UPDATED! What If We Held Annual Awards for Excellence in Social VR and Virtual Worlds?

Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony…What would you call an award
for excellence in social VR and virtual worlds?

I’ve been letting an idea percolate in my head, and now that we are getting closer to awards season in real life, perhaps it’s time to bring it out for closer inspection and debate: what if we held an annual awards ceremony for excellence in social VR and virtual worlds?

We could call them the Schultzies. 😉 OK, maybe not… but let’s toss the idea around for a bit and see what we all can come up with.

We need:

  • A name for the awards;
  • Categories for the awards;
  • A time (and a place!) for an awards ceremony;
  • An award of some type (a picture and/or in-world mesh object);
  • A host (I am willing to step in if Billy Crystal is unavailable).

What else would we need? The most important thing that we need, right now, is categories. Here are some examples to get us started:

  • Best Social VR Platform of 2019;
  • Best (Non-VR) Virtual World of 2019;
  • Best Blockchain-Based Virtual World of 2019;
  • Best Content Creator/Brand of 2019;
  • Best In-World Store/Marketplace Product of 2019;
  • Most Innovative Use of a Social VR/Virtual World in 2019;
  • Best Marketing/PR Move by a Social VR/Virtual World in 2019;
  • Outstanding Contribution to Social VR/Virtual Worlds in 2019 (an award we would give to an individual person);
  • What other categories can you come up with?

We could also (if we wish) incorporate some aspect of the Razzies, by including awards for some of the more ignominious achievements of the year:

  • Biggest Platform Fail of 2019;
  • Biggest Advertising/PR Mistake Made by a Company in 2019;
  • What other categories can you think of?

I could whip up a poll for nominations for each category, and select the top 4 or 5 suggestions in each category as our finalists.

Whaddayathink? Could we make this work? I think this might be a lot of fun.

First things first: what are we gonna call the awards? Please feel free to leave a comment below, or better yet, join us on the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, the world’s first cross-world discussion forum, where we can toss around some ideas. We’d love to have you!

P.S. I am willing to organize, but if I do then I don’t think it’s fair for me to actually vote on the awards in that case, so I will remove myself from that. The voting would be open to the users of the various social VR platforms and virtual worlds for a set period of time (say, two weeks).

P.P.S. Perhaps we should scrap the Razzies portion of the awards before we get started; it would just seem like kicking certain companies when they’re already down. It just doesn’t seem sporting to me.

UPDATE 5:39 p.m.: Adam Frisby of Sinespace had a good suggestion: that I investigate the various in-world awards shows of the past (the Cy Awards in ActiveWorlds, the Avi Choice Awards in Second Life, etc.).

So that’s exactly what I am going to do over the next few days (in between ransacking various Second Life Advent calendars, of course!). So if you don’t see any posts over the next few days, you’ll know I have gone down the rabbit hole…

AltspaceVR: A New Update Makes It Even Easier to Create and Host Live Events on the Social VR Platform

Kyle Melnick of the VRScout virtual reality news website reported today that Microsoft-owned social VR platform AltspaceVR has rolled out a new update:

In an official release sent out yesterday, Microsoft revealed a slew of new features and improvements heading to the social platform that will allow users to more easily create, share, and host their own live events, whether it be a small get-together with a handful of friends or an arena-scale festival open to users around the globe. This latest update introduces a new user interface offering a variety of pre-built event templates for ad-hoc AMAs [Ask Me Anything events], political discussions, community meetups, and nine other additional formats. 

(image from VRScout article)

As part of its new focus on user-made events, AltspaceVR will be hosting a Daily Spotlight Event every evening at 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time/10:00 p.m. Eastern Time, showcasing a rotating lineup of community events for users to discover. 

As I have said before, AltspaceVR is just absolutely killing it with respect to its programming. It’s probably the one social VR platform that hosts the most live events and meetings, and obviously the company has decided to focus on its strengths in that area. (It certainly doesn’t hurt that AltspaceVR clients are available for the HTC Vive, GearVR, Oculus VR hardware, Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and flatscreen desktop mode on a PC. More options mean more people can participate.)

For more information about AltspaceVR, here is their website and their events calendar. You can also follow them on various social media: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Discord.

Princess Pea Performs in Sansar

Even though I am spending most of my time in Sinespace and Second Life lately, I still pop into Sansar from time to time. And tonight I am at Princess Pea’s Live Holiday Music Show, at Solas’ Once Upon a Midnight Dream world, where Princess is singing and playing guitar to a small but appreciative audience.

(The world is a bit dimly lit for good photographs. You’ll just have to take my word for it that there are at least 14 people there. 😉 )

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Christmas Gifts from the Cosmopolitan Event (and Advent Gifts for December 17th)

Another December event which offers lots of gifts for freebie fashionistas is the current round of the biweekly Cosmopolitan shopping event, which runs from the 16th to the 28th of December. It’s only two weeks long, shorter than other events, so be sure not to miss it!

Just inside the entrance to the event is a huge Christmas tree, with stockings you click on to receive the presents. (You do have to join the Cosmopolitan group for free to pick up these gifts.)

Participating vendors are adding stockings to the tree every day between now and Christmas, so I would advise dropping by on Christmas Day and picking up everything at once.

If you insist on visiting every day, the layout of the stockings around the tree can be somewhat confusing compared to traditional Advent calendars, and you might land up collecting the same gifts multiple times. You might want to use this tip provided by SL blogger Chic Aeon: once you have clicked on a stocking and received its gift, right click on it, Select More from the pie menu, select More again, then select Derender, then Blacklist. You will no longer be able to see that stocking on return visits! (These are the instructions for the Firestorm viewer; I do not know what the equivalent is for the standard Second Life viewer.) This is a genius tip! Thanks, Chic!

Cat Pink SL has already posted a YouTube video with a look at a few of the early gifts from the Cosmopolitan Christmas tree, so I am not going to bother posting pictures of the presents here:

Today Vanity Fair is wearing two Advent calendar gifts for Dec. 17th:

  • The lovely Nola dress which comes with a separate black bolero jacket, from Virtue. The calendar requires you to join the Virtue group, which is free to join.
  • The Osaka shoes in riverside blue from Essenz. The shoes comes with a HUD to change the colour of the sole (4 colours), the metals (4 textures), and the flowers (26 colour options!). The calendar requires that you join the Essenz group for L$350, but I believe there is an option for non-group members to purchase each day’s gift for L$50.

Vanity Fair is also wearing:

Happy freebie hunting!