Month: May 2019

A New Patreon Patrons Page and Some Other Housekeeping Announcements

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I just wanted to let my readers know of a few things that I’ve been working on behind the scenes.

First, you’ll notice that there is a new Patreon Patrons page at the top of the left-hand-side menu of my blog (if you are viewing this on a mobile device, just click on the three-bars icon in the upper-right corner to see this new page). This page is where I list and thank all my Patreon patrons. Note that I will be thanking my patrons by name only when I have their explicit permission to do so. Otherwise, they will be listed as anonymous donors.

Second, I am working hard to come up with more perks and benefits for my lovely Patreon patrons! Please stay tuned for more details.

Third, now that I am off Facebook and Instagram completely, I am looking for someone who is already on these two platforms who would be willing to cross-post some of the posts I make on RyanSchultz.com. For example, I really could use someone who is active on the many Second Life groups on Facebook to cross-post my blogposts about SL there. This would be a volunteer (unpaid) position, but I would be willing to give you free merchandise from the Ryan Schultz Virtual Fashion (RSVF) store in Sansar in exchange. If you’re interested, please let me know via the Contact form on my blog. Thanks!

Finally, my producer Andrew William and I are actively looking for advertisers and sponsors for the fledgling show Metaverse Newscast. For example, if you have a product or service which you want to promote via an ad in an upcoming episode of the Metaverse Newscast, please contact me or Andrew and we can discuss the details.

Sansar Pick of the Day: Sancraft

Sancraft is not the first Minecraft-themed experience in Sansar (that would be Sancrafter by JackTheRipper, which I wrote about back in August 2017). But Gindipple has created a wonderful interactive sandbox environment reminiscent of the classic cube-building game.

If you are in desktop, just press 1 to bring up a building HUD. If you are in a Oculus Rift headset, just press the X or A button on your Touch controllers to bring up the same menu. You can easily choose a cube type, then click on the ground to start placing cubes.

If you need to remove a misplaced cube, just select the shovel icon from the HUD and click on the cube you want to remove. Here are just a few examples of what people have built using Sancraft, posted to the official Sansar Discord:

Why not jump into Sancraft and flex your creative muscles? It’s great fun!

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.