Category: High Fidelity (and Forks of Its Open-Source Code)

Happy New Year! Where to Celebrate New Year’s Eve in Social VR

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Designed by Kjpargeter from Freepik.com

I will be celebrating New Year’s Eve offline, with real-life friends here in Winnipeg. It looks like we’re going to have a cold night! 😉

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Meanwhile, in Winnipeg…

If you are looking to spend New Year’s Eve online, here are a few options on the various social VR platforms:

Sansar

Eliot (Linden Lab’s Community Manager for Sansar) will be hosting three New Year’s Eve events in Sansar in different timezones:

High Fidelity

High Fidelity will be hosting a round-the-clock event at The Spot from Monday, Dec. 31st 2:00 a.m. to Tuesday, Jan. 1st 4:00 a.m. (Pacific Time).

Sinespace

As part of its Winter Festival, Sinespace is hosting a New Year’s Eve party. Check the login page of your Sinespace client for more details.

VRChat

The best place to find out what New Year’s Eve parties are happening where in VRChat is, as always, the VRChat Events Discord server. Apparently, there’s a round-the-clock party happening at Void, according to AgentM83:

They’re partying in every time zone all day long (started this morning).

However you choose to ring in the new year—online or offline, alone or with friends, awake or asleep!—may 2019 bring you happiness, peace, and prosperity.

 

The First Episode of the Metaverse Newscast Is Now Up on YouTube!

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Metaverse Newscast Logo (Background vector created by Rawpixel.com – Freepik.com)

I am very happy to announce that the very first episode of Metaverse Newscast is up, after months of planning and hard work! The first episode is an interview in High Fidelity with Cedar Librarian, the winner of the Best Avatar contest at the recent FUTVRE LANDS Festival:

To start, we will be posting Metaverse Newscast videos to a brand new YouTube channel. In future, we may look at other places to post videos. We have already purchased a domain name for a future Metaverse Newscast website, but for now, I will be promoting new episodes of Metaverse Newscast via this blog.

This entire enterprise would not have gotten off the ground without two people whom I would like to thank:

  • Tyler Scarborough, who first approached me about starting a regular show, and who built a lovely studio in Sansar where we will conduct some of our interviews. Metaverse Newscast would not exist at all without his initial idea.
  • Andrew William, my hard-working and talented producer and video editor, who (with occasional second cameraman Carlos Austin) records the individual Metaverse Newscast segments. I want to thank Andrew from the bottom of my heart for all his tireless work getting the Metaverse Newscast off the ground! I would be lost without him.

Our goal is to produce and release at least one episode a month to start, where we cover various metaverse events and interview the personalities behind social VR and virtual worlds. Note that we will focus on the newer VR-capable platforms (Sansar, High Fidelity, VRChat, Sinespace, AltspaceVR, etc.) rather than older virtual worlds like Second Life.

We have four more episodes that we are currently working on, so keep watching!

BINGO EXTREMO at High Fidelity

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Wow, High Fidelity is certainly throwing the money around at their events lately. Today at 3:00 p.m. Pacific time they are hosting some in-world Bingo games with some sweet prizes:

TODAY, Dec 13, 3:00 pm PST

Join BINGO EXTREMO today. The prizes aren’t the only reason to attend. There are also celebrity streamers, massive attendance, and the excitement of coming together as a VR community!

You Could Win up to $1,200

We want as many attendees as possible, so the prizes for each round of BINGO will be based on the size of the crowd.

Attendees      Prize Per Round
100 Avatars     $350* or HTC Vive
200 Avatars     $800* or HTC Vive Kit
300 Avatars     $1,200* or HTC Vive Pro

*Cash prizes are paid out in High Fidelity Coin (HFC), HiFi’s in-world currency, which you can arrange to withdraw as US dollars. So, if you’re not doing anything today, why not stop by High Fidelity and play a little Bingo? You can register to attend at this link.

An Updated Comparison Chart of the Twelve Most Popular Social VR Platforms

Have you joined the RyanSchultz.com Discord yet? More details here. 

I decided to update my original comparison chart of the 12 most popular social VR platforms, according to my reader survey. Note that in this chart, I excluded platforms that did not have VR support (e.g. Second Life, OpenSim-based virtual worlds, etc.).

I also did not dwell on technical details, such as the underlying game engine, user creation tools, etc. Instead, I focused on the three things of most interest to consumers:

  • How you can access the platform;
  • What options do you have for your avatar;
  • And whether you can go shopping!

This print on this chart is a little small to show up on the constrained width of this blogpost, so I saved it as a picture to Flickr. Just click on the chart below (or the link above) to see it in Flickr in a larger size.

Comparison Chart of 12 Social VR Platforms 25 Nov 2018

You can also download this chart from Flickr in any size up to its original size (1488 x 920 pixels).

If you feel I’ve made any mistakes, or left anything important out, please leave me a comment below, thanks! I do hope that people who are trying to figure out which social VR spaces to explore will find this comparison chart to be a useful and handy tool.

UPDATE 2:03 p.m.: I’ve just been informed that there is an Android app for vTime. Thanks for the tip, Stephanie Woessner!