Day: July 12, 2018

TheWaveVR: A Brief Introduction

 

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Well, what do you know? Quite by accident, I noticed that TheWaveVR was listed under the free apps in the Oculus Store, so I downloaded and installed the client software. Up until now, I haven’t been able to access TheWaveVR because I’m in Canada and it had been restricted to Americans only. I guess they changed that recently!

TheWaveVR is a social VR platform that is all about music. It describes itself as:

TheWaveVR is a platform for people who love music, enabling them to view, host, and socialize in shows world wide, anytime, anywhere.

We’re empowering artists and music lovers alike by transforming the way people connect through music.

Music creators can fully customize how their audience experiences the music – whether it’s by transforming the venue from a realistic nightclub to outer space with a click of a button – or putting on the most unimaginable light show ever.

Fans won’t have to travel the globe or miss out on their favorite DJs, musicians or festivals and can experience the music like never before, while socializing in totally new ways alongside their friends.

TheWaveVR is quite the trippy experience! You can visit your own personal space, which is called a cave, set up different visual effects (lasers, tentacles, etc.) and play tracks on turntables in your very own DJ booth! I also visited three different shows, each with different, creative, mesmerizing visual displays that act and react to the music and your hand controllers. I encountered quite a few other avatars as well in my travels. It was great fun! It’s very easy to learn how to navigate.

There’s a calendar of user-created parties called Waves, which you can join.

Here’s an early access launch trailer from a year ago:

Recently, TheWaveVR teamed up with The Glitch Mob to transform their third album, See Without Eyes, into a fly-through VR experience:

TheWaveVR has a website, they have an active Discord server, and they are also on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. I’ll leave you with a three-hour video of TheWaveVR in action. I think what you can do, even though it’s still in beta, is pretty impressive!

Why Have the Newer Virtual Worlds Attracted So Few Bloggers?

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Second Life has attracted hundreds of bloggers who cover the virtual world platform in great detail. There are so many, in fact, that they even started their own professional network, the Blogger & Vlogger Network.

One of the things that surprises me is how few bloggers are covering the newer virtual world/social VR platforms, including the “Big Four”, as I call them:

I’m not talking about the official blogs which the companies maintain; I’m talking about individuals who blog about virtual worlds because they’re interested in one or more platforms.

I am, still, one of the very few bloggers who is covering Sansar, Sinespace, High Fidelity, and VRChat on a regular basis. A small number of Second Life blogs, such as Wagner James Au’s New World Notes and Strawberry Singh’s popular blog, have broadened their coverage to include these newer platforms as well. Inara Pey and Nalates Urriah have also covered Sansar in their blogs. But other than that, I can’t think of many other bloggers out there who cover the newer virtual worlds. Why is that?

One of the reasons may be that the newer virtual world/social VR platforms need time to build up a customer base, which includes bloggers. I don’t think that there were very many bloggers covering Second Life when it first launched in 2003, either. (Wagner James Au’s New World Notes blog actually predates SL; his first entry is dated May 22nd, 2001, and his first entry about Second Life is dated April 22nd, 2003.) It has taken fifteen years for the Second Life blogosphere to grow to its current extent, and it will likely take many years for a similar number of blogs to spring up around the newer virtual worlds.

A large percentage of Second Life blogs are fashion blogs (one person has estimated the number at 87%). People tend to spend a great deal of their time and money on avatar customization in Second Life, and many bloggers follow that, reporting on new items and fashion events.

But the fashion market in Sansar is still small, only dating back to Dec. 18th, 2017, and as a result, there are few bloggers reporting on it. (Among the first is Ivonna’s vrBLOG.) The avatar fashion market in Sinespace is likewise very small. And High Fidelity and VRChat cannot really be said to have a fashion market at all, because you create and rig a whole avatar from scratch, including what it is wearing, instead of dressing up a human avatar like you can in Sansar and Sinespace. So that’s probably another reason why there are not very many bloggers yet. As avatar customization options in the newer virtual worlds expand, more bloggers will begin to cover the fashion aspect.

Another idea: perhaps people are choosing to use other means of covering their favourite virtual worlds. For example, there are few (if any) blogs about VRChat, but there are dozens of YouTube channels about VRChat. There’s a lot of Twitch streaming as well. Could it be that attention has shifted from blogs to livestreaming and other ways of communicating?

So, what do you think it will take to get more bloggers to cover the newer virtual worlds? Please let me know in the comments, thanks!