Wired has an in-depth story on the launch of Oculus Venues, which aims to transform social VR into a mixed reality, live event experience:
But those 9,000 people [watching a RL concert in Colorado's Red Rocks] won’t be alone. They’ll be joined by others watching it live—perhaps as many as in Red Rocks itself, perhaps more. These other spectators will be watching from home in their virtual-reality headsets; courtesy of a new app called Oculus Venues, they’ll get their own panoramic three-dimensional view of the show. Vance Joy at Red Rocks isn’t the first time people have been able to watch a live event via VR. That’s been possible since 2015. And multiuser VR platforms have been able to accommodate small crowds of people for just about as long.
Quite a bit before 2015: Back in 2006, Suzanne Vega made a live appearance/performance in Second Life (watch above) to an audience of about 80* -- and that helped directly influence Oculus Venues. That's because one of Venue's lead developers is Linden Lab alum Jim "Babbage" Purbrick.
"Lessons from early music experiences like the Suzanne Vega concert and Secondfest in SL definitely fed in to Venues and made me a huge advocate for live music in VR," Jim tells me. (Second Fest was an SL-based concert featuring Pet Boys.) Second Life has never quite succeeded as a venue for huge live events, since lag starts kicking in at around 30-40 avatars. But Jim and his team have managed to increase the avatar capacity by nearly 10X:
Most social VR platforms cap their experiences at 30 or 40 people for performance reasons. (When you’ve got that many people moving around interacting with each other and the world in VR, things get a little creaky on the server side.) But Venues, being designed to work with those headsets, is a constrained experience in its own right—you can change seats, and you can look around, but you can’t move around—which helps cut down on the lift significantly. That enables the app to split its total audience into manageable but still surprisingly big sections of seating Oculus calls "shards." Each shard is nine steeply banked rows of 28 seats that are sectioned into curved four-person pods, for a grand total of 252 people.
More on Venues here. As with anything backed by Facebook, of course, caveat analytica.
*For Suzanne Vega's appearance, the hosts made everyone take off all avatar attachments to help reduce lag, which is why if you watch the video you'll see several bald ass ladies.
Reliving the crazy adventure that building @oculus venues has been over the last year by reading the article in @WIRED (https://t.co/1KC6LEZk8D): see you all in #vr for the first public event with @vancejoy tonight!
— Jim Purbrick (@JimPurbrick) May 30, 2018
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