Day: August 8, 2019

DCLBlocks: A New In-World Building Tool in Decentraland

Decentraland is inviting participants from its June Hackathon to post to their official blog about their achievements. This week’s guest blogger is Interweaver (a.k.a. Noah), who shared his experiment with in-world building blocks in Decentraland:

In this blog post I’ll be talking about how I designed and implemented my Decentrablocks project. The idea for this scene was simple: I wanted to be able to intuitively build things while actually standing in the scene, not in a separate Builder or with an external text editor and modeling software (as one does with the SDK). Also, I’m not a 3D artist, so it had to be made entirely of primitive shapes.

As you can see, this is a tool very similar to the prim-building tools offered by Second Life, as well as High Fidelity’s in-world building tools.

You can read Interweaver’s blogpost in full to get all the details on how he did this. He’s placed all his code for this project up on GitHub.

Don’t forget to register for the upcoming Decentraland SDK Hackathon. There’s still time to enter the contest, which runs from Sept. 16th-30th, and you could win your share of over US$275,000 worth of prizes, in either MANA (DCL’s cryptocurrency) or LAND (DCL’s 16 m by 16 m square plots of virtual land). Enter today!

VRAVO!: A Brief Introduction

VRAVO! (yes, with an exclamation mark, like Yahoo!), created by a company called VRidge, bills itself as “the Virtual and Augmented Reality Presentations Platform, designed for Corporate and Education”:

The VRAVO! website

According to their website, creating presentations a four-step process:

  1. CREATE/DESIGN: Create your XR presentation using our web based platform, including engaging 360 Videos, Animated 3D Models, 3D Layered Slides, 3D Charts and more.
  2. SCHEDULE/PUBLISH: Schedule your next presentation  (or publish it for on demand access).
  3. PRESENT: Control your presentation in real time using our VRAVO! Presenter tools for Desktop and Mobile.
  4. ATTEND: Your audience will use VRAVO! Attendee apps to watch the presentation in virtual or augmented reality.

Here, “augmented reality” means seeing it through your mobile device like Pokémon Go, which I don’t consider true AR. (Their website says “Soon available for AR headsets”. I’ll believe that little bit of marketing hype when I see it.)

Here’s a couple of promotional videos for the product:

This second video gives you a better feel for what VRAVO! presentations can look like:

VRAVO! has mobile apps for Android or iOS devices. You can also attend VRAVO! presentations in virtual reality, using Android Cardboard, iPhone Cardboard, Daydream, Lenovo Mirage Solo, Pico Goblin, Oculus Go/GearVR or Oculus Rift VR headsets. A viewer app is also available for TV devices: AndroidTV, Amazon FireTV, and AppleTV.

If you want more information on VRAVO!, you can follow them on Twitter or YouTube. While I am not 100% certain that VRAVO! is truly a social VR platform (i.e., where you can have more than one person sharing an experience), for now I will be adding it to my comprehensive list of social VR and virtual worlds.

VRLand: A Brief Introduction

VRLand is a one-person project, a low-poly WebVR-based virtual world you can navigate using your browser, with or without a VR headset. From the main entry point, there are five scenes for you to explore:

In some of the experiences, you automatically have a rifle attached to you, and you can shoot at things.

There’s also a movie theatre:

Overall, there isn’t a lot to see. The website is surprising in its complete lack of information about the project. If you want to monitor this project as it develops, you can join the VRLand Discord server, which has about 100 subscribers to date. Yet another addition to my comprehensive list of social VR and virtual worlds.

UXR.ZONE: A Brief Introduction

I first heard about UXR.ZONE yesterday from Tony (a.k.a SkarredGhost) of the popular VR blog The Ghost Howls. UXR.ZONE is a project created by Enea Le Fons, whom you might remember as the guy who spent 30 days in VR last year.

The site strongly resembles Mozilla Hubs and has the same functionality: you can pick an experience to load, and invite friends to join you. You can use it on the desktop or in a VR headset. You don’t even need to set up an account first to use it!

The creators emphasize the freedom and privacy of the platform on their website:

YOUR OPEN XR ONLINE SPACE to DO and SAY WHATEVER YOU WANT

CREATE your Space / EXPLORE it with your TEAM or FRIENDS
TALK, Share VIDEOS, PICS, 3D MODELS, PAINT in 3D and MORE?

UXR IS NOT STORING YOUR DATA

NOT PUTTING ADVERTISEMENTS IN YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS / BRAIN

NOT PERFORMING DEEP LEARNING ON YOUR STUFF

NOT SELLING YOU ANYTHING ( unless you want a whitelabel solution! )

If you are interested in learning more, here is their website. I am adding UXR.ZONE to my comprehensive list of social VR and virtual worlds.