Month: August 2019

Using Bigscreen As a Remote Workteams Virtual Reality App

A user named PixelRouter posted the following picture to the Oculus subReddit today:

With a post titled Bought 4 Quests and a Rift S and so the sales guy wanted a pic. Will be using them for remote collaboration with my team using Bigscreen. We’ve come along way since DK1, he sparked a lively discussion about the merits of Bigscreen as an example of Yet Another Remote Teams Virtual Reality App (YARTVRA). You can see a short list of other YARTVRA here.

When asked why he had decided to go this route, he replied:

I used Bigscreen when it first came out for the Rift a couple of years ago and found it was amazing for collaborating on digital work of all sorts. I once spent four hours teaching people to build a basic Unity VR game, inside Bigscreen. The trouble was all the wires. Now with the Quest I am hoping it will be nearly as simple as setting up a zoom video call to have team members step in to our Bigscreen room to talk about what we are working on while able to present their screens…

I use Zoom all the time for video calls with potential business partners and it’s OK, but the thing that is great about Bigscreen is the sense of presence you feel with the others in the same room. It feels much more like a real-world, in-person meeting.

When one person said that VR wasn’t yet at a stage where this would be logical, PixelRouter replied:

I disagree. At least this is my tentative stance as I set out to try this out at my company. I’ve been an Oculus developer since 2013 with the DK1. I discovered Bigscreen when it first came out about two years ago. At the time I was Technical Director at a VR company in New York. Some days I worked remotely from NJ and would use Bigscreen to review code and designs, with people at the office in New York. It was awesome, except for all the wires and setup. Now, with the Quest, I think we have crossed that threshold where it really is practical to use VR to collaborate…

This is core to my experiment here. I want to see what we can make of this. I’m not a noob. I went through the “VR is the best thing ever” phase, on to the, “but it’s not there yet phase”. Things change, though. I think that, with the Quest, it may have just crossed that convenience threshold which will make this stick. We shall see.

And I have to admit, this is a perfectly valid use for Bigscreen, which I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to before. I always used to see Bigscreen as more of an entertainment app, but it could be used as a remote workteams app, too!

Cluster: A Brief Introduction

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:

I don’t read or speak Japanese, so that’s pretty much all I can say about the product. From the video, it appears there are VR and PC versions of the platform. Last September, the company secured 400 million yen (about US$3.6 million) in venture capital. 

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: A Brief Introduction

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).

Normal’s website essentially consists of a blog and a store selling branded merchandise. They have one product called Normcore, which they describe on their blog as follows:

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.

EpicLive: A Brief Introduction

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).

According to a recent news item on their website:

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.