New World Notes

How to Run the VR Version Of Second Life For Firestorm With a Pretty Great Frame Rate (If You Got a Great PC)

Just got a cool little update to Tuesday's post about installing and running Peter Kappler's VR version of the Firestorm viewer for Second Life from Austin Tate: In response to my suggestion that the frame rate might be too low for this to be usable, Austin did some test runs and some tweaks.

"I tried the Drune IV area on the Second Life Ravine region you mentioned. One other user there (or maybe it was an NPC).

"On Ultra quality and 256m view distance it was a bit too low frame rate and was a bit choppy, but it worked fine at 'High' quality settings and 128m draw distance. On my rig I was getting 40 frames per second in VR mode.  Images attached for 
you." (See above.) 

So those look like the settings for optimal results. To be sure, he got them thanks in great part to very good hardware (see his specs below), but the bottom line is this VR viewer is more or less WYSIWYG compared to the PC-based Firestorm:

Oculus Quest Install Base on Track to Surpass 1 Million+ Units By End of 2019

The new VR HMD sales estimate from Superdata* is pretty good news for Oculus Quest: The standalone device sold 347,000+ units in its first two months on the market. (It went on sale in late May of this year.) Safely assuming those sales numbers stay at least as steady throughout the rest of the year  -- and Zuckerberg claims** the Quest is selling "as fast as we make them"-- Oculus Quest will not only continue to sell faster than PSVR, but it'll easily reach an install base over 1 million by the end of this year.

Which is not bad! That would place the Quest second only to PSVR in terms of install base size, which leads the industry by far with about 5 million units sold so far. (Sony reported 4.2 million sales last March.)

Then again, it's not great:

How to Use the VR Version Of Second Life For Firestorm & Steam VR

Austin Tate has a very useful, in-depth tutorial for installing and running Peter Kappler's VR version of the Firestorm viewer for Second Life (which I blogged earlier this year), with bonus points for a how-to on installing an XBox One/360 controller to run with the Oculus Rift installation.

While Second Life isn't social VR per se, it remains the largest, content rich social virtual world space with (relatively) high end graphics that can be explored in a VR rig.

As you might expect, Austin tells me/warns me that graphics performance does take a hit in virtual reality:

New World Notes' Discord Needs YOU - UPDATE: Fixed Invite Link

Click here to join. We're a friendly little club of some 200 folks or so talking about virtual worlds, VR, gaming, and subjects in between.

Speaking of virtual reality, here's a new server for AR/VR/XR fans called, of course, We Make Reality. (Via founder Eva Hoerth.)

Watch: Piloting A Drone in Real Life While in Virtual Reality

This latest mixed reality demo from Toronto's mix reality mad scientist Lee Vermeulen is an update from a recent one from June: He is flying a Tello drone with a Unity-based controller that is hooked up to his Vive VR headset and Knuckles hand controllers. So the inset video you see is the stream from the drone's camera. This time, however, the heads-up display which shows what the drone is seeing is transparent -- that way, you can still pilot the drone even when the HUD display used to navigate seems to temporarily block the drone in real life.

Oddly enough, this really feels like a killer app for VR/AR headsets. To the extent that drones have multiple killer apps (and they do), they need a way to be controlled with a high degree of precision. And what better way to do that than being able to see what the drone is seeing (so to speak) while also able to see what the drone pilot is seeing?

Tim Sweeney Has an Epic Vision for an Open Metaverse -- But Unanswered Questions "Who Needs It?" & "Who Wants It?" Remain

Master VR podcaster Kent Bye has a valuable Twitter thread on a SIGGRAPH 2019 talk by Epic's Tim Sweeney, who just laid out his vision for an open metaverse. (No surprise Epic has plans to build one, as that was evident when the company rolled out user-creation tools for Fortnite last year.) In opposition to say, Facebook, Sweeney's metaverse is admirably open and not a walled garden: 

.@TimSweeneyEpic
What is the Metaverse?
Real-time social medium to share experiences & ceators need to be able to create their own stuff.
Needs to have an open economy that participants can participate & survive w free market economics without corporate dystopian control.

— Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) July 30, 2019

As with any other metaverse framework, however, two basic questions (far as I can tell) remain unaddressed:

Metaverse Artist AM Radio On the Ephemeral, Communal Nature of Digital Art

Great conversation around last week's interview with art critic Cristina García-Lasuén, on the nature of VR-based art, and the criterion required to call a VR installation "art" at all. (Which shows you just how smart and engaged NWN readers are!). One key comment came from someone imminently qualified to discuss this top: Jeff "AM Radio" Berg, whose Second Life-based installations are generally considered among the very best works of art created on the platform.

Responding to García-Lasuén's criteria that VR-based art "must respond to very elaborate intellectual criteria and not merely aesthetic ones", Berg (who graduated from an East Coast art college before going into technology) had this contrary thought:

"Having been formally trained, I understand the academic foundation of philosophical evolution desired in celebrated artists and their work. I'd qualify on paper maybe.

"Digital [art] however presents a new challenge...

What Makes a Virtual Reality Installation a Work of Art, Rather Than Just a Fun Immersive Experience? A Veteran Art Critic Makes Her Case

Earlier this month I wrote about a VR installation that opened up in a Madrid arts center, which places visitors in a highly detailed, to-scale recreation of a real forest. It was curated by Spanish art critic Cristina García-Lasuén, who calls it an example of "Portal Art", a new genre of fine art: "3D, VR, immersive, interactive, realistic, multi-sensory, of the world."

But what makes this VR installation art, as opposed to any other fun, immersive VR-based recreation of the natural world? García-Lasuén has been writing and working on the intersection between technology and high art for many years, so she's among the best people to explain the distinction. As she puts it:

“Exact recreations of reality are not always artistic. Actually, very few are artistic. Neither in the VR nor in real life. As an example, look at all the photographs or videos that are made in the world, those that we all take with smartphones, with cameras. Are they all artistic? Of course not. So, what makes some creations to be art and not some others?"

She has three criteria to elevate the virtual recreation to art:

Sansar Rave Attracts 1K+ Visits in VR, But Way More Watched, Than Logged In

Above: Sansar's Monstercat: Call of the Wild Experience, inset with peak player usage on Steam and viewership on Twitch

After two years of extremely low user numbers in Sansar, Linden Lab's recent partnership with electronic music label Monstercat seems to have paid off in some relatively significant usage:

Monstercat: Call of the Wild Experience is a VR space where the music label will host artist meet and greets, giveaways, and more. [Linden Lab CEO Ebbe] Altberg didn’t give me exact numbers but over a thousand people watched the show in VR via Sansar. “Tens of thousands of people watched the concert across Twitch, Mixer, and Huya, and over a thousand people around the world attended the event in Sansar - across 6 continents, 65 countries, and 675 cities. Fans feel more connected and immersed in the music they love, while artists, in turn, effectively reach more people and places in a single day than they'd reach on a real-life tour. “

That last line is a bit questionable, because while 1000+ people might have visited last Friday's VR-based concert rave, it doesn't look like 1000+ stayed for that long -- according to Steam, peak Sansar usage through Valve's platform reached 172 maximum for that day. Assuming as many came in via the direct client, that's more like 300 users at any one time. So what's likely is there were a lot of short-term visits throughout the duration of the show.

In any case, that's something of a moot point, because the show did attract a lot of viewers:

Oculus Quest is Great in Short Bursts - So Probably Won't Sell Well Until the Price Comes Down

So I've been steadily falling in love with my Oculus Quest, the first VR headset I've ever tried that looks and feels like it could eventually be a near-mass market product: The seamless connection between it and your smartphone, the fact that it immediately starts up in your virtual Oculus home the moment you put the headset on, even the gorgeous packaging -- the Quest team fixed just about all of the little friction points that makes previous headsets so clunky and off-putting.

But I say "near-mass market", because having used it at length, I can also see its limitations: Fundamentally, no matter how seamless and user-friendly the Quest's VR experience is, it's likely that most consumers will only want to use it in limited bursts. (20-30 minutes a day seems about right.) It's not just the heaviness of the headset itself, or the inevitable chafing and discomfort caused by a headset gripped tightly to your face, or even the social discomfort of being blind to family friends.