The social VR game show formerly called Kiss or Kill has now been released with a brand-new name, VR Trivia Battle, on the Viveport subscription service for both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift users, with releases to follow later this month both on Steam and the Oculus Store.
Here’s a brief YouTube promo:
According to the promo video, up to 8 avatars can compete against each other in trivia contests drawn from a quiz bank of over 10,000 questions.
Ever since I had my first guided tour of Virtual Universe back in April, I felt that this was something special. As opposed to so many other blockchain-based virtual worlds that were more hype than substance, VU felt like an actual, solid product, tantalizingly close to a release date. I was excited, and I promoted VU as often as I could on this blog.
But the cryptocurrency markets this year have been rough—absolutely brutal—lately. Many cryptocurrency tokens for various projects have lost a great deal of their initial value. Many people who jumped on board the cryptocurrency bandwagon when certain coins were riding high are now looking at their losses and cursing their bad luck. The Telegram channels I follow have been full of angry, bitter, and demoralized buyers.
Very recently, Virtual Universe decided to turn their VU token sale from public to private. Their only public message about this change was posted to Medium on Sept. 27th:
ICO Update
As the Industry continues to evolve rapidly, the VU Token team has been advised to take our sale private at this time. We want to thank our contributors and supporters for their patience as we continue to pursue private investment sources.
The Company intends that current VU Token owners will receive their tokens upon the conclusion of our token sale.
We remain excited and committed to the creation of Virtual Universe. Stay tuned to our social channels for updates.
The Virtual Universe Team
And then, complete and utter silence. Absolutely no news, no word of any kind.
In recent days, I have been approached privately by two worried people, one of whom had made a significant purchase of Virtual Universe tokens during their public ICO period, and another one who (like me) was an active participant in the VUtoken Partner Program. Both had the same question: “What’s going on?” I didn’t know what to tell them. I honestly don’t know what’s going on. But the sudden lack of communication is a very troubling sign.
There hasn’t been an “Earn & Win” task posted since early August, and I am starting to feel a little concerned. I’ve posted questions in both the Discord and Telegram channels for the Virtual Universe project, but nobody has responded to my questions.
What’s going on?
Adam Frisby, a co-founder of OpenSim and the Chief Product Officer of Sine Wave Entertainment (the creators of the virtual world Sinespace), has written a very insightful article for the Hypergrid Business website.
Titled What I learned about virtual worlds by helping found OpenSim, Adam talks at length about some of the lessons he learned from building virtual worlds over the past 12 years, particularly his experience with OpenSim:
For a while, there were some big names adopting the project in droves. Nearly every major tech company had some involvement — or at least one employee contributing — to OpenSim at some point. IBM had an entire team of OpenSim developers and was running internal conferences using the project. During my involvement, the OpenSim software was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. In the years since, it’s found its way into many surprising places, from NASA to university courses.
It’s gratifying to see OpenSim still soldiering on 12 years later, in great part through the efforts of the educators who’ve embraced it, and through worlds like OSGrid, which maintains a small but dedicated user community, along with a host of other enterprises, projects and grids using the software.
And while OpenSim didn’t become the breakout success we hoped it would, I learned a lot from it, about building virtual world platforms — and what they need.
He stresses the importance of not reinventing the wheel:
Virtual worlds shouldn’t reinvent the wheel
This is true of Second Life and OpenSim, and numerous other virtual worlds and MMOs — attempting to build key features and functionality by creating them from scratch, when better options already exist.
At the time, the list of free or cheap 3D engines could be counted on one hand — Torque, Ogre3D, Irrlicht, etc. But today, we have dozens of fantastic high-end options, including Unity, Unreal, Lumberyard, CryEngine, and Unigine. If you were willing to shell out real cash, Unreal, CryEngine, id Tech and others have been available throughout.
Building your own graphics engine from scratch, however, is a dumb idea. It’s an insanely complex bit of software. Throw in a few thousand graphics cards and chips, various drivers, and you’ve got the recipe for a monumental headache on compatibility and support, let alone trying to stay up to date with the latest and greatest in 3D features. Trying to build your own is just going to result in you wasting a ton of talent reinventing the wheel.
Sinespace is built on top of the Unity engine, which allows it to leverage the usage of such cool, Unity-based tools such as Archimatix. Contrast this with Linden Lab’s Sansar, where Linden Lab has decided to develop their own engine. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches (for example, Sinespace has to scramble to fix bugs introduced by regular Unity updates, something that Linden Lab doesn’t need to worry about as much, since they control everything in-house).
Adam also talks about the importance of addressing non-Windows and mobile users:
Virtual worlds must be accessible — immediately
Even among gamers, the percentage of people willing to downland and install a client, then endure a time-consuming, multi-step login process, is vanishingly small. For the same reason, web and mobile access matter too. We know from our own efforts that if you want someone to download or install something, half of the people who sign up, won’t.
Today’s consumers don’t use desktops either – the web today is mobile, and I find myself using my phone more and more, switching only to my desktop to get work done. You need to be where the users are – and that, in my opinion, means friction- free and device-agnostic experiences.
I note that Sinespace is now available not only on the desktop (with versions for Windows, MacOS, and LINUX), but also for users in VR headsets (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality). They’re also currently testing viewers for both iPhone/iPad and Android devices. Sinespace even has a viewer that runs completely within a web browser (I’ve tested it and it works fairly well). And they are working on a client for OpenVR viewers for both Windows and Mac, too! I would have to say that, at this point, Sinespace is ahead of the competition in terms of mobile device and multiple platform support. They’ve got all the bases covered!
Offering lots of options for people to access your virtual world (particularly those which don’t involve downloading a client) gives you an advantage in an increasingly crowded market of metaverse products. And if you don’t believe that mobile-accessible virtual worlds are important, you really do need to check out both IMVU and Avakin Life. Both are very popular with children and teenagers, most of whom are on smartphones—and these children and teenagers are future adult consumers! Companies need to be paying attention to this segment of the market.
This is a very good article about virtual worlds from an industry veteran who is doing some innovative things in virtual worlds. I’d encourage you to go over to Hypergrid Business and read it in full!