Interesting project now in development within the community of OpenSim, the open source/reverse engineered version of Second Life:
OpenSimulator core developer Melanie Thielker — also known as Melanie Milland in-world — announced that she is releasing her virtual reality OpenSim viewer to the open source community, available here via GitHub. The new viewer uses the Unreal Engine to display OpenSim regions, such as areas from the grid Thielker founded, Avination.
While OpenSim never took off as a consumer-facing project, it counts thousands of developers and dedicated members, many within the education community, and counts thousands of regions/3D experiences. So this could potentially be a good, low budget/low frills alternative for indie social VR projects. Though the technical effort to make this possible seem fairly daunting -- porting OpenSim content into the Unreal engine:
Rendering the scenes in VR was the hard part, she added. For example, she said, her team had to port Meshmerizer to C++, a tool that converts the prims used by OpenSim to mesh objects that can be imported into Unreal Engine.
“We were already using Meshmerizer in OpenSimulator in order to have the prims be meshes for physics,” she said. “Now we are using it for display.”
Unreal Engine is free for developers and non-commercial projects. The new OpenSim viewer code will be made available for free on GitHub, she said.
I'm curious whether OpenSim performance is good enough to work well in VR. I tried an early build of Second Life for VR, and the poor framerate made it a non-starter for virtual reality. But definitely lots of potential here (potentially)!
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