Mark.Space is a Russian company which bills itself, according to its white paper, “an open source platform for the creation of 3D- and VR- compatible online spaces (sites) and objects, powered by Blockchain”. Like Decentraland, another blockchain-based virtual world, they are issuing a cryptocurrency in an initial coin offering (ICO) called the MRK.
You can actually go and visit a browser-based demo of Mark.Space at this address: https://demo.mark.space/, where you can point and click your way through a simulated shopping mall, among other places. There’s not much to see or do, yet. You use your arrow keys or click the mouse to move around, left-clicking and dragging the mouse to rotate your view. You do get an annoying white screen as the scene redraws every time you click your mouse to move around. It’s all 360-degree photographs.
On their Telegram chat, which I recently joined, they announced that they were having a Best Apartment contest, where they were giving out prizes to the people who had done the best job of decorating their free apartments, and sharing the resulting pictures on social media. So I thought I would give it a try.
Here’s what “decorating your apartment” actually consists of:
- Choosing a 360-degree photo which represents your empty apartment (walls, windows, floor and ceiling). Not a real three-dimensional space.
- Dropping and dragging flat images of furniture around your apartment. Yes, that’s right, there are no actual three-dimensional objects, just pictures. The menu does let you “rotate” them, which essentially means flipping the image from left to right.
Here, I shot a one-minute video of me decorating my Mark.Space apartment, so you can see for yourself:
Rather an underwhelming experience. I think I’ll check back in six months to see if anything has progressed since then. If you’re interested, you can visit my apartment in your web browser.