Day: May 2, 2019

Tonight in Sansar: A Crash Course in Star Trek with Rod Roddenberry

This evening at 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time/Sansar Time, Gene Roddenberry’s son Rod will screen a special artist biography, reflect on the Roddenberry legacy, and answer Star Trek fans’ questions. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Trekkers!

Here’s the listing from the Sansar Events Calendar. You will need to install the Sansar client software on your computer and create an account to see this show. Here’s a guide on how to get started. On the day of the event, open up Sansar and navigate to the Atlas (look for the Go button on the left-hand-side menu, click it, then select “Find Places to Go”). At the What’s Happing in Sansar page, click on the item A Crash Course in Star Trek to join the live event. The doors will open up 30 minutes ahead of the show. See you there!

meetingRoom: A Brief Introduction

meetingRoom is yet another business-oriented social VR platform, by an Irish company, with support for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices, as well as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headsets.

They claim to offer a variety of features to help replace face-to-face business meetings in the real world:

So I decided to download and install their client software for the Oculus Rift, just to check it out. Things did not go well.

At first, I got stuck in an endless loop where a male voice kept welcoming me to meetingRoom, and to click the right trigger button to continue, which did not work for me. Eventually, I got to the Select Organization screen:

The software had an option to customize my avatar, but I found that it did not work for me. When I clicked on the Daily Room, it took me to what appeared to be virtual boardroom. However, when I put on my Oculus Rift, all I saw was a flat screen in my field of view, the exact same image as appeared on my desktop. I found I could not move around at all, either in my VR headset or on the desktop. Let’s just say that meetingRoom is rather buggy and poorly documented, and leave it at that! Eventually I had to use the Windows Task Manager to shut the program down completely. It was a disappointing first look.

Yet another platform to add to my ever-growing list of social VR apps and virtual worlds. I don’t think this product is quite ready for merket yet, so I’ll check back in six months or a year to see what’s new.