This past Wednesday, April 4th, was the one-year anniversary of the popular talk show Endgame in VRChat, so I decided to drop by and see what’s happening. The talk show, which is held every Wednesday at 7:00 pm Pacific Time, is hosted by Nomono, Poplopo, and Psych. Over the past year, Endgame topics have ranged from bitcoin and blockchain technology to virtual culture to artificial intelligence to biotechnology to transhumanism, and just about everything in between! The show has been a real success story in VRChat, and a great example of the promise of social VR platforms in fostering better communication and understanding between people.
The topic of group discussion was: what will the world look like in 150 years? Although I did not stay until the end of the discussion, there was the usual lively debate on what we can expect our future society to look like: the impact of climate change, the use of technology to prevent aging, even the possibility of uploading our consciousness to computers.
Someone recently posted the following offer to sell an 80m-by-60m parcel in the initial Genesis City region in Decentraland (each red square on the map below is one 10m-by-10m piece of virtual real estate, called LAND):
That’s right, a million dollars for 4,800 square meters of land. Compare that with Second Life, where a 65,536 m² plot sets you back US$600.00 with a monthly fee of US$295.
The seller justifies his asking price by saying, “but there’s nothing else on the market of this size with this much land next to a road”. Keep in mind that proximity to a road is a moot point when you can usually teleport from place to place in any virtual world (but, of course, you can’t even visit Decentraland yet, let alone teleport anywhere).
The only active, functioning part of Decentraland at the moment is the land market, where people are frantically buying and selling virtual land in anticipation of making a huge profit when Decentraland actually goes live (and nobody can say when that will be, yet). Given how extremely competitive the virtual world market is, and how much further ahead most of the other platforms like Sansar, High Fidelity, and Sinespace are in terms of functionality, this is extremely risky speculation.
I notice that since my last blogpost about the Land Marketplace in Decentraland, the developers have turned off the website’s ability to sort and view the marketplace listings by most expensive first. So you can no longer easily find out what the most expensive land is selling for. Well, actually, it’s still pretty easy to see, you just select the sort by Cheapest option and scroll to the very end of the listings:
I just keep shaking my head, and I keep watching from the sidelines.
Harassment is commonplace in VR. In past qualitative research, I studied sexual harassment of women. In my new project, in partnership with Pluto VR, I surveyed 600+ people who regularly use VR (Rift, Vive, PSVR, or Microsoft Windows Mixed Reality). It turns out that all genders are subject to multiple types of harassment in VR:
49% of women reported having experienced at least one instance of sexual harassment
30% of male respondents reported racist or homophobic comments
20% of males have experienced violent comments or threats
Apparently, Facebook Spaces is rolling out a new-and-improved update to their cartoony avatars. It’s disgusting to me how even the smallest Facebook Spaces announcement gets oceans of fawning press coverage, and this latest planned update is no exception.
But what Sansar, High Fidelity, and VRChat offer is an opportunity to let both VR and desktop (non-VR) users connect, in three-dimensional virtual worlds that you can actually move around in. And that’s what I consider true social VR. What’s the point of using a VR headset and being in an immersive, three-dimensional environment at all, if you’re just going to be locked into one place?
So until Facebook Spaces fixes what I consider this fundamental flaw in its platform, I don’t especially care how much they try and tart up the avatars. As The Verge reports:
Of course, we’re a far ways off from the avatars of Ready Player One. Facebook Spaces still makes you look like a goofy cartoon, and that creates a somewhat off-putting effect when those avatars move in realistic fashion as the Rift headset tracks your head and hand motions. Facebook says it’s working to make the movements feel even more natural, so perhaps that will change for the better with this update. And the realism it seems will only get better over time.
Want to see the difference between before and after? Glad you asked. Here’s a picture from VentureBeat’s coverage:
Facebook Spaces Avatars: Before and After
Big whoop-dee-doo.
Even with the upgrade, the humanoid avatars in Sansar and Sinespace still look much, much better than Facebook Spaces. And of course, there are no limits to the many different kinds of avatars you can create in High Fidelity and VRChat if you have the know-how. (If Second Life has taught us nothing else over its fourteen-plus years of existence, it’s that people are heavily invested in the appearance of their avatars.)
And, more to the point, all four virtual world platforms I just mentioned—Sansar, High Fidelity, Sinespace and VRChat—allow you to move around freely in a three-dimensional environment, explore, break off into separate discussion groups, and interact not only with other VR headset users, but also non-VR (desktop) users. Facebook Spaces still can’t do that. (And no, I’m not counting the ability to video call friends without VR headsets via Facebook Messenger from within Facebook Spaces. That’s just plain stupid.)
Has Facebook learned nothing from the many other companies that are putting out more fully-featured social VR platforms, with much better-looking avatar options? Are they paying any attention at all? The continued lameness of Facebook Spaces, now a full year after its launch, continues to astound me. Sorry, but I’m seriously unimpressed.
