Alloverse (which has not yet been released) is a Swedish social VR company with an extremely ambitious goal:
The goal for the Alloverse is to lay the foundations for the “3D internet”: introducing a set of federated, distributed and open protocols to supercede HTTP, building a set of open source tools and applications that are compatible with those protocols, and fostering application development on top of these.
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Alloverse is distributed by design. No single company can own the Alloverse, just like no single company can own the Web. Alloverse lets you create your own places, and use software from all over the internet within them. It is not a single platform where a single entity sets the rules.
Among the intended uses of the open source platform are:
■ Virtual classrooms. The social XR aspect of the Alloverse allows students and teachers to come together in a space. The application platform aspect of the Alloverse allows a wide variety of educational software to run concurrently and collaboratively in this space.
■ Collaborative construction. By building your CAD, fashion or art creation application on top of Alloverse APIs, the app is automatically collaborative. Multiple people can work on pieces together, and you could even run multiple creation apps in orchestration to see your full creation in one go. One app could be used to create a garment, while another to create the spaces in which it will be shown off; and they’d both run at the same time.
■ Pair programming. Since apps can run on any computer anywhere, you could collect programmers, IDEs, and runtime monitoring from many different servers and all over the world all into the same space: perfect for a remote organization.
■ Business meetings. Bringing people and instrumentation together into dedicated spaces, saving airfare and increasing understanding.
If the Alloverse project sparks your curiosity, and you want to help get it running, the Alloverse team would love to hear from you!
The Alloverse is an open source work in progress. If you’re an interaction designer, programmer or visual artist interested in the frontiers of HCI, we’d love to collaborate with you! Send us an email at: info@alloverse.com
They also have an Updates blog you can follow, which gives a bit more of the background of the project.
