Day: April 12, 2018

30 Days in VR, 5+ Hours a Day: Could You Do It?

One of the problems in virtual reality is that the current level of hardware is still somewhat bulky and uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time. I get tangled up in the cable, on warm days sometimes it gets sweaty inside the headset, etc. My personal limit when I wear my Oculus Rift VR headset is about two hours, then I definitely need to take it off and rejoin the real world! Most people probably wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) use a VR headset for more than an hour a day.

So, how would you feel if you spent all day, every day in VR for a whole month? Someone in Italy is doing just that. His name is Enea Le Fons and he is a VR developer.

Enea in VR 12 Apr 2018
Enea Le Fons (from the blog The Ghost Howls)

Skarredghost of the blog The Ghost Howls has blogged about the HTC Vive-sponsored marathon:

And he loves VR, he loves experimenting and he also loves opensource and free software. He has this idea of making the world better, of letting people live freely and exchanging their expertise. He has this idea of a VR ecosystem that is completely free of chains. So he proposed to HTC to live 30 days in VR in a way that in these 30 days he could develop very cool things like AI bots and VR locomotion systems while being inside virtual reality with other people helping him remotely… and then share everything developed there to the community as open source software. Isn’t it cool? Yes, it is. That’s why HTC couldn’t do anything but accepting his proposal. This way has born the #30DaysInVR project.

…

Of course he won’t stay 24h a day in VR for 30 days, this would be potentially too extreme for his health at this point of the technology (even if he actually told me that he would really love to stay for a month completely in VR). He has started with five hours of immersion each day and has incremented the duration of his immersions until he has arrived to many hours a day. That’s impressive.

It looks like he is going to document his 30-day journey on YouTube. Here is the video from Day 1:

And you can follow him on various social media:

Sansar Store Spotlight: GotMojo Musical Instruments

GranddadGotMojo has just released what I believe to be the first line of playable musical instruments in Sansar. He has listed them all for sale in his store, GotMojo Interactive Music:

GotMojo Store 12 Apr 2018.png

There’s a steel pan drum, a regular drum set, a Hammond organ, a grand piano, a Moog synthesizer, a drum machine—even a boombox with 40 jam tracks! And he has also put working models of all his instruments in his new Sansar experience, called GotMojo Interactive Musical Instruments:

GotMojo Musical Instruments 12 Apr 2018.png

To try them out, stand on the red pad in front of each musical instrument. Give it a few seconds to load, and then use your keyboard to play musical notes!  Granddad explains:

The Stand Alone Instruments are played using the PC Keyboard. The top row of numbers 1 to 0, the keypad numbers 0 – 9, the Shift Key plus the top row numbers 1 to 0 and the Shift Key plus the keypad numbers 0 to 9. This means that you can play up to 40 notes using the PC keyboard.

For example, here is a chart on the wall showing you what keys control various sounds on the drum kit:

GotMojo Drum Set 12 Apr 2018.png

To learn more about what you can do, check out the wiki that GranddadGotMojo created to support these products. They are quite detailed, and explain exactly how to set the musical scale, octaves, volume, and pan of each instrument.

You can buy and install these playable musical instruments in your own Sansar experience, following the step-by-step instructions GraddadGotMojo has prepared. There’s a fair bit of setup involved, but Granddad walks you through it all.

Use of VRChat and Sansar in China

li-yang-138248-unsplash.jpg
Shanghai, China. Photo by Li Yang on Unsplash

Wuhao, a Chinese user on the official Sansar Discord channel, has shared some information about the current state of VR gaming and social VR in China. He said:

I have feedback from Chinese market. At present several thousands of young Chinese are playing VRChat because of the advertising effect from bilibili, a video sharing website popular with young Chinese. VRChat Chinese community have became the largest virtual world community over Second Life Chinese community based on a view to active QQ Groups (Chinese Discord). The movie Ready Player One is also very popular with young Chinese. But Chinese still have common unstable network problem causing slow loading or uploading in Sansar, and even can’t download the client.

He posted an image of a problem that many Chinese seem to face when trying to use Sansar:

Sansar Installer Failed 12 Apr 2018.png

He also said, in answer to a question as to whether or not VRChat is easier to access:

VRChat should be easier to access in China because it’s a game in Steam.

(I wonder when Linden Lab will release Sansar on Steam?) He added:

VR players are still not mainstream gamers. But more and more Chinese VR [gamers] are buying HTC Vive which has better support than Oculus Rift in China. For me, I only use Steam VR and [the] Oculus Store.

In response to my question about how he is able to run and use Sansar in China, he said:

I use [a] VPN. So I don’t have problem to enjoy Sansar. But many of my Chinese friends and even some Creators in SL who want to develop Sansar really have a common network problem for Sansar.

When asked if he has any information on how common Windows Mixed Reality headsets are in China, he commented:

Not sure. Based on my life in China, I haven’t seen a real AR/Mixed Reality headset product yet and also haven’t experienced one. But it’s no problem to experience VR here even in a small city.

Thank you for sharing your perspective with us, Wuhao!