Talking With the Creators of the First True Mobile and Social Game, in VR
Social virtual reality services Convrge and AltspaceVR are both working on apps that will allow people to occupy a virtual space together using Samsung phones combined with Gear VR. Likewise, Facebook’s Oculusreleased an app for viewing Vimeo and Twitch together with four other people. Oculus Social is still in an alpha, however, and many of the planned features have not been added yet.
In contrast, with an update this week to their award-winning $10 app Daydream Blue, Richie Hoagland and Shea Rembold have released the first true* social, mobile, VR game. Players can voice chat and discover fun things to do, like playing golf or fishing, with a couple other people in mobile VR.
I spent about 35 minutes with the two of them in VR learning about what they’ve built. Physically, I was in California and the two developers at RalphVR were in Kentucky. Virtually, using my Gear VR, I felt like I was exploring a serene cartoon valley with them. If you own the $100 goggles and a compatible Samsung phone, you could download this app and explore it today. They are releasing an update soon to make it a little easier to find other people online who are using the social features.
“We have plans of where we want the game to go over the next six months and year, and it gets pretty weird. But in an awesome way,” Hoagland said.
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With virtual reality head mounted displays connected to the internet it was only a matter of time before we saw the first iterations of the metaverse. Right now they aren’t much to look at- basically low poly, customizable, 3D chat environments, but the more they incorporate web data sharing they more it looks like we are plugging into the beginnings of the metaverse.
Here we highlight a few that are up and running right now. Though it’s far from a complete list- it touches upon the major players in the space.
VRCHAT
VR chat is a platform for navigating virtual worlds that you can host on webspace and explore it with othe VRchat users. If you are designing in Unity it’s as easy as downloading the SDK and exporting your scenes into VRchat files. Accessible through a web browser as well as oculus rift they have around 20 people coming to their weekly events which includ Gunters Universe a talk show about VR technologies as well as their Sunday night hangout where everyone gets together and explores the new worlds they have been creating
Janus VR
Janus is the one that really feeling like the beginnings of the metaverse. At any time you can hit tab, enter a website address and it immediately populates a well designed world with the website data and creates a portal that you can walk through. A few people wandering about!
Above is an example of a Janus VR world where you can walk right into a 360 video!
High Fidelity
Started by the founder of Second Life High fidelity is taking more of a minecraft meets unity approach. There is a marketplace that feels similar to unity’s asset store where you can buy everything from terrains to avatars. They are doing some revolutionary things on the sharing and hosting of virtual worlds and information. On top of running the high fidelity app you run a stack manager program that runs behind the scenes aiding with the flow of data.
Convrge
Just a one world environment for now, hosting weekly meetups with friendly folks. Their events vary from movie nights, to art and music shows as well as social experiments
Oculus Social VR
Right now Oculus Social is limited to sitting in a room with 5 other people watching twitch feeds or choosing from a curated list of Vimeo content. The rooms are based on what is offered from the Oculus Video app store which include a classic theatre, a tiny ant world and a private theatre for you and your favourite 5 strangers from around the world . While that may sound limiting it really is one of the most engaging experiences available in Virtual Reality at the moment. You can finally step outside the ‘Swayze Effect’ of non interactive virtual reality content and have other peoples avatars look and converse with you.
COMEDY IN THE METAVERSE!
We are looking for a few comedians to do a short set in Virtual Reality Sunday December 6th. We’ll have the comedians gather in our offices in downtown Vancouver, but the audience will be everywhere! Want to be a part of the first ever VR Stand Up Comedy show? Start time is 7:00 and we’re looking for folks to do a 10-15 minutes set.
You will be wearing an Oculus Rift VR headset and once you choose from a list of avatars we will bring you in to our VR comedy club where other people from around the world will be watching you do a stand up routine.
Contact Mike ([email protected]) if you are interested/can make it/want more info!
"So Two Guys With Gear VR Walk Into a Bar..." #vr #gearvr The folks from Convrge went to see what would happen if they tried to order food and drinks with…
