Day: May 27, 2020

Teooh: A Brief Introduction

UPDATE May 12th, 2021: Teooh is now called Roomkey; here is an updated review.

I swear, they must be running out of names for new metaverse platforms! (I kept typing in “Teeoh” instead of “Teooh” when searching for this one, or while writing up this blogpost.)

Teooh (currently in beta) describes itself as follows in their FAQ:

On Teooh you can create virtual events and monetize them by selling tickets. Your guests can attend as an avatar and hear speakers, socialise and network with others. All this through their laptop and mobile phone. In short, if the Sims did paid events Teooh would be it.

Teooh appears to offer several different kinds of virtual spaces for your event:

Here’a a one-minute promotional video to give you a feel:

Here’s a longer, twelve-minute video showing you a bit more of the platform:

There’s precious little technical information about Teooh on their website, and no pricing info available. All the individual customer use cases in the “For Customers” drop-down menu point to essentially the same text and images, repeated over and over for each case. Someone really needs to put some more work to this new platform’s website.

From what I can tell, this is primarily a service for desktop and mobile devices. TechCrunch reports:

Teooh won’t be available in VR, instead focusing on mobile and desktop platforms, hoping to pitch an alternative to teleconferencing software like Zoom that is more bespoke for meetups where participants can single out and chat with individual users in a virtual environment.

So, I would classify Teeoh (damn, I mean Teooh!) as a virtual world with mobile support. And frankly, I think that a nonsense word like Teooh is a terrible, terrible name for a product. (In my opinion, it ranks right up there with Twinity and Beloola for stupid platform names.) The company behing Teeoh needs to reach out to a professional branding consultant and change it.

If you want more information on Teooh, you can visit their website, or follow them on social media: Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube (and the link to their Twitter account from their website is broken, another sign that somebody is not paying attention to details).

It would appear that Teooh is now taking applications from parties who are interested in using the beta platform for their events; the application form is here (just click on the button “Apply for Batch #2”).

Thanks to Neobela for the heads-up!

NeosVR Demonstrates Full Mouth Tracking on Their Avatars

Tomáš Mariančík (a.k.a. Frooxius), the creative and talented lead software developer who is building the NeosVR social VR platform, recently shared the following video via Twitter, saying:

The HTC Vive lip tracker dev-kit I integrated into NeosVR really adds a whole new level of expressivity to social VR. Never before [have] I had other people in VR telling me they like to see me smile when there’s something funny, or to go to sleep when I’m yawning!

This is so cool! Of course, most people in VR headsets use hand controllers of some sort to animate thier avatar’s arms and hands. Valve Index hand controllers can even animate individual fingers (although not all platforms can take advantage of this feature).

Many people have also been experimenting for years with using the HTC Vive “pucks” (on platforms such as VRChat, the old High Fidelity, and Sansar), to animate their avatar’s full bodies, attaching them to shoulders, waists, hips, knees, and feet. But adding mouth, lips (even tongue!) movements pushes the envelope even further, and these non-verbal expressions can add so much to conversations in social VR!

It should be noted here that the quest to animate your avatar’s face has been going on for quite some time now, with a variety of different solutions. For example, Sinespace sells a product called an Avatar Facial Driver, which works using your webcam to capture your facial expressions and play them on your avatar’s face (this is for a non-VR, desktop user, though). I blogged about this back in May of 2018.

Congratulations to Tomáš and the entire team at NeosVR for pushing the boundaries in avatar expression!

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