Category: Blockchain-Based Virtual Worlds

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.)

UPDATED! Decentraland and Somnium Space: A Tale of Two Auctions

Today is officially the last day of the week-long land auctions for the blockchain-based virtual world Somnium Space. You can check out the status of the auctions using their up-to-date land auction map (which might take a minute or two to load on slower computers).

Red parcels were those which were claimed before the auction as an incentive for investors in their previous crowdfunding initiatives (approximately 500 parcels in total). There are 4,500 parcels up for grabs this week to the highest bidder. Yellow parcels are those which have bids in the auction. Green parcels are those which have not been bid on.

Here’s what the map looks like (in two sections, top half and bottom half), as of today around 2:00 p.m. Central Standard Time:

As you can see, there’s a veritable sea of green parcels on the Somnium Space map, and not a lot of yellow ones. Compare this to the bidding frenzy that occurred in both of Decentraland’s previous land auctions, in which almost every single parcel of land was sold.

The team over at Somnium Space must be feeling a little surprised by the (relative) lack of response from bidders, and I must admit that I am feeling somewhat surprised myself.

The cost of the Somnium Space land parcels currently up for auction varies from 0.3 ETH to 3 ETH (US$54 to US$540), compared to the cheapest parcel of LAND available on the Decentraland LAND Marketplace at 12,900 MANA (US$412). If course, some LAND is much, much more expensive than that!

And let’s compare feature sets between the two products: what you can do in Somnium Space compared to Decentraland. You can actually build using the in-world building tools in Somnium Space, which offer you much more functionality than the somewhat limited Decentraland Builder, which is not really an in-world building tool at all, but rather an external website. (Someone has already built an experimental in-world building tool in DCL, but it is rather primitive.)

You also have better, more realistic graphics in Somnium Space than in Decentraland. Let’s compare two scenes, one of Somnium Space, and one of Decentraland:

Somnium Space
Decentraland

You can see more pictures of the new Somnium Space 2.0 here. Decentraland is hobbled by the significant content constraints placed on its builders, and cannot currently hope to match SS’s scenes.

So, why aren’t people (yet) flocking to Somnium Space as they did to Decentraland? Why aren’t people choosing to spend their money on cheaper virtual land that offers much greater creative possibilities?

One of the issues may be timing. Decentraland started off with an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) at the height of the cryptocurrency mania, which generated a lot of money (millions of dollars) and a lot of interest because it raised so much money. Somnium Space started off with less of a bang, as a non-blockchain project which had blockchain added afterwards. At the time of Somnium Space’s land auction, the bloom has definitely come off the rose for blockchain and cryptocurrencies, which might explain the relatively sedate pace of bidding compared to the frenzy over Decentraland in their two previous LAND auctions.

Another reason might be that Somnium Space is still a relatively new and untested platform (particularly the new, contiguous version 2.0 landscape), and potential investors might be cautious, wanting to wait and see what the early pioneers are going to do with the land they bought. As someone said on the RyanSchultz.com Discord channel in talking about thos week’s Somnium Space auction:

Unless the worlds become bustling with life and events and creators and MONEY, nobody will ever want to buy more land (only if they are still sick with blockchain hype). Buying an abstract piece of “land” in some obscure world that might or might not become popular is a gamble, and the only winning party here is the House, aka the creator.

Decentraland may not compare that favourably to Somnium Space in terms of technical features, but it does hum with money—the millions of dollars that MANA and LAND speculators invested ensure that DCL gets the white-hot spotlight of more attention, including mainstream news media coverage from places such as CBC Radio and the BBC. Once a project gets that level of coverage, it almost takes on a life of its own. And Somnium Space will likely need to get that kind of attention, that kind of coverage, in order to succeed. (I mean, I’m covering it, but I’m just a niche blog with 600-6,000 viewers a day! That’s peanuts.)

And, as we have seen with failed blockchain-based virtual world projects such as Virtual Universe, simply having better features alone does not guarantee success. Virtual Universe supported VR, had simply stunning realism in their world, and some truly innovative in-world creation tools, but the company was simply unable to entice the public to invest in their project’s cryptocurrency, and they folded.

It will be interesting to watch as both Somnium Space and Decentraland evolve and adapt to circumstances in future. I wish both companies every success in their endeavours, and good luck! They will both need it. (Remember, Facebook is planning to launch a social VR platform and a cryptocurrency next year. Don’t think for a moment that they haven’t considered combining the two in some fashion.)

UPDATE 7:34 p.m.: I wanted to add a time-lapse video of Somnium Space’s in-world building tools in action, since not a lot of people have had an opportunity to try them out yet:

I find this to be pretty impressive!

A Sneak Peek at the Contest Entries in the Decentraland Game Jam

Decentraland has not yet announced the winners of their recently concluded two-week Game Jam, but they have dropped a teaser video showing us the variety of contest entries.

Apparently, they received over one hundred entries to the contest, and it looks like the judges are going to have a hard time selecting winners. I see lots of interactive games! And did I catch a glimpse of a three-dimensional virtual recreation of the Van Gogh painting Bedroom in Arles? (They have one similar to that in NeosVR, too.)

Updated! A First Visit to Somnium Space “2.0”: Some Pictures

UPDATE Feb. 21st, 2020: I just wanted to clarify that I talked about this as version “2.0”, but in reality, the official launch of version 2.0 of Somnium Space was pushed back to February 20th, 2020. So I have updated this blogpost to put “2.0” in quotes throughout.

I got a tip that the updated client for Somnium Space “2.0” (the newest version of the social VR platform) was now available for download from their website, so I decided to pay a visit today. (Somnium Space is also available via Steam, but I don’t know if you can get the newest client from there yet. I assume that you can. UPDATE Oct 6th: I have now confirmed from Artur Sychov that you cannot get the newest client from Steam yet. It should be available within the next month on Steam.)

There’s a separate launcher program, from which you select either a PC (flat-screen) client, or the VR client. Unfortunately, I could not get the PC client to work for me (or perhaps I accidentally skipped a tutorial), but I was able to successfully use the VR client with my Oculus Quest headset.

Like Decentraland and Cryptovoxels (two competing blockchain-based virtual world platforms), Somnium Space is laid out as one large contiguous landscape. Decentraland deliberately constrains how far you can see into your surroundings, but in Somnium Space, you can actually see the distant mountains on the misty horizon! There’s a truly vast sense of space. It just feels bigger. And yes, I can confirm that you can walk (or teleport) all the way to those distant mountains and back!

I faced a similar problem that I did when I first visited Somnium Space and reported on it back in May 2018: it was difficult for me to get good pictures to share with you on my blog!

I had difficulty getting some good screen shots, because there didn’t seem to be a snapshot feature in the VR client software… So I had to hold up my VR headset in one hand, and grab a screenshot with SnagIt with the other from what I could see in my VR headset reflected on my monitor! 

There’s a lovely, landscaped park-like area not far from the spawn point with lightposts and park benches, complete with the sound of chirping birds to add atmosphere:

Off to one side is a lakeside café, next to large floating island attached to what appears to be a zip line or tether of some kind! The in-world water is quite well-done and looks realistic. The soundscape work is effective too; you can hear the waves lapping against the shore as you stand on the café pier, looking out at the scenery.

It’s only natural to want to compare Somnium Space with two other blockchain-based virtual world projects, Decentraland and Cyptovoxels. As you can see from these pictures, Somnium Space is easily the most realistic-looking blockchain-based virtual world to launch to date. The flat, voxel-based landscape of Cryptovoxels and the lowpoly, almost Minecraftesque aethestic of Decentraland cannot begin to compete against this! Given that Decentraland does not support virtual reality, and is unlikely to do so anytime in the near future, I am also wondering how many investors who spent small fortunes on Decentraland’s LAND parcels must be feeling at present.

My visit was on the eve of the one-week land auction taking place in Somnium Space from Oct. 6th to 13th, 2019. In an earlier blogpost I had written:

Somnium Space is holding an Initial Land Offering (ILO) starting October 6th and running until October 13th, where 4,500 parcels of virtual land will be auctioned off in partnership with OpenSea. (Bidders will have to have a Ethereum cryptocurrency wallet like MetaMask.)

Lands available for purchase have a clearly visible green neon border, making it easy to see what parcels are for sale as you explore the new, expanded landscape. Here’s a map of the parcels that are up for grabs to the highest bidder (the red ones were already claimed in a previous crowdfunding event):

I came away from my visit feeling quite impressed at the progress that has been made in Somnium Space. And I am quite looking forward to seeing how the platform develops over time, as landowners begin constructing buildings and putting their personal stamp on the place.

If you are interested in this social VR platform, you can follow Somnium Space on Discord, Twitter, Telegram or Instagram. Somnium Space is available via Steam and downloadable from their website (the client software is free).

SuperWorld and Stan World: A Brief Introduction

Recently, a corporate account called SuperWorld began following me on Twitter, and according to their Twitter account:

SuperWorld is a social and real estate platform in AR/XR, where users and brands can explore, connect, and build community in a decentralized environment.

So, curious, I visited the SuperWorld website. The company describes their platform as follows:

SuperWorld is a social AR platform company which allows users to build community in Augmented Reality. Users and brands can personalize the real world by adding anything anywhere in augmented reality with photos, videos, texts, and 3D objects, and share the AR experience with friends and followers. We are currently launched on iPhone.

As I have stated before on this blog, I do not consider cellphone-based apps to be true “augmented reality”. I prefer to reserve the term for actual AR headsets such as the Microsoft Hololens or the Magic Leap One, which are still considered highly experimental technology.

Basically, the premise of SuperWorld is that you purchase regions (called polygons) that correspond to real-world locations, such as the Empire State Building in New York or the Eiffel Tower in Paris:

Holding a SuperWorld AR Real Estate Token allows buyers to have ownership of the longitude / latitude dimensions purchased and where future AR posts and advertising will be placed. It’s like the game of Monopoly in Augmented Reality. The goal is to collect the best places of real estate in the world or places that you love and to be able to buy and sell that real estate over time, as you like. The purpose of the AR Real Estate Token is to serve as an incentive to lock-in users to our ecosystem.

Now, this is not the first such product; I have written in the past about similar blockchain-based platforms which are superimposed upon the real world, such as Mossland and Worldopoly (which has relaunched as Worldopo). The big problem will all of these projects is that they are being set up well before any kind of wearable augmented reality headgear becomes popular among consumers. According to the SuperWorld white paper:

Social media usage is very popular worldwide but does not align user interests with company interests. Ads are how social media apps stay alive but users do not always see the benefits of ads. Concurrently, content creators and influencers face a fragmented market when trying to start off their endeavors. Few platforms allow content creators to monetize and share in the revenue other than YouTube. We want to create an economic paradigm in which passive content viewers, content creators and marketers’ interests are all aligned…

We believe that in the future AR glasses will be widespread and the lens through which people see the world will be through their favorite AR apps. Currently, smartphones are more commonplace and accessible so we will be focusing on the SuperWorld smartphone app until the future of AR glasses arrives.

So, let me get this straight. You’re expecting people to download the SuperWorld app to their mobile devices, and point them at real-world locations, in order to see more advertising? Why would anybody bother to do this? Aren’t we inundated with enough advertising as it is?

Here’s an eight-minute promotional video for SuperWorld:

The first half of this video is taken up with an explanation of how to set up your MetaMask wallet and purchase Ethereum to use in SuperWorld, so you might just want to jump straight to the second half, just to see how underwhelming this product is. Even worse, when I tried it myself last night, I couldn’t get the map to load, despite several attempts.

Here’s another video, a year-old three-minute promotional video showing you how the mobile app works:

But when I downloaded the app to my iPhone SE to test it out, it was so buggy that it was simply unusable. In my opinion, this product is simply not yet ready for prime time. There seem to be all kinds of bugs and glitches in the implementation.

I do think that attempting to build a global augmented-reality overlay when we don’t have any kind of affordable, consumer-grade AR headset technology is a bit of a folly. There’s absolutely no guarantee that SuperWorld’s way of slicing up the real world is going to be accepted or adhered to by any other company.

Anyways, I idly clicked on the LinkedIn profile of the one of the co-founders of SuperWorld, Max Woon, to find that he has started not one, but two virtual worlds: SuperWorld, and something called Stan World.

(You know me and virtual worlds! For me, hunting down and reporting on all these social VR platforms and virtual worlds is like Pokémon: “gotta catch ’em all!” I take a great deal of pleasure in tracking these sometime-elusive creatures down!!)

So, I loaded up the Stan World website to take a look, and yep, all the standard buzzwords are present and accounted for:

There’s plenty of self-affirming text throughout the website, about building and enhancing community using virtual reality:

But there’s very little technical details on the implementation of Stan World, other than this very vague diagram explaining how all this is supposed to work:

And check out the promotional video for Stan World, which was just posted a couple of weeks ago on YouTube:

Now, I have no idea from where the company cobbled together this veritable mishmash of avatars and scenes from various virtual worlds, but nowhere in this video do I see evidence of an actual deliverable product! (In fact, I would appreciate it of my readers could help me identify where all these avatars and scenes were taken from.)

This is another one of those blockchain-based projects which seems to be selling the sizzle instead of the steak, and pinning all its hopes on earning money up-front via an initial coin offering (ICO) like Decentraland did, as can be seen in the following eight-second video taken from the Stan World website:

(Sorry, I was listening to Stairway to Heaven when I captured this footage! This is not the soundtrack to the website 😉 …)

Now, your guess is as good as mine as to what the woman in the bottom right-hand corner is supposed to be doing, wearing what looks like a very basic, cellphone-based VR headset! (Maybe hand tracking has come earlier than expected?) This all looks like third-party stock images to me.

But what really set off my alarm bells was this part of the website:

You would think that clicking on the iOS App Store button would take you to the App Store, right? Wrong. In fact, it doesn’t matter which of the three buttons you click on; all three do exactly the same thing, downloading exactly the same APK file to your hard drive. A little deft Googling revealed that APK is the package file format used by the Android operating system for distribution and installation of mobile apps and middleware. But the fact that…

  1. It downloads the APK without warning you; and
  2. It makes the download look like actual links to the iOS App Store, the Oculus Store, and the Google Play store;

…makes me seriously, seriously pause.

So, once again, I issue my standard warning, as I do for every blockchain/cryptocurrency product and platform out there. Please do every. single. shred. of your homework before investing in any blockchain-based virtual world. Read the white paper carefully and read through everything on the website, including the Terms of Service. Carefully and thoroughly evaluate what is being offered here in return for the investment of your hard-earned money.

Remember: Caveat emptor!