Cluster was mentioned as a social VR platform in the 2019 infographic published by the San Francisco-based venture capital firm The Venture Reality Fund (which is available here).
Cluster is perhaps best described as a Japanese version of VRChat:
The website is in Japanese only. There’s a video, but it’s in Japanese too:
There appear to be two basic kinds of avatars: the anime kind which you see everywhere in VRChat, and a sort of placeholder robot avatar which reminds me strongly of those in AltspaceVR, but with even less customization options. Here’s a picture of what the latter look like:
Yet another addition to my list of social VR/virtual worlds! Hunting down all these social VR platforms and virtual worlds is kind of like another Japanese game, Pokémon: “gotta catch ’em all!”
Normal is mentioned as one of the companies working in social VR in the 2019 infographic published by the San Francisco-based venture capital firm The Venture Reality Fund (which is available here).
If you’ve ever tried building a multiplayer game, you know it’s a lot of work. Even just getting to the point where you can pass data between two clients can be challenging. It’s so much work that many developers decide from the beginning not to create multiplayer games. We love multiplayer games and apps at Normal. Especially when it comes to VR, multiplayer turns what has the potential to be a very isolated experience, into a shared one.
When we started implementing our own multiplayer titles, we realized the multiplayer aspect was going to be a lot of work. Sending messages between clients, synchronizing & smoothing movement of objects, implementing voice chat, matchmaking, running servers, etc. The list piles up quickly, and there are many engineering challenges that aren’t obvious until you’re months or even years into a project.
We’ve spent the last three years working on Normcore, a Unity plug-in for our own internal use, implementing all the different pieces—state syncing, physics syncing, voice chat, persistence, fast serialization with versioning, delta compression, flow control, and much more. Through this process, we noticed a pattern: Everyone currently needs to implement each of these pieces from scratch.
We’re releasing Normcore in an effort to not only save developers time and encourage more multiplayer titles, but with the hopes of creating the best multiplayer networking plugin available. Our goal is to refine and improve Normcore until it becomes so good, you wouldn’t ever dream of writing your own multiplayer networking. You should be spending that time on your game anyway.
So, instead of a social VR platform, Normal sells a multiplayer networking plugin for Unity-based games. So it is “social” in that sense. But it’s not very interesting from an end-user point of view, so I’m not going to include it in my list of social VR/virtual worlds.
The South Korean company Salin, which makes the Bigscreen-like social VR platform EpicLive, was mentioned as one of the companies working in social VR in the 2019 infographic published by the San Francisco-based venture capital firm The Venture Reality Fund (which is available here).
EpicLive can provide various types of video-on-demand (VOD) and live-streamed content, such as 2D and 3D imaging in a virtual space, with no location restrictions. It is possible to enjoy movies, sports events, performances, and other content in the company of friends and family members in a virtual room, where broadcasters can provide a wide range of services and options.
Here’s an overview of the EpicLive platform, which seems to be directed more to video content providers than consumers:
As far as I can tell, this service only seems to be available in South Korea, although Salin “is now actively developing markets in Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia in order to advance EpicLive into the global marketplace”. There are no instructions on the English version of their website on how to download and install the client software. So, like Teemew, I’m adding it to my list of social VR/virtual worlds, but until I see actual proof of a working VR app, I’m not going to bother adding an asterisk to it to indicate that it supports virtual reality.
Here are some pictures I took of the live deejay performances at the Monstercat Compound Pre-Party in Sansar!
Coming up next is the Tailgate Party, which is free for everybody to attend, and runs from 2:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time/Sansar Time! See you there!
