Can you believe that we’re already at fifty episodes of Atlas Hopping? It’s been an amazing run for the popular and fun livestreamed show, hosted by Draxtor Despres and Strawberry Singh. (Drax has announced that Strawberry will be stepping away from her co-hosting duties for the forseeable future. I am very sorry to see her go, and I will miss her.)
Today’s theme is games, and we are visiting the following five Sansar experiences:
Some things haven’t changed: the dreadful cartoony avatars, and the campfire meeting spot. In addition to the campfire, you can also visit a new gathering place, called The Origin.
So, what else is new in AltspaceVR? Well, for one thing, you can now set a (friends-only) home location, choosing one of twelve predesigned homes. Here’s a picture of the winter lodge I selected:
It also looks like Altspace is gearing up for commerce. I came across a sprawling mall, filled with row after row of empty stores, all ready for vendors to move in:
Microsoft’s AltspaceVR differs drastically from other social networks by letting you share the same (virtual) space with your friends. Now, it’s giving you more places to hang out with custom building kits. You start with a virtual hangout based on the popular “Campfire” and “Alien Planet” spaces, then customize it by grabbing assets from a curated library of flora, structures and shapes. You can then host muliplayer social games within your space and even add custom 3D design and sound.
“This is step one of a greater plan to make sure our community can help build AltspaceVR with us,” said Microsoft’s AltspaceVR group on its blog. “Today our community will have basic kits that they can use to build their environment.”
There’s more information on this new feature here. From the article, it sounds as though AltspaceVR is providing all the components for building your own world. It will be interesting to see if they will allow creators to design and sell items for consumers to use in building their own spaces in the future (the empty shopping mall hints at that possibility).
You create and name your “world” using the AltspaceVR website first, but when I got back into my VR headset, it wasn’t clear exactly how to get to the world I just created. The instruction page says, “Once in-world, activate your dashboard by clicking on the Space Editor”, which I couldn’t find. They’re going to have to improve the documentation to make this feature a little more user-friendly, if you ask me.
