Decentraland, the ambitious, open standards-based social VR world project which raised $25 million in Ethereum last August to fund its own development, just announced a somewhat less ambitious (if perhaps more scalable) shift in the project: It's now going to be developed on Fontus, a web-based virtual world software. (Click here to get a first-hand demo.)
"Fontus was built on web technologies that we were planning to use, as well as IPFS and Ethereum," project lead Ari Meilich tells me. "Whereas our proof of concept was built on Unity and our own blockchain, we will be working off of Fontus to save time and get to a proof of concept for developers faster."
Ben Nolan, who developed Fontus and is joining Decentraland's development team, wrote about his vision for Fontus a month ago:
With my previous work, I had made a node.js server that connected all the players together using websockets. However, if I did this for Fontus, it would mean running hundreds of servers so that players could see a shared world together. I wanted to avoid this, and instead turned to WebRTC, so players could connect directly to each others computer and share their positional information.
Using WebRTC, and a lightweight signalling server, your browser connects directly to other players, and shares chat messages and positional information. Because this is a high bandwidth, direct connection, in the future you will be able to voice chat and share content with each other.
And while Fontus' roadmap includes VR compatibility, this does feel like a come-down from Unity 3D, the industry standard for ultra-rich immersive graphics experiences for virtual reality. Ari Meilich tells me their intent is still to keep the focus on making Decentraland a VR-centric world, and that Fontus' non-realistic graphics are by choice:
"Decentraland will continue to be focused on VR," he says. "We're adopting WebVR technologies so that our platform runs on any device. Fontus is a proof of concept. We haven't done any art work on it yet. However, we will keep the low-poly aesthetics to prioritize performance, and because it's easy for anyone to build low poly assets, just like you can do with Google Blocks."
So sort of Minecraft meets VR meets the blockchain -- could be a better direction for what they're aiming for.
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