Spinview: A Brief Introduction (Yet Another YARTVRA)

Yawn. Here we go again…

YARTVRA: Yet Another Remote Teamwork Virtual Reality App. 

And yet another boring, cookie-cutter corporate website where it appears the owners haven’t even bothered to swap out the lifeless, generic default clip art. And yet another platform which is only nebulously described by its company:

You can use Spinview’s social VR space to immerse your team in a real-world learning environment for effective and engaging training without them leaving their desks, let alone their city. In our environment up to 8 people can focus and communicate with each-other in real time. They can work together, train together, research, plan and more. You can create a workspace designed to encourage a culture of sharing without the cost and time taken to get people physically in the same office. With Spinview, 8 heads can easily be better than one.

Again, absolutely zero technical details of their platform, and no mention of which VR hardware is supported. Just a lot of handwaving, and a cookie-cutter contact form, complete with more uninspiring clipart and vague suggestions of possible corporate uses for the Spinview platform:

VRFocus reported in November 2018 that the company acquired Agority, another social VR platform I had never heard of before:

Spinview, a company that concentrates on VR for business use has purchased immersive social platform Agority as part of its continued expansion.

The aim of the purchase is to offer businesses a new way to communicate and collaborate, letting teams inhabit a virtual area together, even if they are miles apart.

And Spinview’s corporate blog has not been updated since October 2018 (no news of the acquisition). Since then, radio silence. Who knows what is going on behind the scenes. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Spinview, like all the other YARTVRA I have covered on this blog, is having some trouble signing up paying customers. The list of companies who want to sell VR products supporting remote workteams is getting rather ridiculously long (you can see a list of other YARTVRA platforms in this earlier blogpost).

Let me say this again: High Fidelity has already decided that there’s not enough corporate interest in a remote workteams app to continue operations, and they are essentially shutting down as of January 15th, 2020. If a company that has raised $72.9 million in venture capital and has an actual working platform can’t make it happen, companies that can’t even bother to keep their websites up-to-date and demonstrate to their potential customers that they have any sort of deliverable product are doomed to failure.

Flowtropolis: A Brief Introduction

Flowtropolis is YARTVRA: Yet Another Remote Teamwork Virtual Reality App. (Yes, I am still trying to get the acronym to catch on!)

On their website, there’s lots of handwaving about the benefits of remote teamwork and various applications of virtual reality to the office, but precious little detail about any actual products. According to their website:

We are currently building the Flowtropolis platform and will soon open up for our wider community to take it for a spin during the fall of 2019. Please hold on, it´s going to be worth it!

Well, autumn has come and gone, and there’s still no concrete details on what this platform is all about. Absolutely zero information on what VR headsets it supports, for example. The company does offer a link to a form to fill out, for customers interested in what they call “co-creation opportunities”. Hmm.

It all sounds rather suspiciously like “contact us with your ideas, and we will build it for you”, as opposed to an actual deliverable. If you’re interested, you can contact Flowtropolis, but be sure to also check out my list of other YARTVRA platforms before you make any decisions.

This is still a nascent, rapidly-evolving marketplace, and High Fidelity has already decided that there’s not yet enough corporate interest for it to market a product for remote workteams. I suspect that we are at least a generation away from the more widespread use of remote workteams in VR/AR/MR/XR at most corporations. Most companies still expect their employees to commute to a central, shared office space to do their work.

Alloverse: A Brief Introduction

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.

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.

Alloverse is obviously marketing itself to the furry community 😉

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.

SculptrVR: A Brief Introduction

SculptrVR is a multiscale, collaborative voxel sculpting tool, available for the Oculus Rift, Quest, and Go VR headsets, and PlayStation VR. The platform is also available on Steam.

Here’s a one-minute promotional video from YouTube:

There’s not a lot of info on their official website, so if you want to learn more about SculptrVR, you can follow them on Facebook or Twitter, or join their Discord server.

Yet another addition to my comprehensive list of social VR/virtual worlds!