Month: May 2020

Breakroom: A New Social Hub for Remote Work Teams, Education, and Conferences from Sinespace

Sinespace has decided to branch out into an area that has seen a mini-boom in recent months: social VR platforms whose aim is to provide an immersive social hub to bring together work teams who may be scattered across different neighbourhoods, different cities, even different countries!

This is a particularly critical need, as so many employees are now working in self-isolation from their homes in an effort to stop the spread of the current coronavirus pandemic. Keeping your team connected and motivated, when pre-existing lines of communication have been shattered and shared physical spaces are no longer available, can negatively impact a company’s productivity and morale, and its bottom line. Sinespace is selling Breakroom as a way to overcome these hurdles.

The concept is to bring your work team together in your own safe, secure, branded virtual world, providing team members a private space where they can hang out, connect with peers, chat around the virtual water cooler, and feel part of the group. Some of the benefits are:

  • Use live events and social hangouts to create momentum and enthusiasm;
  • Go beyond work collaboration tools to offer a full social space where your team members can be themselves;
  • Help people maintain the friendships they rely on in their daily lives, even if they are physically apart;
  • Support employee mental health while they self-isolate with shared spaces and activities, and combat the threat of depression and other mental health issues that isolation, worry, and fear can lead to.

Among the many features offered by Breakroom are:

  • Exhibition halls
  • Corporate headquarters
  • Amphitheaters
  • Open plan offices
  • Private offices
  • Student common rooms
  • Cinema and screening rooms
  • Live music venues
  • Casual game regions and tables
  • Breakout rooms
  • Hangouts
  • Explorable regions
  • Extensive avatar customization
  • 10,000+ virtual goods for shopping and building your own worlds
  • Full suite of communication tools (VOIP, IM and inworld email)
  • Video conferencing, video sharing and conferencing tools
  • Media sharing and desktop sharing tools
  • Branded exhibition stands
  • Event management system
  • Mature APIs for integrating other enterprise applications
  • In-world building and scene editing
  • HIPAA compliant regions for one-to-one therapy sessions
  • Support for live events including music, cinema, pub quizzes, seminar sessions

Breakroom is also partnering with a number of agency partners who can build a custom breakroom to your company’s specifications. And, of course, content designed by existing Sinespace developers can also be bought by users to use in their Breakrooms, giving them yet another avenue for sales.

Pricing for corporate users starts at US$500 per month for 50 seats, a fully-featured private custom branded space, with dedicated customer support. Additional seats can be purchased for only US$10 per month per seat. Bulk discounts are available; please contact the company for further details.

And Sinespace is offering Breakroom to state and public schools for free, with an unlimited number of seats! A product such as this can so easily bring students and teachers together, in an immersive, shared virtual space, in a way that Zoom and Webex simply cannot.

Breakroom

Wagner James Au of the long-running virtual worlds blog New World Notes has written several pieces about Breakroom: an introduction to the platform with a brief interview with lead developer Adam Frisby, as well as a poll asking potential education users what time slots they would prefer for live group demos.

And, I note with interest, among the staff listing for Breakroom, Wagner is listed under the job title of Public Relations for this new venture. You gotta hand it to Wagner; he knows how to hustle for his coin! He’s one of the hardest working men in the metaverse (after, of course, the utterly inexhaustible Draxtor Despres), and no doubt offers Sinespace the wealth of his many years of experience in virtual worlds.

On Friday, May 1st, Sinespace hosted the first open house of Breakroom, to demonstrate the various features of the platform for visitors. Sinespace staff demoed Breakrooms features to support remote work and teaching, including webcam calls, a dynamic whiteboard, screensharing, and a group quiz system.

A screencap from the Breakroom open house livestream (below)

And, if you feel the need to let off some steam, why not take your work team to the racetrack?

The race track in Breakroom

If you missed the open house, you can catch the entire hour-and-a-half livestream here. There’s lots to see and do! Breakroom is the perfect virtual meeting spot for your work team to feel connected and energized.

To get started in Breakroom, just fill out the form at the bottom of their official website, and a representative from the company will get in touch with you. There are also downloadable demo versions of Breakroom for both Windows and MacOS users, if you want to kick the tires, test out the features, and see how Breakroom can work for your company.

More information about Sinespace is available from their website, and you can also follow them on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and YouTube.

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here). 

Linden Lab Launches New Viewer to Broadcast Live Video Events to Virtual Audiences with Screening of Adult Swim’s The Shivering Truth on Friday, May 8th, 2020

The ongoing global public health crisis that is the coronavirus pandemic has forced many media companies to rethink how they promote their content and attract eyeballs. Flashy, crowded launch parties (with the requisite celebrities and attendant social media influencers) are simply out of the question, and savvier metaverse platforms are neatly stepping into the newly-created marketplace for virtual events.

One such event is taking place in Second Life on Friday, May, 8th: Adult Swim is the first media partnership to use the new limited-release Second Life Viewer. In a press release, Linden Lab reports:

Be among the first to experience live video streaming inside Second Life at an exclusive Adult Swim screening event, held this Friday, May 8 at 4:00 p.m. (SLT/Pacific)/7:00 p.m. (ET). 

Watch two classic episodes and two all-new unreleased episodes from the forthcoming second season of “The Shivering Truth” at this special event, to be held in-world at a new venue created exclusively for this screening.

During the event, you can chat with fellow fans of the show and other special guests as you experience the show together for the first time in the virtual world. Free limited-edition virtual gifts and mementos will also be distributed during and after the show — just look for the “Free Gifts” kiosk near the front entrance. 

The event also marks the first media partnership utilizing the new limited-release Second Life Viewer, which enables content creators and entertainment companies to broadcast live video events to virtual world audiences. In the future, you may see several new forms of entertainment including movie and TV premieres, live concerts, and artist/fan meet-and-greets. We’re very excited to partner with Adult Swim for the debut of this new feature, which we plan to integrate into the main Second Life Viewer release in the coming weeks.

Those of us who have given up the default Second Life viewer, in favour of more fully-featured alternatives such as Firestorm, will need to download and install the special view from SL before visiting the suitably spooky venue (at this SLURL). I expect that this will be the first of many such media events in future, and no doubt Linden Lab hopes to attract more users to Second Life via these initiatives.

Herding Cats: Taking a First Step Towards Developing a Taxonomy of Metaverse Platforms by Looking at Virtual Worlds That Do NOT Support Virtual Reality

What’s the Best Way to Organize Social VR and Virtual Worlds?
(Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash)

This evening, I thought I would start working on a task I have put off for far, far too long: organizing my comprehensive list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds (almost 150 entries) into some better semblance of order. (And, in some cases, provide an overdue status update. For example, I had forgotten to remove my note that Decentraland was not yet open to the public after their February 2020 launch.)

I hope to be able to come with a classification scheme, a taxonomy where similar platforms are grouped together. But how to do this grouping? Where to start?

Well, we could start by taking a look at the oldest, so-called “first generation” section first: the virtual worlds that can only be accessed via desktop on a flat monitor, the so-called “pancake worlds” that do not support virtual reality.

This list could further be divided by whether the virtual world was sill operating or was dead. Sometimes, you are lucky enough to get an official “Closed” sign when you visit their website, like with The Deep when you visit their website.

Some projects never are officially closed…
(Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash)

But of course, not all virtual world projects are so clear-cut as “closed” or “open”; “dead” or “alive”. Think of all those projects in between, that may be stuck in some sort of software development hell, or slowly circling the drain, or on life support at best. Let’s call those “Questionable Status / Stalled / Moribund” as a catch-all category.

In drawing up this first list, I will be removing any products which are clearly more MMO/MMORPG games instead of open-ended worlds (although the line between those is also frustratingly blurry at times). I’m also not going to bother with primarily adult/sex-oriented worlds such as Utherverse/Red Light Center, although I do know that some people do use this type of virtual world for non-sexual socializing. If it’s marketed as a word primarily for virtual sex, I’m not interested, sorry!

“Pancake Worlds” (Virtual Worlds That Do NOT Support Virtual Reality)

Still Operating

  • Second Life (now almost 17 years old, and still the most commercially successful and popular virtual world to date, with approximately 600,000 regular monthly users)
  • Active Worlds (the granddaddy of all virtual worlds, launched on June 28th, 1995, and now almost 25 years old)
  • Avakin Life (a mobile app)
  • Decentraland (blockchain-based virtual world, which launched in February 2020)
  • Dreams (a game and world-building platform for PlayStation, which currently does not support VR, although future PSVR support is planned)
  • Ever, Jane (latest update was October 2019, so it’s still operating!)
  • IMVU
  • Kitely (an OpenSim grid, which has also announced that they are working on a fork of the open-source High Fidelity software code)
  • Occupy White Walls
  • OpenSim based virtual worlds (e.g. OSGrid); here’s a list of active OpenSim grids (trying to keep track of which ones are open or closed is like herding cats)
  • There.com (their blog was just updated today; they’re still operating!)
  • VirBELA*
  • Virtual Paradise (an older virtual world very similar to Active Worlds; the latest update was in October 2019, so it’s still operating!)

Questionable Status/Stalled/Moribund

Well and Truly Dead (Amen and Hallelujah!)

  • Aether City (a blockchain-based virtual world that never got off the ground)
  • Blue Mars
  • The Deep  (another blockchain-based virtual world that never got off the ground)
  • InWorldz (This grid, which was based on OpenSim, closed on July 27th, 2018.)
  • Islandz Virtual World (the successor to InWorldz; closed in February 2019)
  • NeoWorld (another blockchain-based virtual world…seeing a trend here?)

Looking at this list of virtual worlds that do not support users in VR headsets, several thoughts on other ways to organize it come to mind:

  • We could easily pull out the many blockchain-based virtual worlds into a separate list
  • We could pull out Second Life and all the OpenSim-based virtual worlds (e.g. Avacon, Kitely) into a separate list
  • We could put Active Worlds and Virtual Paradise in their own category, too
  • Some products, like Avakin Life and IMVU, have literally dozens of similar products, all pitched at the teen/tween market (another category I do not wish to cover on this blog)

Another interesting point is that many of these “pancake worlds” are older (and some quite old), with an exception: the brand-new, blockchain-based virtual worlds such as Decentraland and The Sandbox. I find it interesting that many of the companies building blockchain-based platforms decided to avoid virtual reality completely (although, of course, many did include VR support in their products, as we shall see in the next blogpost I make about my progress in constructing a taxonomy).

Anyway, I thought I would publish this work-in-progress to the blog, for my readers to comment on. Which of the products in the Questionable Status category should be declared well and truly dead, and given a decent burial? What products were you surprised to see here, or surprised at how I categorized them? What ideas do you have about to go about the Herculean task of organizing them into categories?

Please feel free to leave a comment, thanks!

*UPDATE May 6th, 2020: A commenter to this blogpost informs me that VirBELA now supports virtual reality. Thank you to reader Alexander Grobe for this update!

Peer Support in Second Life for Those with Mental Health Issues: Survivors of Suicide is Hosting a Mental Health May Festival

You may also be interested in this blogpost: KiraListens: A Professional Active Listening Service in Second Life

Although it might seem like it at first glance, Second Life is not all fun and games (and fashionista/club/relationship-related intrigue, backstabbing, gossip, and drama, although there is certainly no shortage of that!).

Second Life also has its serious, service-oriented side, and it is home to many organizations such as Survivors of Suicide, which this month is hosting a Mental Health May Festival, with a full calendar of live musical artists, discussion groups, and many other events. Here is more information about the Mental Health May Festival, including the line-up of performers.

Here’s the SLURL to the festival, where you can also find an upcoming events calendar posted near the main stage, as well as some background information about the Survivors of Suicide group in SL.

A poster in the display states:

Survivors of Suicide was established in December of 2008 as a peer support group for suicide survivors and their families, and to both help educate people on suicide prevention and fight to end the stigma surrounding suicide and mental health.

We have grown considerably in the past 11 years, and have branched out to encompass all sorts of mental health issues, not just those relating directly to suicide. This growth, along with our longevity, has Survivors of Suicide become both the largest—and the longest running—mental health peer support group in Second Life.

With a pool of trained peer mentors, several weekly peer support group meetings, various activities, and a very active group chat, you can be sure to find someone to talk to at Survivors of Suicide when you are going through a rough time. We are not doctors or mental health professionals, but peers with a really wide and diverse set of skills and experiences, who are always happy to listen to you and to offer emotional support and practical advice based on our own experiences.

There are two levels, an Event Level, which has the main stage located at one end, and contains a pavilion lined with information posters about various aspects of mental health, for you to peruse:

A teleporter sign takes you down to the Main Level, where the Survivors of Suicide House is located:

Inside the house is an extensive library or resources, as well as a cozy area for group discussions:

If you want more information about Survivors of Suicide, here is their website, and their calendar of events (there are support group meetings almost every day).

If you are currently experiencing a mental health or addictions related crisis:

If you are not in crisis, but still need help, here are some other good places to get started:

When you absolutely need someone to talk to online, one of the best places to try is The KindVoice subReddit and Discord channel, both of which are staffed by volunteers:

“Sometimes we need to hear a human voice on the other end of the line telling us that everything’s going to be ok. This subreddit is for people that aren’t in a suicidal crisis, but feel depressed, alone, or want someone to talk to.”

A similar service is called The Haven, another Discord channel for people who need someone to talk to. Both Kind Voice and The Haven are free, volunteer-run services.