A couple of people encouraged me to go take a look at another social VR space/virtual world product called Anyland, so I decided to visit it a few times, both in my VR headset and on desktop. (I actually had only one successful visit in my Oculus Rift. Each time after that, I got an error from SteamVR whenever I tried to enter in VR mode. These pictures are screen captures, all taken when I was in desktop mode.)
Anyland bills itself the “virtual reality sandbox universe”, where you can build anything you want using the in-world building tools.
First, here is a selfie of my avatar taken in my spawn point, which appears to be a small rocky planet in space. There’s not much to the default Anyland avatar, only a pair of grey robotic hands with button pads on the thumbs (which you press to call up menus, such as the one you see on the left-hand side of this picture).
In fact, Anyland encourages users to use its in-world building tools to create their own avatar body! I did see some creative examples on my first visit in my VR headset, when I popped in on a group of avatars playing an Uno card-playing game.
The following are two pictures of Anyland experiences, the first is called Blue Castle, and the second is called Build Town. As you can see, it’s basically a blocks/”prims” building environment, which reminds me a little of Google Blocks and the Second Life in-world building tools.
Here’s Anyland’s main tutorial video, explaining how to use the building tools:
It’s clear that some people are really enjoying the creative canvas that Anyland provides:
In summary, the best way I would describe Anyland is that it is a mix between Second Life and Google Blocks. Give it a try if you are interested, it’s available on Steam for free.
