I have already profiled C3rb3rus’ urban noir science fiction experience 2077 as my Sansar Pick of the Day, here and here. But I revisited it today at our regular Saturday Atlas Hopping, and I was so impressed by what C3rb3rus has added to the experience that I am making it my Pick of the Day again!
At the spawn point is a new Holomap, which gives an overview of all the locations within the sprawling sim. And C3rb3rus has even scripted it to include little red figures to indicate where all the avatars are located in 2077 in real time!
The Holomap outside the Palladium club in 2077
When you arrive at the spawn point for this experience, turn around and go downstairs into the subway station (C3rb3rus has added some fun, futuristic advertising there). Get on the subway train when it arrives and ride it until the next station, then get off and come back up to street level. You will have arrived at a large opulent club called Palladium, complete with a DJ booth, and an extensive aquarium built into the walls, complete with animated schools of fish, and even sharks swimming around!
DJ Booth of the Palladium Club in 2077
With all these wonderful, inventive new additions, 2077 is a joy to explore. Even if you’ve visited before, it’s definitely worth another visit!
And C3rb3rus has hired DJ Puddles to perform for us today (Saturday, February 2nd) at 2:30 pm Pacific time, so come join us! We’re starting the party off with a street rave on the main street, and then moving over to the Palladium club. Here’s a Sansar Altas link to 2077.
As most of you already know, I quit Facebook as my New Year’s resolution, and I am still quite happy with my decision.
One of the places where I have spent more time since leaving Facebook has been Reddit, which is home to many thriving communities such as the Oculus subReddit, with over 140,000 subscribers who discuss and debate various issues related to Oculus VR hardware and software. (Sometimes I cross-post one of my blogposts there.)
Mark Zuckerberg presents the Oculus lineup (image taken from The Ghost Howls blog)
First, it’s ridiculous that cross-communication between the Go and Rift communities is so difficult, especially with Quest coming. VR social presence should be an underlying infrastructure that the whole Oculus ecosystem can plug into… Oculus: don’t split the VR community simply because of which of your own platforms they buy. Make communication easy, automatic, and built in.
Second, where the hell is the metaverse/Oasis/shared world? I know, VR Chat, AltspaceVR, Rec Room, High Fidelity, etc. …but why has Oculus–let alone Facebook!–abdicated this whole sector to third parties?
Now, this poster has raised a valid point. Why is social VR across all the Oculus hardware such a disorganized mess? Currently, Facebook offers Oculus Rooms for the Oculus Go users and Facebook Spaces for Oculus Rift users. Is Facebook going to use the release of the Oculus Quest (which I predict will be popular) to try and clean up this situation?
Some of the comments to this poster are worth quoting (again, I am going to take it easy with the quoting, taking into account the feedback I have recently received). I did go in and write a lengthy response, outlining the situation as I see it, and pointing out that there were already many social VR platforms which have been in development for several years (Sansar, High Fidelity, Sinespace, etc.).
When I said that High Fidelity and VRChat were planning to support the upcoming standalone Oculus Quest VR headset, one person responded:
Sadly, I don’t think VRChat’s gonna support Quest. It’s just not compatible with mobile CPUs. Hell, it brings modern up-to-date PC’s to a standstill with too many people. I very much doubt the Snapdragon 835 can handle all the custom shaders, avatars, IK, etc. The team would basically need to do a full rewrite. And that’s unlikely unless the team was way bigger.
Someone else said:
Do you really WANT Facebook also own the social VR “metaverse”? That seems like a really terrible idea in general to have a monopoly control so many things. Especially one that has proven dozens of times that they could care less about our privacy in respect to their profits…
I for one HOPE Oculus fails WILDLY on social VR. The alternative would be the worst-case dystopian future for VR and likely disasterous for humanity as a whole in the long-term.
To which I say, Amen and Hallelujah. However, Facebook has the deep pockets (lots of money) and the hardware (Oculus) to totally up-end the current, nascent social VR market, if they finally get their act together and choose to do so.
And finally, one person said:
To me it comes down to this—people want Second Life in VR format. It’s true. A metaverse where you can build or be anything you want…but in VR. We know that SL’s infrastructure cannot be upgraded to do that. High Fidelity, even with the founder of SL, isn’t cutting it. And neither is Sansar, Linden Lab’s actual VR offering.
I believe there are two main issues impeding them. 1. Instances – every platform nowadays does instance based “world” creation. Worlds are not permanent, player join numbers are limited, and the worlds are not visually connected to each other. People want permanence! To be able to wander from one place to the next aimlessly. This isn’t just an issue limited to VR of course (hello WoW). The reasoning behind this is that it’s much easier on the server hardware. Personally, I’d deal with some lag to be able to participate in a true open world environment. And
2. Adult content – All of the platforms are scared as f*** here. They don’t want their brand to be ‘marked’ by that, they don’t want to have to figure out how to police it, etc etc. That stuff is not going away. Whether they admit it or not, adult content has kept Second Life alive and thriving for 15 years (they still have ~50k concurrent users). Bottom line—deal with it. Embrace it. It’s going to happen with or without you.
This wide-ranging and fascinating discussion is the kind of thing that Reddit has become well-known for, and I would encourage you to go over there and read all or most of it for yourself, and perhaps add your own comments.
