For far too long, Virtual Worlds have been lumped into the gaming category, when they are more than games. There are games within Virtual Worlds, but Virtual Worlds are not just games.
The user generated content aspect and potential of Virtual Worlds has also for far too long, been overlooked or treated with contempt. However as the Virtual Reality hype cycle keeps gaining traction, people are finally starting to talk about more than games.
This brings me on to two articles I’ve been reading today, one about a platform called ROBLOX, which I will confess I’d never heard of before but I’m glad that I now have and the other is about AltspaceVR, which I have heard about before and I’m pleased to see that AltspaceVR is making interesting strides. There are differences with the approaches of these platforms, but they both seem to agree that the future is social.
Before I highlight the article on ROBLOX, it’s probably a good idea to mention what ROBLOX is, so I’ll quote their blurb :
ROBLOX is the best place to Imagine with Friends™. With the largest user-generated online gaming platform, and over 15 million games created by users, ROBLOX is the #1 gaming site for kids and teens (comScore). Every day, virtual explorers come to ROBLOX to create adventures, play games, role play, and learn with their friends in a family-friendly, immersive, 3D environment.
ROBLOX founder, co-created and CEO, David Baszucki, has posted an article on The Huffington Post : Why Co-Experience Is the Ultimate Killer App for Virtual Reality. David is an enthusiast, early on he talks about The Metaverse, Snow Crash and more. David talks about how storytelling has evolved and continues to evolve.
David also talks about why the future or VR will be social, or as David terms it “Co-Experience” :
I would like to introduce a new category that I believe will ultimately be larger than gaming, and that is the “Co-Experience” category. Mojang (Minecraft), Second Life, and ROBLOX have typically been categorized with games, but unlike traditional game businesses, these companies provide human co-experience based on user generated content (UGC). They provide a long tail of experiences that satisfy a wide range of social activities. On these platforms, one can participate with friends in the Hunger Games, hang out at a disco, or survive a tornado together. More and more, companies in this co-experience space will provide social graphs to play with friends across phones, tablets, computers, consoles and VR.
The article makes for a very interesting read. Meanwhile over at USA Today, Edward C. Baig has been taking a more in depth look at AltspaceVR and has published an article : The promise and growing pains of social VR. Early in the article Edward makes a very interesting point about Virtual Reality and it’s one I’ve heard similar commentary about regarding virtual worlds such as Second Life :
Mind blowing as such experiences can be, however, you often find yourself in a solitary reality, otherwise disconnected from fellow human beings.
That, in a nutshell, is why social is so important, because people do not always want to be all alone on an immersive island. The article also highlights issues that will dampen the VR excitement at this stage, the technology isn’t quite there yet, but it’s certainly getting there. Edward also, inevitably, makes references to Second Life and highlights why AltspaceVR isn’t quite the same :
The various virtual rooms and landscapes where such exchanges take place bring to mind the avatar-inhabited online world Second Life from Linden Lab, now approaching its 13th anniversary. Linden Lab is developing its own creator platform for social VR under the codename Project Sansar, with general availability expected by year end.
While Second Life is much about building stuff and spending the Linden Dollars virtual currency, Altspace is focused more on being a communication platform.
But the technology just isn’t fully there yet. I experienced repeated crashes, or I’d tap the side of Gear VR to select Altspace icons or enter rooms and nothing happened. Sometimes a poor Wi-Fi or cellular connection was the cause, sometimes not.
There’s also talk of problems entering a comedy club for what AltspaceVR described as the biggest VR event yet. This was a performance last Friday by comedian and musican Reggie Watts. Edward had a bit of trouble technology wise and I’m sure many Second Life users can sympathise with that situation, but Edward did manage to catch some of the show :
AltspaceVR’s CEO Eric Romo concedes that the experience was “mixed.” At peak there were more than 1200 attendees, exceeding company expectations, and about ten times as many people, Romo believes, who have ever gathered before for a single VR event. It was also something of an achievement that attendees could come at it from different VR vehicles.
But then there were all the many people like me who had a heck of a time getting in.
1200 attendees for a live show is bloody impressive, so it’s not surprising that there may have been some technical glitches. However if VR is going to be a big social success, it will have to be able to handle audiences of this size and probably well beyond this amount.
Other aspects of an important social VR experience are going to involve ease of access and creativity. Linden Lab are well aware of this and that’s why in their press releases about Project Sansar they say things like :
Slated for general availability in 2016, Project Sansar will democratize virtual reality as a creative medium. It will empower people to easily create, share, and monetize their own multi-user, interactive virtual experiences, without requiring engineering resources. The platform will enable professional-level quality and performance with exceptional visual fidelity, 3D audio, and physics simulation. Experiences created with Project Sansar will be optimized for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, but also accessible via PCs and (at consumer launch) mobile devices. Users can explore and socialize within Project Sansar experiences through advanced expressive avatars, using text and voice chat.
An important thing to bear in mind is that this round of Virtual Reality is still in its very early stages, it can be argued that Virtual Reality itself isn’t really in its early stages, but this round is and in many ways this reminds me of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, which after a few false dawns, is starting to deliver Virtual Desktops on much larger scales because the technology and solutions from companies such as VMWare are scaling well.
Personally I think Virtual Desktops will have an important role to play in delivering Virtual Reality to more devices, but we’ll have to see if my instinct is correct on that point. The wider point is that companies such as Linden Lab, AltspaceVR and Roblox recognise that importance of VR being a social platform, because if VR isn’t social, it is highly unlikely to get to the dizzy heights many of us hope for.