New World Notes

Will High Fidelity's Short Term Focus on Desktop Change the Future of Social VR? Readers, Users & VR Experts Debate

Lots of interesting conversation on Philip Rosedale's bombshell news late last week that High Fidelity would close down nearly all its hosted sites and devote much more attention to supporting its desktop clients -- both from readers and users, and experts in the VR industry. First, from readers and HiFi users in Comments:

Been saying this for years. There is no real uptake for the general population (gamers excepted.) How do we use social media? We 'dip' on our phones as we go about our day. Wearing a VR headset everywhere is not feasible, to access a system where many of our social circle may not even be... We keep trying but flat screens continue to win the game. - Dirk

Even gamer uptake is still remarkably slow. by the way. SuperHot VR sold 800,000 copies across all VR platforms but that and a few other hits are pretty much the high end. Now from some High Fidelity users:

High Fidelity's reputation wasn't helping itself either. The fact that some people have had no idea they can log in without a VR headset illustrates a major issue: failure to communicate that it does work fine without an HMD. This is just a single example out of many where things aren't communicated as well, and honestly that heavily lead to the downfall in the video. - FlameSoulis

I've been in High Fidelity since it went alpha (over five years ago), and I am sad about this turn of events. It feels as if people are pulling up stakes although we are still in there every day, the alphas, doing stuff, building stuff, and hanging together. We are a small group who believe in the vision.  Yes, Philip is correct. VR is not happening the way it seemed it might.  Will it? I think when the hardware is easier to use, and less restrictive, a few years away, I bet. - DrFran

On Twitter, there was a fair amount of conversation about this move from VR experts like Chet Faliszek (who helped Valve launch the Vive), Kent Bye (who hosts the influential Voices of VR Podcast), and Tipatat Chennavasin (a venture capitalist with the VR Fund). Roughly summarized, I think it's fair to say they think the problem is not social VR per se, but High Fidelity's approach to it:

Nylon Pinkney Is Online - How to Hang Out IRL If You're Into VR

Virtual Reality Bombshell: Philip Rosedale Says Social VR Not Sustainable With Slow HMD Sales, Drastically Scales Back High Fidelity Hosted Content, Moves Focus to PC/Mac Clients

Last week at High Fidelity's regular community meeting, Philip Rosedale stood before dozens of assembled robots, anime girls, and other assorted avatars, and dropped a couple fairly large bombs that are likely to have an industry-wide impact: The company is closing down nearly all its own hosted domains (users can still host their own), and devoting much more attention to supporting its desktop clients -- both PC and Mac. (Watch above.)

"Social VR in HMDs won’t really work until we can do everything in them, including work and messaging," Philip explains to me by e-mail. "We can’t multi-task in VR yet, and that’s a real challenge."

 

Until then, says Philip, desktop will dominate High Fidelity's future: "[W]e are going to improve desktop PC and Mac performance, look for that over next quarter."

 

As for no longer hosting most High Fidelity domains: "[I]t is time for everyone to take over from us, if we are to have a decentralized Metaverse," he tells me. "We can’t be regulating the community if it is going to get big.  We are building something a lot bigger than a social VR chat experience."

His reasoning won't be surprising to anyone who follows social VR Steam stats or VR sales figures:

Watch: NeosVR, Patreon-Funded Social VR Metaverse Platform with Robust Tools, Major Updates

If you haven't yet taken a look NeosVR, an impressive indie social VR metaverse project backed by Patreon funders, now is a good time. Supporting Vive, Oculus, and Windows Mixed Reality, here's the latest update introduced by lead developer Frooxius. Includes robust in-world building and scripting, an ICO-backed virtual currency (Neos credits), and robust physics -- robust enough, as you'll see above, to create a multiplayer tributes to Portal and (as below) Beat Saber. And as you'll also see, it's notably furry-friendly, so it's got that going for it (if you go for that).

Lots of impressive elements for such a low budget project, so it's well worth keeping an eye on: Steam account here, Discord server here. They also just announced a content creation contest:

Watch: How to Apply Make-Up to Hide the Red Lines Caused by "VR Face"

Here's a fun video and tutorial from Jazmin Cano, a User Engagement Manager at High Fidelity, which addresses a major problem with virtual reality that's little addressed by the virtual reality industry in general: The deep lines created by wearing an HMD for extended periods, i.e. "VR Face". Jazmin's solution: Apply blush and other make-up so that the red lines look more like a healthy sun-dappled glow.

"I do this no matter what HMD I'm going to wear," Jazmin tells me. That's because it's a universal problem for VR: "I've worn PSVR, Vive, and Oculus and get a similar result on my face. Redness on top of my cheeks and around my eyes."

As you might guess, her makeup tip varies based on user skin tone:

High Fidelity First Announced Social VR Platform for Vive Focus Plus

Looks like congrats to Philip Rosedale and his team at High Fidelity are in order. Last February, HTC Vive announced the Q2 2019 launch of Vive Focus Plus, a standalone VR system for enterprise applications -- and last week, Philip announced (in the video above) that High Fidelity is working with Vive to make its open source VR platform available to the Plus.

Unless I missed it, this is the first social VR app that's been officially announced for the new system, which is already being used in enterprise-facing applications:

Watch: How Virtual Worlds Like VRChat Make It Possible for People To Share Tremendous Real Life Pain

In this latest interview by "Syrmor", VRChat's best embedded reporter, a guy in a Bugs Bunny avatar shares with him and Winnie the Pooh a cascade of brutal stories from his real life, starting with FBI raid on his house, family abuse, his mother's meth addiction, from which point it gets worse -- and in the end, possibly, just a bit better.

When I started reporting in virtual worlds over a decade ago, among the very first people I profiled casually told me they were homeless in real life; that and many, many more similar experiences hasve informed my sense that virtual worlds are among the few mediums where people can share heartbreakingly intimate aspects of their lives that they couldn't comfortably speak honestly about elsewhere. Or as Syrmor put in when I profiled him:

“I'm legitimately interested in hearing strangers share their stories so I think my interest shines through and makes them more excited to share,” Syrmor says. “Also in VRChat there isn't as much social anxiety cause you can just leave the conversation without consequence whenever you like.”

Syrmor has such a large and dedicated viewership (nearly half a million YouTube subscribers now!), he has an anonymous commentator who posts graduate level philosophical analyses of his videos:

At 4.2M, PSVR Now Has About 2X Install Base as Vive & Premium Oculus

Sony just announced that its PSVR rig "sold-through more than 4.2 million PS VR systems worldwide as of March 3, 2019", suggesting a big leap in sales over the 2018 holiday season, powered in great part by Beat Saber. So matching that number with previous sales projections, the install base for leading premium VR rigs, the total install base as of now looks something like this:

• PSVR: 4.2 million
• Vive: 1.3 million
• Oculus: 1.2 million

Sources here and also here , combining SuperData's sell-through estimates from 2016-2018, rounding up a bit to account for Q1 2019, and excluding Oculus Go, which is generally considered sub-premium, as is Gear VR. Huge caveat: Since Vive and Oculus aren't officially reporting total sales, these are definitely rough numbers. In any case,  it's indisputable that PSVR is way ahead -- and arguably, has nearly twice the market as its leading competitors.

Watch & Boggle: Non-Euclidean Curved Space Simulated in Virtual Reality

Henry Segerman is a mathematician who's been building brain-melting virtual world simulations for over a decade, and his latest project is quite possibly the most cerebral yet: A VR experience that simulates non-euclidean, negatively curved space, I.E., kinda like what space is like near a black hole:

This video demonstrates a virtual reality simulation of a non-euclidean, negatively curved space. Suppose that I walk in a straight line, then turn left by 90 degrees, and then repeat these steps until I get back to where I started. In a flat space with no curvature, I have just walked around a square. In a positively curved space, like the surface of a sphere, I could instead have walked around a right-angled triangle: I could start on the equator and walk a quarter the way around the sphere, then turn left and go up to the north pole, then turn left again and walk down to my starting point. In this video I am (virtually) in a negatively curved space; here I walk around a right-angled pentagon.

"The idea of space itself being curved has been around for a while," Segerman tells me, "most famously in Einstein's relativity. This is a way to experience a curved space in VR There are some phenomena that I knew would happen going into this kind of project, but experiencing it directly is a much more visceral understanding."

With some tweaks, he even thinks it could be used to teach Einstein's theories from a first-person perspective: "Our stuff so far doesn't do variable curvature as in relativity," he allows."The spaces we have are very nice uniform spaces; in relativity, the curvature changes as you move around. In principle, one could do something with variable curvature, but we're not doing that yet!"

You can check out a demo of this on WebGL site here, and the code to create the simulation is open source and available on GitHub here. The fact that other developers can play with this code opens up the possibility of using it to create other kinds of negatively curved space-based apps -- for instance, in a first-person shooter. 

Is Second Life Too Technically Limited to Create a VR Version for It?

I'm intrigued with Peter Kappler's open source VR viewer for Second Life, but longtime SLer and heavy duty VR user Adeon Writer is unconvinced, writing in Comments:

Nothing about Second Life was made for VR. The avatar motion will make you want to puke after a few minutes, and since all that's serverside, nothing can be done about it.

And even if we had a 100% working VR view, you'll never be able to move your arms or legs around and have other people see it. It's not VR except in raw technicality only... not worth it.

This is all true, except possibly the last point. I've tried an early version of a VR viewer for Second Life, and didn't get nauseous; however, it's definitely not a full-featured VR experience as we understand it now. As for arm and leg tracking, while that doesn't exist now, that strikes me as an addressable issue.

But perhaps it's a matter of changing the experience metaphor: