Metaverse chat rooms on the social audio app Clubhouse have come and gone—there was a Virtual Worlds club which used to host regular rooms, but like many Clubhouse clubs, it kind of ran out of steam—but there’s a new club, called the MetaWhat? Show. (By the way, you no longer need to wait for an invitation to use Clubhouse; it’s now open to the general public, with both iOS and Android apps.)
Here’s the description of the MetaWhat? Show club on Clubhouse:
MetaWhat? The Metaverse Show: Everything you wanted to know about the metaverse, but you didn’t have the metadata to go on or felt uncool to ask! From the perspectives of the uninitiated to the movices and the pros, we’ll explore all things metaverse and more.
The club already has over 500 members, and they’re meeting on Sundays at 3:00 p.m. CDT/4:00 p.m. EDT time. Here’s the Clubhouse link to this afternoon’s chat. (I’m not sure if these links will work on desktop, but they will on your mobile device!)
The chat show brings together a number of people, from various backgrounds and with varying levels of experience, to talk about anything and everything metaverse-related (including blockchain metaverses).
It’s 4:00 a.m. and I have a wicked case of insomnia, so I decided to get out of bed and present yet another in my series of my patented 15-minute SL avatar makeovers (you can find them all here).
I have an alt (with, appropriately enough, the legacy name of Autumn Winter), whom I tend to trot out at this time of year, dressed up as the avatar embodiment of autumn. Here’s a Before shot of the classic system avatar, wearing a system-layers-and-flexiprims outfit, and rocking a hat from ye olde pre-mesh days:
Not bad, but I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could upgrade this alt to mesh, as inexpensively as possible. Here’s the After shots, and I think you’ll agree with me that I succeeded:
Styling credits:
Mesh Head: Genus Strong head (still a free group gift from Genus Project; the Genus group is free to join)
Mesh Body: Atenea from LUCYBODY (available for free from their Midnight Madness board in-store; once the board hits 350, everybody wins a copy of this mesh body, which is Maitreya Lara-compatible for clothing and Slink-compatible for footwear; you will need to purchase a Bakes on Mesh applier for this body for L$197 to use it with BoM skins. Note that this MM board does not reset at midnight!)
Bakes on Mesh Skin: Flower Girl skin in Autumn from 7 Deadly S[k]ins (a fatpack of these skins was a recent free gift from their Gift Board in-store; gifts change daily)
Gown: Kensie gown (a free group gift from Just Because; the Just Because group is free to join)
Flats (not shown): red flats by Garbaggio (part of a free sample pack of Slink-compatible shoes from Garbaggio, available on the SL Marketplace)
TOTAL COST OF THIS AVATAR MAKEOVER: Only L$198!
Pictures taken at the Deer River sim, a beautiful place for a virtual autumn stroll.
UPDATE Oct. 24th, 2021: The Halloween Shop and Hop gift from Caverna Obscura (exact SLURL) is this lovely autumn maple leaves head wreath, which is completely adjustable. It’s the perfect finishing touch for this autumn maiden look! You have until Nov. 1st to pick this freebie up, before it’s gone!
Sansar is the reason I started this blog a little over four years ago, and it with a very heavy heart that I write this blogpost. As many of you know, I found that I had become too emotionally attached to what was going on with Sansar, and I had to step back from my previously comprehensive coverage of the Linden Lab-founded social VR platform, to gain some much-needed perspective and to be able to write about it dispassionately.
While the rumours of Sansar’s impending demise have been circling for quite a long while now, over the past few months, I have been hearing persistent gossip, from various well-placed sources, that Wookey-led Sansar is in serious trouble. I should rush to add that I have zero official confirmation of any of this, but every time I hear a new rumour, it seems to confirm what I have already heard from others. In other words, I am hearing the same thing from many different people.
Most recently, I’ve been told that the Wookey team is missing in action, both on the official Sansar Discord and in-world. I’ve heard that Sansar has lost big-name clients like Lost Horizon and Monstercat (although Sansar is still listed on the Lost Horizon Festival website). I’ve also heard that many people who used to be actively involved in Sansar have left, leaving for platforms as various and diverse as Helios, SapphireXR, and CORE (where I see many Sansar alumni chatting on their Discord servers).
My latest source tells me:
There hasn’t been a product meetup in months…they were all working like crazy on Splendour in the Grass…after that, crickets.
The marketplace for hosting live events has become extremely competitive, with social VR platforms competing with game companies like Fortnite and Minecraft to sign deals with artists and festivals, and to host concerts and other musical events. And if Sansar is struggling to do this during a pandemic, how will it fare when things return to (relative) normalcy, with a resurgence of live, in-person events? Can Sansar compete against better-funded companies to attract the kind of A-list talent which brings in audiences—and more to the point, can they get that audience to stick around and become content creators and community members after the music ends?
I am in a better position that most external observers to play armchair quarterback and try to pinpoint exactly where it all went so wrong, but I must confess that, like so many others (including numerous employees laid off in at least two rounds of wrenching, painful layoffs), I really thought that Sansar would succeed.
But the expensive bet placed by Linden Lab (and Philip Rosedale’s company, High Fidelity, which shut down a similar service in early 2020, and pivoted to a spatial audio product), is that there would be tens and even hundreds of thousands of people using high-end VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Valve Index to access social VR platforms boasting beautiful high-end graphics. It didn’t seem like such a risky bet at the time, but looking back, perhaps it was.
Certainly, part of the problem is that these companies spent millions of dollars and many years building platforms, only to find that the VR hardware market was evolving so quickly that they couldn’t keep up. I mean, the Oculus Rift is no longer being sold by Facebook, which decided to put all their eggs into the standalone Quest, which is selling like hotcakes—and which Sansar can only run on if you attach a cable from your Quest to your high-end gaming PC.
What does it take for a platform to catch fire, like VRChat and Rec Room? Again, I don’t really know the answer (although social media, particularly YouTube and Twitch, certainly played a pivotal role in at least VRChat’s ultimate popularity and success).
At a time when the metaverse has again become a hot buzzword tossed around by many companies, both big and small, who knows what will happen to Sansar. But I must confess that I am very worried.
It’s official: we are starting to run out of sensible product names, people. Companies are rummaging through all the leftover domain names, and it shows.
Rooom (yes, with three O’s, which apparently are meant to signify the 3 dimensions of space 🙄) is a German company which tries really, really hard to make it sound as if they already provide social VR services, but really, they don’t.
eventCloud has been successfully used for global events with more than 200,000 simultaneous participants. Accessible through virtually any internet-enabled device, online events in 3D are possible without the need for a VR headset.
But take a good, close look at the YouTube video for this:
I’m seeing a lot of flat-screen technology integration (Zoom-like videoconferencing, etc.), and the use of emojis and whatnot, but I am not seeing social VR! The only avatar I see in this promo video is the user him-or-herself. All of the other “avatars” at the briefly-glimpsed trade show above are the digital equivalent of flat, cardboard cutouts! Here’s another video:
Again, look at all the flat cutout “avatars”!! Rooom may have hosted events boasting over 200,000 participants, but all those participants seem to have experienced the virtual space alone, as far as I can tell. Compared to other social VR platforms already out there, with much more impressive feature sets, this is extremely underwhelming and disappointing. I’m not impressed by this at all.
Frankly, based on my perusal of their website, everything that Rooom offers so far seems to revolve around creating 3D virtual environments for business, without actually offering something that I would call actual social VR—that is, a virtual space which you can visit and interact with other real people using avatars.
However, there is mention of something Rooom is working on, called nu.land, which basically consists of nothing but a slick (and slow-loading) website:
