room, VRChat, High Fidelity, Anyland, BigScreen, JanusVR, Spaces, Project Sansar, vTime, WebVR, and Decentraland. Amber also talks about her AmberVR YouTube channel where she plays GearVR games, and the importance of promoting mobile VR applications.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
AltSpaceVR was a pioneer and innovator in the social VR space creating the first bridge between mobile VR and high-end VR, and they published a video of community members sharing their favorite memories within AltSpaceVR:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZR14qnIIEw
Here’s my previous six Voices of VR interviews with AltSpaceVR since May 2014:
- May 2014 – #9: Cymatic Bruce on VR evangelism & Qualia3D, which became AltSpace VR
- September 2014 – #90: Cymatic Bruce on Virtual Social Spaces in AltSpace VR
- May 2015 – #143: Cymatic Bruce on building community with AltSpaceVR, & experiments in gesture input, VR locomotion, & multi-player web content in VR
- September 2015 – #214: Using three.js to Create Social VR applications with AltspaceVR’s JavaScript SDK
- November 2015 – #283: AltSpaceVR’s Eric Romo on the Early Challenges of Social VR
- May 2016 – #364: Social Dynamics in AltSpaceVR After the Consumer Launch of VR
Here’s a popular event featuring Reggie Watts and Justin Roiland Live in VR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nu5cPqZFF8
One of their last big events was Bill Nye talking about 8 Principles About Everything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-6s-x1TvcA
Finally, UploadVR’s David Jagneaux captured some of the final moments of AltspaceVR’s Good Bye party on August 3rd (although it was still online as of Friday afternoon, but could go offline at any moment).
Donate to the Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So on July 27th, AltspaceVR announced that they would be closing down. They were in the process of trying to raise their next round of fundraising, but their investors backed down and they didn't re-up on their investment. Altspace was very early on the social VR scene. They had released applications for the Gear VR as well as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive and just recently the Google Daydream View. They had about 35,000 active monthly users and about half of those were on the mobile VR scene. But it just wasn't growing at a rate that were giving their investors any confidence. They also weren't really charging for much of anything that they were doing. It was free to run your own private events. And I think there was just a couple of combinations of not having a viable revenue stream, but also just the overall VR ecosystem growing at a slower pace than what the investors would have liked. So AllspaceVR was a little bit of a canary in the coal mine in terms of like, is this an indicator of what is happening on the larger VR scene? And I just got back from SIGGRAPH and there was a little bit of a chill. On the other hand, within the context of SIGGRAPH, virtual reality is continuing to really push forward the state of art of graphics and technology. And I think there's still a lot of innovation that's happening. There's just larger questions in terms of some of these companies like AltspaceVR, how are they going to make it into a viable business as they move forward? So I hope to, at some point, catch up with more people from Altspace to really do a bit of a debriefing about what happened, some of the lessons learned. I went through my archives and my backlog. I've got a few hundred episodes that I've recorded over the past three years. And I actually did an interview with Amber Roy, who was still working at Altspace. She was still working on the JavaScript SDK. And I figured I'd pull that interview out where she's talking a bit about the SDK that they have developed, because I think that Allspace was actually doing a lot of really interesting things of trying to blend in these web VR technologies within a Unity shell. And I think that there's going to be lots of opportunities to continue some of these projects that some of these developers have made, but perhaps maybe on a WebVR stack rather than within the context of AltspaceVR. Over the years, I've had a chance to do about six interviews with Altspace and Very soon after I did this interview, I had a chance to catch up with Cymatic Bruce at SVVR 2016, which was episode 364, where we really got a lot of the information about what had been happening at AltspaceVR since the consumer launch of all the different major virtual reality platforms. And soon after I conducted this interview, Amber had left Altspace to go over to Oculus and she's actually been working on the ReactVR framework there for Facebook. So I just figured I'd pull this episode out because we're talking about Altspace and I'll take the opportunity at the end here to give more of my thoughts and reflections about AllspaceVR, what they were able to accomplish, perhaps some of the things that went wrong or weren't working quite as well, and some of the other implications for what this means for the larger virtual reality ecosystem. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And this interview with Amber happened at a VR hackathon that was happening before GDC 2016 in San Francisco, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:37.753] Amber Roy: My name is Amber Roy, and I'm a VR software engineer at AltspaceVR. I've been there a little bit over a year now, and I'm focusing on the JavaScript SDK.
[00:03:47.478] Kent Bye: Great. So what is happening with the JavaScript SDK for Altspace?
[00:03:51.431] Amber Roy: So basically, it lets you run 3JS JavaScript apps inside of Altspace. So you can build them using standard web tools and just write a few lines to speak to our APIs. And then your app can run inside of the Altspace browser.
[00:04:09.136] Kent Bye: And so I've been in Altspace. I've been in the Gear VR version. And they have different air hockey tables, a dragon, a flappy bird. Maybe you could talk about how many of those types of interactive dynamic experiences are being driven by the JavaScript SDK and how much are native Unity code.
[00:04:27.392] Amber Roy: So I think all the ones you've mentioned are JavaScript. So the Flappy Dragon and Air Hockey were both built by third-party developers. The chess I built. And I think the only one that's not SDK right now is the disk, flying disk. But generally, when you see those apps that are kind of running in a small part of the room, then they're doing it through the SDK.
[00:04:49.751] Kent Bye: So from your perspective, what is that enabling in being able to allow new demographics to be able to participate in social VR experiences? Why should somebody use this SDK to create immersive experiences?
[00:05:04.469] Amber Roy: Sure, there's a few reasons. I think the primary reason is you don't have to know a game engine, you don't have to be a Unity programmer or Unreal Engine, you can just use JavaScript and web technology. So for people that aren't familiar with game engines, it can lower the barrier to entry. or you might have 3D models to just import them very quickly, or even if they have existing, you know, 3JS apps, they can port them over. So in some ways, it makes it easier to get something going. And also, Altspace handles a lot of the complexity of you don't have to worry about having a player avatar or worrying about voice over IP to allow your users to communicate. So we handle the avatars and the camera movement and let the users communicate with each other. And we even provide libraries to help with the synchronization and game networking. So it's kind of fast tracking these apps. So the developer can focus more on the content and not on sort of all this infrastructure that normally goes into VR apps.
[00:06:01.152] Kent Bye: And so maybe you could talk a bit about your background in terms of how you kind of got into VR through this web development stack.
[00:06:09.249] Amber Roy: My background is actually more in backend, server-side development, and then I was doing iPhone apps, and then I tried the DK1, and it blew my mind, and I couldn't go back to making apps for this little phone. I'm like, I have to figure out how to make VR apps as soon as possible. But I didn't have any game development experience, so learning a game engine, seemed kind of daunting, but when I heard about WebVR, through some of the talks that Tony Parisi had gave, that just seemed like an easier path to get in, and I built my first WebVR app at the VR Hackathon in 2014. And it turned out that was actually the world's first WebVR game. Up to that point, all the WebVR experiences had been kind of more static, but I wanted to do something interactive, so I built a little game, and people had so much fun playing it, that really just motivated me to keep going. What was the game? It was called VR Planet Chase, and it looks really primitive now, but I remember it was like my first 3JS app. It's at vrplanetchase.com. You can play it on the Oculus Rift, or even there's a kind of version on the desktop, or kind of a preview version on the phone.
[00:07:12.020] Kent Bye: So what is it about virtual reality that gets you excited or passionate about it?
[00:07:15.970] Amber Roy: I think it's the degree at which my mind is just tricked. Like, it's amazing that you really feel like you're there. I remember one of the first experiences I had was being on the roller coaster, and I remember looking down and seeing my legs, and then I'm like, oh, I wonder what my hands look like. And so I raised my hands up to look at them, and of course my avatar's hands didn't move, because I wasn't holding any motion controllers, there was no hand tracking, but my brain was 100% convinced that if I moved my hands in real life, my avatar's hands were gonna move. even though on some level I knew that wasn't my body, but on another level I thought that it was somehow. It's this really kind of interesting sense of immersion and presence that I'd never experienced before. And yeah, it's just really compelling.
[00:07:59.131] Kent Bye: What are some of your favorite stories of, you know, some virtual reality experiences that you've had?
[00:08:04.353] Amber Roy: Well, I've been playing mostly Gear VR games recently. Well, I mean, Alt Space is where I spend most of my time for work, but then as far as games, I have a Gear VR, I've been playing those games, and there's this game, Dead Secret, where you're in a house, And I remember trying to solve the mystery and then at one point wanting to take a break and thinking, oh, I'm going to take off my headset and put it on this table. And then when I took off my headset, the table disappeared because it was in the virtual world, not in the real world. But that game, they did a really nice job with the scale and the setting. So even though you obviously know you're in your home, a part of your brain thinks, I'm in this house. So games like that really kind of transport you into a new place. So I like that game. I also like the shooter games as well. I played Into the Dead on Gear VR, and I played that on the mobile phone. I played the mobile version and I liked it a lot, but when I tried it in VR, it was so much better. I mean, it was just as good, but better. And I don't usually like horror games, so I probably wouldn't have played it if I hadn't already played it on the Gear VR. But it was fun. Dodging zombies, there's a lot more urgency to it when you're in VR. And you're going to actually crash into them, as opposed to just on your mobile phone when there's this distance between you and the screen.
[00:09:20.486] Kent Bye: So yeah, maybe you could talk a bit about your YouTube channel, where you're starting to actually do some reviews of some of these Gear VR games.
[00:09:26.765] Amber Roy: Cool, yeah, I played a few Gear VR games and noticed that there weren't many people putting videos up, so I decided to start doing it, and also to try to maybe get more people into VR by showing them what's available on the Gear VR, because I think on some level it's kind of an underappreciated platform right now. Of course, the Rift and the Vive are amazing, and those are like the flagship VR experiences, but there's some really cool games available on Gear VR right now. and it could be accessible to more people because of the price point. So yeah, I started making these videos and got really good feedback from people that saw them and people started calling them reviews. I didn't really intend them to be reviews because I'm not like a critic, but I guess people were saying, oh, I want to know if I should buy this game and so I'm going to look if there's any videos and that's how they found my channel. So I was kind of doing it just more to show off my awesome skills and gameplay. But I think people have been helped trying to decide which games they want to buy. And you can't really tell by the screenshots if you're going to like a game. There's so much more to actually seeing a video. Well, it's a 2D video, but it gives you a lot better sense of the gameplay and if you're going to enjoy the game as opposed to the screenshots that are on the Oculus Store right now.
[00:10:35.820] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that the color commentary and the reflections and your thoughts as you're going through it are usually kind of a good part for me, at least, is to making some of those judgments. So do you do that or do you do sort of silent playthroughs?
[00:10:48.463] Amber Roy: Oh, I definitely do a good commentary while I'm playing. And I try to keep my video short, like about five minutes in length. So in a short period of time, people can get an idea of basic controls and objectives of the game. Because a lot of these games right now don't even have tutorials or very limited instructions. And so sometimes it's even hard to figure out how to play or what you're supposed to be doing. And I really like playing with the gamepad. And a lot of times, they don't even document how to use the gamepad. So I try to describe tips, but also just, you know, how to play for people that might be new to VR.
[00:11:23.995] Kent Bye: Yeah, some of my favorite games on the Gear VR are the Smash Hit, where you're kind of flying through this world where there's these objects flying at your face, and you kind of have to shoot a ball to break the glass, and I just think it's a beautiful aesthetic, and it's got just great music, and just really fun gameplay, and it's also something that you can kind of get better at, you know, you could just get, like, start to shoot and, you know, hit two targets with one, you know, shot, and start to get up to, you know, five balls, It's kind of an infinite runner after you get to level 11, but it just keeps on going. But that's just one that I found really meditative. And another one that I really enjoyed was the Spirit Hero Bounds with the games where it's kind of like this adventure. I was actually playing that so much that the battery would die. I would have to charge it up and then get it back and then play it as much as I can. And I just felt myself getting to the point of playing until my phone either overheated or died, and I just kept on pushing through.
[00:12:20.735] Amber Roy: Yeah, I also really like Smash Hit. That's one of my favorites. The physics in the simulation is awesome. Another thing that was interesting for me about that game is, well, as you mentioned, it's kind of an infinite runner where you go forward automatically, and then you just have to shoot things that you're passing by. And I played that on the train, and it was really cool, because the train's going forward, and, like, you're going forward in the virtual world. So, yeah, infinite runners are really cool on the train. That's a tip.
[00:12:47.847] Kent Bye: That's a good tip. Are there any other games that you think or perhaps ones that maybe overlooked or ones that are just kind of personal favorites?
[00:12:56.291] Amber Roy: Land's End will always have a special place for me because that was the first game that I played in VR. And it's also one that I often used to demo people who haven't used the gear VR before because they have a really good movement scheme where you don't need a controller, you can just look. It's not really slow paced, but you kind of go at your own pace. There's no enemies or things trying to shoot you. It's more kind of an exploration type game. So that was really fun and a good intro for people new to VR.
[00:13:24.078] Kent Bye: Yeah, one Gear VR app that I pop into every now and again just to explore is the Street View VR, where you're kind of like, it's not a game, but you can just use a voice recognition and go to different places all over the world and kind of just get the sense that you're actually going to these different places. I think that's an interesting thing about Gear VR is that Oculus has reported that about half of their experiences are non-gaming, so either videos, photos, or these other app experiences, and then a little less than half are gonna be games. I'd expect that to play out, especially with the Gear VR being bundled with the S7 and more and more people who may not be coming from a gaming background getting a hold of a Gear VR and maybe not necessarily interested in the gaming part. Are there any kind of non-gaming applications that you would like to point out?
[00:14:13.990] Amber Roy: AltSpaceVR. Yeah, AltSpaceVR is the company I work for, so of course, you know, I really love that. And I think that is probably the most complex app on the Gear VR store right now, because we're multiplayer, you can talk to different people in the world. And as I was saying at the beginning, we're also running a web browser inside of Altspace. And so you can browse the web, watch YouTube, watch Netflix. We have events where we have comedians or quiz nights or people come in. So there's a lot going on in that app. And we're only at the beginning. And I think the Gear VR apps are going to get even more complex and interesting as time goes on.
[00:14:55.167] Kent Bye: It's a lot easier for me to jump into Altspace from a Gear VR than it is to go to my computer and set up the Rift and everything. It's just a little bit easier to pop in and be able to teleport around and have conversations. I've done a number of events in there and been really impressed with both the level of interactions that I can have in there. So yeah, I'm excited to see how it evolves in the future because I think that as kind of like this eternal September with more and more people getting into VR, what type of activities, events, and stuff that seems to be really sticky and popular of things that people want to actually do. For example, some of these games, is that what people are going to want to do? Or is it going to be more of a conversational base, so topics or specific people talking about things? doing things to be able to have interactions in VR socially that would be impossible to do face-to-face. Not only the geographic location, but being able to talk to, say, more than, you know, 10, 30 people at the same time, which gets a little unwieldy with, you know, voice-over IP, Skype, and whatnot. But also potentially doing some sort of, like, computer-mediated moderation to be able to have different types of dynamics, interactions, social games that would be impossible to do face-to-face.
[00:16:16.584] Amber Roy: Yeah, and AllSpace is an interesting example, because I believe it's the only app that's out for Gear VR, Oculus, and the Vive. We're on beta for the Vive and Oculus, and we're in the Gear VR store. And so, yeah, being in Gear VR, you might have lower-quality graphics, but you have more freedom of movement in the sense of you're untethered, because with the mobile headset, you can turn around 360 degrees and not be, like, tripping on cords. So it depends, you know, what kind of experience you're having. But if, as you mentioned, if you're in a space with a lot of people and you're moving around that space or you're talking to people in front and behind you, kind of that untethered, you know, VR could be a good fit for that kind of experience. And so I think maybe certain experiences will kind of gravitate towards certain platforms. So yeah, definitely like high quality gaming will probably be more on the rift. But I'm coming from more of a console gaming background, so I didn't have a high-powered computer. I'm actually building one right now. So that's another reason that Gear VR is pretty interesting to me.
[00:17:13.987] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what that might be able to enable?
[00:17:21.475] Amber Roy: Well, for me, even spending just 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes in VR and having a game or communication or just doing something, it's such a break. Or it can be so, like you mentioned, meditative or relaxing, or just a break from the stress of kind of everyday life, you know, because people now are so plugged in on our phones. or all these apps. But when you're in VR, you have to be fully present in that virtual world. So it kind of forces you not only to disconnect from technology, but take a break from whatever's going on around you that might be stressing you out. And so I think it might be a good way for people to sort of just take a break in a way that can be hard to do when there's so much that's kind of chaining people to their phones or their jobs or commuting or all this stuff. So to me, I think that there can definitely be a lot of applications for you know, medicine and education, but I think just kind of, you know, stress relief and like recreation and maybe helping people just enjoy life a little more.
[00:18:23.804] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah, I think that that's a good point just because, you know, there are sort of a lot of lofty applications, but there is a lot of value in gaming and relaxation. And talking to Joshy Schell, he said that gaming is often the innovator of a forefront of new communications mediums, whether it's like the Game Boy leading to a lot of user interface that eventually got fed into like the modern cell phones and the different ways of interacting. I think gaming and play could potentially lead to a lot of innovations, but also just reduce a lot of stress and allow people to have fun and do things they could never do in real life.
[00:19:00.825] Amber Roy: Yeah, exactly. I used to be an avid snowboarder, but definitely the time and money to get up to the mountain. I'm not saying skiing in VR is going to be the same as doing it in real life, but for a short, contained experience. Once you have the VR equipment, you can do so many different things, so many different applications or games that you can have a lot of variety in a short amount of time. And it might even get you excited about things that you want to do in real life. So it can go both ways. You can have an experience in real life and then that could influence you to try something in VR or the other way around. You could experience something in VR and then decide, oh, I want to see that city in real life. In fact, that's happened to me with video games. I've played a video game that was set in a certain city, in a different country even, and it kind of inspired me. Oh, I would love to see that. I would love to see that place in real life. It just got me interested. and made me feel like I already knew a little bit about it, playing an open world game, exploring the city, and then going there in real life. And that was even just on a standard screen game, and even more in VR.
[00:20:00.975] Kent Bye: Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:20:05.637] Amber Roy: I love your podcast, and keep going.
[00:20:10.278] Kent Bye: Awesome, well thank you.
[00:20:11.839] Amber Roy: Thank you.
[00:20:13.657] Kent Bye: So that was Amber Roy. She formerly worked on the Altspace VR JavaScript framework and is now over at Facebook working on the React VR framework. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, I think that Altspace had a lot of really large ambitions to be able to create social VR experiences that could really cross over between the mobile and the high end PC VR. I think that on some dimension, choosing to both serve mobile VR as well as a high-end VR was a huge limiting factor for all the different things that Altspace could eventually do. Specifically, just the level of graphics, the fidelity, the avatars, the worlds that you're able to create had to be optimized for a mobile VR. And I think that downgraded the experience for people who had high-end PCs as well as a Rift or an HTC Vive. So I think that at the end of the day, they had to go with the lowest common denominator in order to serve the mobile VR experiences. What that meant was that they were able to potentially have the scale to have super large events, but whenever you don't have your hands in the experience and you just have lower graphic fidelity, then it just makes it a little bit more challenging. I think if you look at some of the more successful social VR applications like Rec Room, that's when you have your full ability to express your agency, you have a sense of embodiment with your hands that are being tracked, and you're able to actually feel really engaged and present with some of these activities that they have within Rec Room. I think that alt space made the choice of trying to achieve that level of agency as well, but it was just a little bit more downgraded when you're doing a level of abstraction whenever you're interacting with these mobile VR frisbee golfs or whatnot. So I don't think that they really ever found a sweet spot of what types of interactions really worked well. However, I will say that because they made available this JavaScript API, some of their most popular applications were created by that JavaScript API. They had both the Cards Against Humanity experience, which I think was probably one of their more popular experiences to have these social game. And there's also a painting application as well that was also developed through the JavaScript framework. Now, I think that there was also limitations in terms of user identity and expression of identity with the avatar system that they had. I think it was always a little bit something to be desired in terms of what type of body representation that I personally wanted to have within AltSpaceVR. I didn't necessarily feel like I was able to ever really embody an avatar that really felt like me. And that's a problem within social VR. You want to be able to express your identity. And so I hear from some of the developers that they were in the process of doing a whole revamp for their whole avatar system, as well as make it easier for people to make their own worlds. But it looks like it may have been a little bit too little too late in terms of having people be able to really dial in the avatar that they wanted, but also make it easier to be able to create these different worlds. When you look at something like VRChat, for example, they've made it possible to have anybody who can create a Unity application to be able to start to create these different worlds. And so you have a lot more innovation in terms of user generated worlds and activities that are possible, but also the avatar system within VRChat is probably the most sophisticated avatars that I've seen. Just being able to see what people are doing with those avatars is just amazing to witness. However, VRChat is not on any of the mobile platforms, largely due because of constraints that you have to embrace in order to be optimized for mobile VR. So some of the extent of identity expression and world building really needs to have the high-end PC. The other thing is that there wasn't necessarily an economic model for revenue built into the ecosystem. I think that if you look at something like Decentraland, they're starting with the economic model first and foremost by selling an ICO on the blockchain, and the virtual reality aspect is almost kind of an afterthought to that. So we'll see if that model is able to yield an environment where there's actually an opportunity for people to make money and an incentive for people to create something that is interesting and of value. Without that incentive, there was a little bit, like, based upon the goodwill of people to be able to create these experiences for people. I think that VRChat actually also faces a similar problem in terms of not having an economic model sort of built into the fabric of their interactions, as well as RecRoom. RecRoom is a free app, but at this point, there's no revenue streams that have been introduced within those types of applications. So those are challenges in terms of, do people want to pay in order to interact with each other in social VR? And I think another dimension that was challenging for Altspace VR was just the issue of harassment. Whenever you make it easy for anybody to jump in and be anonymous, then there was just a lot of harassment that was going on. And so there were some things that Altspace had developed in order to counter that. They implemented the personal space bubbles, which is a great feature that I think a lot of different applications will need to have. But that wasn't necessarily stopping people from coming in and still just griefing people in the welcome area. news users coming in for the first time and just immediately being barraged by different trolls that were there. So they had to do a lot in terms of having community moderators there to help police it. And I think they also made the decision to make it easier to have people have private events that they could have just their friends come into, which was great for people who were able to Have those private events, but yet at the same time I think it was difficult for people just dropping into old space VR It would be a little bit more of a ghost town if everybody was hidden away within those private events So because they were operating at the scale of all the people on the mobile phones, the issue of harassment just became much more of an issue. And in terms of technical achievement of what Altspace was able to do, they were able to do an impressive cross-platform application that not a lot of other people were able to really pull off. But again, I'd just point out that there's these different trade-offs between when you're doing something that was both for mobile VR as well as a high-end PC, then you kind of have to make a lot of decisions that are optimized for that mobile VR experience and the people who are in the high-end PC just have a little bit more of a downgraded experience. I was able to have a few of the Voices of VR meetups within AltspaceVR. And it was great to be able to not only have an interaction to speak to my listening community, but also have an opportunity for people to connect and interact with each other. And when I look at the social VR space that's out there, we have social VR games like Rec Room, which is probably the most popular social VR application that's out there. Then VRChat, I think, is doing some of the most interesting experiments within social VR. High Fidelity's out there, they're building something that's a little bit more distributed on the web stack. And so they're doing some of the most technically interesting aspects of being able to be distributed on the web. Anyland is an amazing application that if you haven't checked out, it's a Vive application that you can go in and start to do your own creation. It's more about world building. You're creating worlds and interactions. Anything that is in Anyland was created within Anyland. And there's like this easy way to do this. Scripting and interactions and have an interview with someone who's spent quite a lot of time Exploring and doing different social experiments within any land that I have coming up here. There's also Jonas VR web VR I think is gonna have a lot of social VR applications and Project Sansar from Linden Lab just launched this past week. And so that's a whole new social VR space that's available that is made by the creators of Second Life. And so again, they have a lot more of the economic systems in place as well as a whole user base from Second Life that are coming in and looking at how they can start to set up different businesses and create different experiences within Project Sansar. And then finally, there's big screen VR, which I think is probably one of the most popular social VR experiences that are out there. It's difficult to know for sure because there hasn't been any specific usage numbers released by the developer, but because it's got this private encrypted way of being able to interact with each other, it's actually created this environment to connect deeply with people. One of the other challenges I'd say that Altspace had is that they did allow you the ability to locomote anywhere at any time. Focusing on that user agency and that ability to explore around a space, but that also weakened the amount of social cohesion and emotional connection that you have with people when they can start to just teleport away. There's a way to navigate around without teleporting, but most people when they're in all space VR kind of blip around and it just creates a different dynamic. And when you're in big screen VR, there's a little bit less moving around. It's a little bit more like V time on the mobile application side, but on big screen, you have an ability to share your identity based upon whatever you're looking at on your computer screen. And it just provides more opportunities for people to have conversations with each other about either a game or a different project that someone's working on. Whereas in AltspaceVR, you're a little bit limited by your ability to express your identity in a specific way. So I hope to catch up with some of the co-founders and developers of AltspaceVR, probably coming up at the Oculus Connect 4, and do a little bit more of a debriefing and some of the lessons learned from AltspaceVR. So that's all that I have for today. Just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and become a member of the Patreon. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference to help me continue to bring you this type of coverage. So you can donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
