New World Notes

Linden Lab: Social VR is "The Future of Spectator Sports", Promises A Major eSports Partnership Next Month

Do you want to watch an immersive 3D experience while in another immersive 3D experience? Linden Lab thinks you do. Interesting new interview on the Cheddar (LOL) news network with Linden VP Sheri Bryant, who drops hints of a big eSports partnership with Sansar coming next month, announcing, "We believe social VR is the future of spectator sports." In terms of eSports, she mentions incorporating elements from a live game into the Sansar experience -- for example, a dynamically updated, 3D game map. (I assume like in those "war rooms" in the Star Wars movies, where the battlefield is represented in a cool holographic map.) 

Maybe social VR is the future of real world spectator sports (which very much remains to be seen) but I'm not sure why Linden Lab keeps insisting this is the case with eSports. So far, their existing eSports partnerships don't seem to be increasing Sansar usage. But to be fair, it's still early days. The deeper problem is this seems to misunderstand the popularity of eSports viewing on a platform like Twitch:  

Holodeck VR Uses Hybrid Tracking to Map Virtual World Experience Onto Real World Location With Up to 100 Users in the Same Physical Space

Holodeck VR is a fairly unique twist on location-based VR experiences with a lot of potential. For one thing, it uses light, low cost Gear VR headsets, rather than bulky systems where the user is tethered to cables or a heavy backpack. For another, it's using a patented hybrid tracking technology which incorporates both optical and radio signals, which is reportedly able to coordinate the location of up to 100 items or people in the same virtual/real life space. In other words, a multi-user virtual world experience mapped onto the location of users in the real world. 

Based in the EU, Holdeck VR's platform is already being used at theme part locations in Europe, including a location tie-in for last year's Valerian movie from Luc Besson. Longtime game developer Barbara Lippe is the company's co-founder and head of content, and she tells me the tracking technology they're using took 16 years of development at the German Fraunhofer Institut, before it was even ready for users wearing VR headsets, so they could navigate around each other without colliding:

Thomas Dolby, Pop Star & VR Enthusiast, To Perform Live in High Fidelity

Dolby singing "She Blinded Me With Science" in VR rig for audience in High Fidelity

Recently a distinguished academic showed up in High Fidelity as an avatar, researching social VR platforms to use in the Music for New Media program at the Peabody Conservatory. "He didn't identify who he was at first but did share that he was a professor looking for a medium to teach VR and music design," High Fidelity's Ryan Downe remembers. "After sharing contact information, he reached out and revealed his identity and my colleague spent some time helping him get familiar with our platform."

The professor, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, also happens to be pop star Thomas Dolby -- yes, the one who was massively blinded by science -- and is appearing live in High Fidelity next week, singing into an audio stream piped into the virtual world while his VR-controlled avatar performs. (Click here to reserve a slot at November 17's FUTVRE LANDS Virtual Reality Festival.)

Dolby has been working directly with High Fidelity on a number of performances previous to that -- not just appearing as an avatar, but making dynamic use of the social VR platform:

"We collaborated with him on a pair of Halloween-themed events at our 'Zombie Island' domain," as Ryan explains. "From a perch above the island, he musically scored the event in real-time as visitors (most of whom didn't know he was there) ran into jump scares and zombies played by live actors."

So far from being a "special celebrity appearance" event, Dolby's appearance in VR is very much part of his explorations as a musician and performer. (Not unlike how, in VR's last generation, Duran Duran's Simon LeBon was an avid user of Second Life before his band officially created a presence there.)

VRChat Reports 50,000 In Its Discord -- Good Estimate of Its Active User Base

VRChat recently announced it has 50,000 subscribers in its Discord server... which also gives us a pretty good estimate of VRChat's active userbase of people who log into the world at least once a month. Up until now, we've only had some insight on the social VR world's daily average concurrency rates (via Steam), which hover somewhere between the 6000s and 7000s every day. The fact that there's 50,000 just in VRChat's Discord server alone (you're not likely to join unless you're actively engaged with the community) suggests monthly active usage of the world itself runs between 50,000-75,000. (As a rough estimate, but this also fits an industry rule of thumb that active users are 10x the daily average concurrency.)

So until the company reports otherwise, I'd say 50,000-75,000 users is an educated guess -- among them, a shy German anime dancer and a small Korean bird who's a military vet and a Kanye fan.

Sansar to Close Sandex, Move Platform to Steam in Search of VR Users

Well this is quite a virtual shoe to drop -- the end of Sansar's virtual currency to US$ exchange (called the Sandex), and a transition to  publishing the social VR platform on Steam:

The cornerstone of our growth effort will be to put Sansar on Steam. Steam is where more than half of the VR market goes to find software. It also is a huge pool of users who are interested in our space and are likely to have the hardware required to run Sansar. We anticipate being able to get onto Steam by the end of this year... n order to do this, we are obligated to make significant changes to how Sansar works, especially in how the Sansar Dollar and process credit system work. These changes, will also make the credit process for Creators far more consistent and predictable. The first change is that we will be discontinuing the Sandex as of December 4, 2018.

Sometimes I feel like Linden Lab's strategy is to do the direct opposite of what New World Notes just reported, because as I posted yesterday, Oculus and Vive usage appears to be flat or declining on Steam. And also, early this year: That only twelve of all the thousands of compatible games have attracted meaningful sales on Steam. And that when it comes to social VR on Steam, only VRChat has a (relatively) large user base, with the rest struggling with concurrencies in the two to three figures. But all that to one side, you can't blame Linden Lab for making what seems to be a hail Mary pass in the face of low user numbers.

Then again -- and this was years before Ebbe Altberg became CEO, and I'm not sure any executive from 2012 is still there, to tell him -- Linden Lab unsuccessfully attempted a similar strategy with Second Life: 

Oculus & Vive Usage Appears to Be Flat or Declining, According to Steam Stats, Sales Estimates

Active VR owners on Steam in September 2018, via Road to VR's estimate

Road to VR has an interesting report which combines usage rates of Steam, the largest platform for computer and VR games, with Steam's monthly Hardware & Software Survey, then came up with this estimate (above) for active VR owners on Steam.

"[I]t would be more accurate to call the figures above ‘Monthly Attached VR Headsets on Steam’ rather than ‘Monthly Active VR Users on Steam’," reporter Ben Lang allows, "though this is the closest indicator we’ve got to the latter." Fair enough. Based on that calculation, Oculus usage is somewhat ahead of Vive, and -- subtracting the smattering of Windows Mixed Reality headset owners -- there's a total of 600,000 active Oculus and Vive users total for September 2018 on Steam.

This number is pretty perplexing, because it's significantly lower than the estimated number of total Oculus and Vive sales at the beginning of 2017:

Oculus Co-Founder Who Wanted to Build a "Billion Person Virtual World" Departs Facebook, Decrying Company's "Race to the Bottom" With Standalone Headsets

TechCrunch's Lucas Matney reports that Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, who once advocated creating a billion user MMO for virtual reality, i.e. the Metaverse, is leaving the company with a billion+ userbase, i.e. Facebook:

Iribe is leaving Facebook following some internal shake-ups at the company’s virtual reality arm last week that saw the cancellation of the company’s next generation “Rift 2” PC-powered virtual reality headset, which he had been leading development of, a source close to the matter told TechCrunch. Iribe and the Facebook executive team had “fundamentally different views on the future of Oculus that grew deeper over time” and Iribe wasn’t interested in a “race to the bottom” in terms of performance, we are told.

By "bottom" he's presumably referencing the standalone Oculus Go and the recently-announced $399 Oculus Quest standalone headset. The irony is, the only way there's any real chance of achieving an MMO where hundreds of thousands of people (let alone a billion) can be together in VR is through low-priced standalone headsets. But maybe he's hoping to work for/found a new company that's more specifically designed to deploy such an MMO?

Upload VR's Ian Hamilton wonders if the next Oculus shoe to drop is the departure of its CTO John Carmack:

New VR Program Trains People for Public Speaking -- But A Social VR Version Would Be Even Better

This is one of the more interesting non-gaming use cases for virtual reality I've seen in awhile -- a public speaking trainer:

Inside the headset, Ovation offers up a highly configurable experience for practicing your public speaking. Scenes range from a handful of people in a boardroom to a large group of people in a conference hall. As most any public speaking engagement is supported by some sort of prepared material, you can import a range of ‘Speech Items’ which can be pure text, for placing on virtual notecards or teleprompters; powerpoint slides and PDFs, for showing on projectors and screens; and imported images, to place drawings for on whiteboards.

More on Road to VR here. As with many one-off VR applications for real world use, the need for an open-ended multi-user creation and deployment platform is really screaming out:

Sinespace Featured on VentureBeat With Report on New User Growth & Revenue Numbers, Certified Creators Program

Kudos to NWN partner Sinespace for this great coverage by Dean Takahashi on VentureBeat:

Sinespace is billing itself as a massively multiplayer online sandbox world in VR, and the company is launching what it calls a Certified Creators program to try to boost the creation of user-generated content in Sinespace. It hopes that it can stand out from others because its technology won’t be “pinned in time,” but rather will change with the times as graphics and other technologies move forward.

 “We are trying to build a virtual world that is future proof [says founder Adam Frisby]. "The goal of what we are doing is to make it accessible to everyone."... He said that the company’s monthly active users grew from 10,000 in June to more than 15,000 in August. And Sinespace players are also buying more content from creators, with the average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) in August hitting $20 a month, up from $17 a month in June.

More about the Certified Creators program and its special advantages on Sinespace's blog. Highlight:

Shy Guy Becomes Live Dance Star on VRChat With Full Body Tracking

“Yumi” is a young dude living somewhere in Germany who wasn’t particularly in shape and definitely not the star at his local nightclubs. But he has an HTC Vive full body capture rig, and now he’s doing this in VRChat on the regular, where’s he become a minor celebrity and social media star, both in VRChat and on his popular YouTube and Twitch streams.  It's a testament to how full body tracking and social VR can bring out the best in people that they'd otherwise not likely share.

“I'm a hobby dancer pretty much,” he tells me. “Before VRChat I've never danced before, always the unathletic type of person. With the first ‘dance’ video on my [YouTube] channel all of this pretty much started to be real for me.” He learned more moves from real life dancers who've uploaded tutorials on their own YouTube channels, and applied them to his avatar.

He does dance IRL sometimes. “I prefer VR dancing. It's so much easier to just break into dancing to your favorite song with the shroud of anonymity... and dancing with a different avatar each time is hella fun.”

But he says dancing through his avatar has definitely improved his performance in real life: