Frooxius, lead developer of Resonite, the crowdfunded metaverse platform with 10,000+ active users, recently revealed his new vision for a single shard virtual world grid. Unlike, say, Second Life, where the grid are sims interconnected in a way that resembles the real world, the Resonite approach will be much more brain-melting:
"It's a bit like seamless grid," as Froox puts it to me, but more generalized. Grid is one of possible arrangements, but not the only one. The goal is to enable each domain to be arbitrary arranged relative to the others -- and even move relative to the others."
So another words, you could be crossing from one "session" -- basically Resonite's version of what Second Life calls a "sim" -- and walk into one that's totally different. I.E. go through a barn door and end up on the Moon.
"Yeah, you could have a doorway that enters a completely different session," he tells me, when I run that scenario by him. "Or you have a big house somewhere in a big world. You enter it and inside is a whole new session - potentially even bigger on the inside. The house could be a tiny one too, so you shrink down to enter it."
Frooxius believes this architecture will open up new possibilities that a Second Life-like grid doesn't easily enable:
"With SL grids you can't really make whole planets, solar systems or galaxies, that are recursively subdivided. You can't have a session inside a spaceship that can travel through worlds. With this approach you have a lot more possibilities and flexibility."
But wouldn't this break immersion, since there's no coherent whole? Is a random jumble of very different realities even a "virtual world" at all?
Frooxius argues otherwise:
"It will only be incoherent, if you decide to make it incoherent. This approach doesn't really prescribe the way you compose the experiences together -- it just gives you more tooling to have better flexibility.
"You can use it to make coherent, continuous experiences -- you can go from real scale world -- like scale of buildings and terrain and fly into the solar system, where each planet could be it's own domain -- with lots of subdomains for various on that planet.
"Or you could fly out across galaxy -- that can be its own giant domain that's connecting other domains - different star systems. This is an example of world you can build with this that's immersive and coherent.
"Also think of something like a Tardis from Doctor Who. With this system, the inside of it is a domain that's it's own session, that's not really tied to any specific one. The 'outside; of the Tardis can travel around to different worlds - when you step out, you can be on the Moon. Or in a barn. Or anywhere Tardis travels to. That's closer to your example, but I think approaching it this way is something that makes it make sense to people.
"The technology is kinda like a pencil in principle - it's very flexible, what you draw with it, is up to you. Someone could make just some scribbles that are not coherent. But you can also draw anything from portraits, landscapes, technical drawings, diagrams - anything you imagine. The goal is to give users as much flexibility as we can."
Given his track record, I believe Frooxius can do this, but he's not making any promises on "when":
"When it's done. We generally don't do timelines for any features unless they're the current task (and even then, we often won't), because there are way too many variables involved and things change."
So probably best to follow Froox on socials, and consider joining Resonite's Patreon.
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So I gotta buy a PC or install a Linux emulator. As a Mac OS user, I would go the latter route.
If it gets big, maybe. The concept is promising.
Posted by: Iggy 1.0 | Monday, January 13, 2025 at 01:25 PM