This category is for all the new cryptocurrency- and blockchain-based social VR spaces and virtual worlds (Decentraland, The Deep, Ethernia, Mark Space, Somnium Space, Staramba Spaces, Terra Virtua, VIBEHub, Virtual Universe, etc.)
More and more often, I see announcements about art galleries and installations in Cryptovoxels, both regular art and blockchain art (the production of which is described at length in this article). Good sources of information about openings and events are the official Cryptovoxels Twitter and Discord channels.
Have you joined the RyanSchultz.com Discord yet? You’re invited to be a part of the first ever cross-worlds discussion group, with over 300 people participating from every social VR platform and virtual world! More details here.
UPDATE Feb. 6th, 2023: Thank you to Dr. Fran Babcock, who made some updates to this spreadsheet in 2021. I am currently working on a complete update to this spreadsheet for 2024. Thank you for your patience.
I haven’t published an update to my popular November 2018 comparison chart of twelve social VR platforms for quite some time. There never seems to be a perfect time to update. At first, I wanted to wait until the Oculus Quest was released. And then, I was wondering whether or not I should wait until Facebook releases the Oculus Link update to the Oculus Quest (which means, theoretically, that Oculus Quest users can use a custom cable connected to their VR-ready Windows computer to view content originally intended for the Oculus Rift).
In the end, I decided to go ahead and publish a first draft of the updated comparison chart now, get feedback from my readers, and update the chart as necessary. So here is that first draft.
I removed two of the 12 platforms in last year’s comparison chart: both Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms were shut down by Facebook on October 25th, 2019, in preparation for the launch of Facebook Horizon sometime in 2020. I have not added Facebook Horizon to this chart (yet) because we still know so little about this new social VR platform. And I decided to add six more social VR platforms to the chart: Anyland, Cryptovoxels, Engage, JanusVR, Mozilla Hubs, and NeosVR.
Rather than publish the chart as an image to Flickr, as I did last year, I decided to create a spreadsheet using Google Drive, and publish it to the web here:
Please leave me a comment with any suggestions, corrections or edits, and I will update this new comparison chart accordingly. You can also reach me on the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, or any other virtual world Discord that I might belong to (my handle is always the same, RyanSchultz). You can also use the contact form on my blog.
UPDATE 3:48 p.m.: I’ve had a request to add userbase figures to this chart, but I am not going to do that for a very good reason: there’s absolutely no way I can get accurate figures from the various companies, many of whom want to keep that information private. And even ranking them using a scale like low, medium, and high would just be guesses on my part, misleading to a lot of people, and liable to lead to a lot of arguments. Sorry! I will leave it up to you to check Steam statistics for those platforms which are on Steam (which, again, may or may not be an accurate measure of the actual level of usage of any platform).
UPDATE Nov. 13th: I’d like to thank Frooxius (of NeosVR), Artur Sychov (of Somnium Space) and Jin for their corrections and suggestions. Any updates to this table are shown in real-time, which is a unexpected bonus to publishing a spreadsheet directly to the web from Google Drive! I should have thought of doing it this way last year.
And it would appear that there is a great deal of disagreement of what constitutes “in-world building tools”. I am referring to the ability to create complex objects entirely within the platform itself, and not using external tools such as Blender or Unity and then importing the externally-created objects into the platform. For example, High Fidelity has very rudimentary “prim-building” tools in-world, which are not often used by creators, who prefer to import mesh objects created in tools like Blender, Maya, or 3ds Max instead. To give another example, Somnium Space now offers a completely in-world tool for constructing buildings on your purchased virtual land. Sansar has no such tools for in-world building, although you can assemble premade, externally-created objects into a world by using their Scene Editor (which is something completely different from what I am talking about here).
One reader had suggested adding in a few more columns to this chart to include various technical aspects of these social VR platforms: game engine used, open/closed source, support for scripting, etc. Using the table provided to me by Enrico Speranza (a.k.a. Vytek), I have now added three more columns to the original comparison table: architecture/game engine, open/closed source, and scripting. Thank you for the suggestion, Vytek!
Please keep your suggestions, corrections and edits coming, thanks!
I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while now, and someone reminded me today on Twitter (in response to my recent blogpost about the state of current social VR) that there was a nearly two-hour-long YouTube video of a panel discussion held in September in VRChat, where four smaller social VR developers talked about various aspects of virtual world economies.
We’ve gathered an incredible cast of lead developers building VR platforms to discuss virtual economies. How can creative people make a living inside these worlds? What ingredients are missing to catalyze a thriving user-generated content economy? What’s the landscape look like? How can startups compete with big tech?
■ James Baicoianu: Working on Elation Engine since 2011 building web based virtual worlds and JanusWeb for past few years as a framework for anyone to easily create social VR experiences. Bai has 20+ years of web dev experience, is a webgl / threejs contributor, and a part time internet archivist.
■ Ben Nolan: Built scenevr which lead to aframe, worked at Decentraland for awhile building their first web client. Currently developing Cryptovoxels full-time, a browser based virtual world owned by users via the Ethereum blockchain.
■ Avaer: Created a minecraft clone on the web about 6 years ago, ran into browsers at the time. Took C++ background and built own web browser named Exokit just doing WebVR / WebXR. Now focused on bringing people together and incentivized to work on proper Metaverse with Exokit Web.
■ SM Sith Lord: Lead developer of Anarchy Arcade, a 3D desktop with VR support. Has been using 3D desktops for 10 years and streams to Twitch regularly to show it off on twitch.tv/anarchyarcade.
I must confess that haven’t watched all of the video myself yet, but I wanted to share it with you, in case you were interested in some of the smaller companies’ perspectives on virtual world economies (and before I forget to post about it yet again). Enjoy!
Did you know that you can help support my blog (as well as the Metaverse Newscast show), and get great rewards in return? Here’s how.
Carnival (the ninth-place winner of the Decentraland Game Jam)
Yesterday, Decentraland announced the winners of their recent Game Jam contest. While there are still approximately 14,000 people waiting for their opportunity to enter the current closed beta of the blockchain-based virtual world Decentraland, the company has thoughtfully included links in their blogpost that will allow any readers to visit the winning scenes without having an account or an avatar set up!
There were a couple of bugs I did encounter yesterday, however. For some reason, the link to the first prize winning entry, The Farm, did not work for me, no matter how many times I tried to reload it. Eventually, someone gave me the in-world coordinates of the entry, so I just signed into Decentraland with my own avatar (which already has access to the closed beta), and I teleported to The Farm to be able to take a few pictures of it to show you here. (The coordinates are -3,-33 if you are interested and want to visit it yourself.)
The first place winner is The Farm (all links were taken from the original blogpost, so this one might not work for you, either):
Another bug that kept coming up is the pop-up message that you see at the top of my screenshot above: a message telling me “You received an exclusive wearable NFT (non-fungible token) mask! Check it out in the avatar editor.” I was told that this is a bug that DCL is aware of and is working to fix as soon as possible.
The Farm appears to be some sort of gathering and manufacturing game around food. If you click on a book in the farmhouse, a series of recipes pops up:
Second prize went to Enchanted Wood, which reminded me of a brain teaser from the venerable puzzle game Myst:
Third place winner Koko Jones had an Indiana Jones adventure theme:
Here’s a list of the remaining Game Jam winners, along with links to visit each one:
