Tag: Adam Frisby

News Watch: What I Didn’t Blog About in April and May!

I’m constantly on the look out for stories for the RyanSchultz.com blog, bookmarking anything and everything that I or my readers might find of interest—news and announcements about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse (including the blockchain-based platforms).

At the moment, I’m so backlogged with my bookmarks, that today I’ve just decided to share many of them with you, in an effort to get caught up! Each would likely be the seed for a proper blogpost all on its own, but here each one will just get a sentence or two, a brief annotation only. Hope you don’t mind!

Ready? Let’s dig in!

Geekwire: ‘Second Life’ creator shares lessons learned from one of the world’s first metaverses (an interview with Linden Lab’s founding CEO, Philip Rosedale).

Businesswire: Razorfish Study Finds 52% of Gen Z Gamers Feel More Like Themselves in the Metaverse than in Real Life (Razorfish and VICE Media Group released findings from a new research study, titled The Metaverse: A View from Inside).

Road to VR: Virtual Social Platform ‘Rec Room’ Hits 3 Million Monthly Active VR Users (Rec Room continues to rack up some impressive statistics).

The Conversation: Can you truly own anything in the metaverse? A law professor explains how blockchains and NFTs don’t protect virtual property (a thought-provoking editorial by Indiana University law professor João Marinotti)

Medium: World War “M” and the curse of the Metaverse, by Avi Bar-Zeev (an editorial where Avi poses the question: If “The Metaverse” represents our digital future, who decides what “it” is?)

metamandrill: Interview with Founder Adam Frisby of Sine Wave Entertainment (an interview with the man behind both Sinespace and Breakroom)

NFTs are Legally Problematic (a 46-minute YouTube video featuring lawyer Steve Mould and NFT pundit Coffeezilla)

24/7 Crypto: Metaverse hotel for avatars to open in Decentraland next week: “The first ever metaverse hotel (*cough*cough*Second Life*cough*cough*) is being opened next week in Decentraland by Singapore’s Millennium Hotels and Resorts.”

TIME: 6 Lessons on the Future of the Metaverse From the Creator of Second Life (a good overview article, with the writer talking to both Philip Rosedale and Tom Boellstorff about the lessons learned from Second Life).

moOMNI: Around the Metaverse by DrFran Babcock (short but essential reading; Fran shares her thoughts about the community within the metaverse).

Road to VR: A Dating App for Meeting Avatars in VR Aims to Build Very Real Relationships (a review of the Flirtual matchmaking app)

XR Today: Sensorium, Humanity 2.0 Launch Vatican City Art Metaverse (Ultra high-end social VR platform Sensoirum Galaxy partners with the Humanity 2.0 Foundation to build a virtual gallery for Vatican City). “The company’s Sensorium Galaxy platform is currently in beta testing, with a launch date set for later in the year to expand its availability across devices, including VR headsets, PCs, and mobile devices.”

Road to VR: Meta to Merge ‘Venues’ Event Space into ‘Horizon Worlds’ Social VR Platform (starting June 6th, 2022, Horizon Worlds users will have direct access to live sports, concerts, comedy, and user-created meet-ups in Horizon Venues).

WIRED: This VR App Has Legs: Spatial adds support for full-body virtual avatars, giving realism in VR a step up (the Spatial social VR app now had a full-body option).

The Atlantic: Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse (an interview with longtime Second Life blogger Wagner james Au).

Medium: Web3.0 Must Be Destroyed (long, but well worth the read).

Harvard Business Review: Cautionary Tales from Cryptoland (interview with Molly White, creator of the website Web3 Is Going Just Great).

Current Affairs: Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire” (interview with UC-Berkeley computer science professor Nicholas Weaver)

Now that I’ve shared some of my most interesting finds with you, I hope that this list will tide you over until I can whip up some fresh new content for you! Expect more blogposts soon. (If people find these news roundups useful, I might continue to write them, as well as my regular blogposts.)

Sinespace and Breakroom: A Look Back and a Look Forward—Adam Frisby Gives His 2021 Annual Keynote

This news is a little late, so I do apologize to Adam Frisby and his team at Sine Wave Entertainment (the makers of the metaverse platform Sinespace and it corporate cousin, Breakroom). I had decided to take most of December 2021 as a vacation from this blog, in order to refresh myself to meet the new year head on!

At an Office Hours presentation in Sinespace in early December, Adam (wearing his now-signature bunny rabbit avatar!) gave his Annual Keynote, in which he talked about how 2021 went, and what’s coming up for 2022. Here are some highlights from his speech:

  • Sine Wave were originally planning a promotional push for Sinespace last February, but the ongoing pandemic threw a monkey-wrench into those plans, and work shifted to Breakroom. Companies can now go to breakroom.net, buy it off the shelf, and customize it with little-to-no involvement from the team; this means that the Sine Wave team isn’t getting as tied up dealing with Breakroom customer issues as much as they have in the past.
  • Did a lot of work on compliance and auditing their back-end processes;
  • Did a lot of crossover stuff between Breakroom and Sinespace, including well-attended talks by Philip Rosedale and Matthew Ball;
  • Made a huge effort in Quality Assurance, fixing bugs and implementing feature requests in Sinespace (e.g. adding the ability to control your avatar turning speed);
  • The design and UX team is working on user interface improvements (including the Room Editor);
  • Usability improvements (e.g. click-to-walk now steers around obstacles; fixes to inverse kinematics for feet and hips on avatars for smoother movement);
  • Developer improvements (e.g. new LUA functions);
  • New network stack is coming out very soon (designed to have hundreds and even thousands of avatars in one location at once); Adam mentioned recent load tests with 650+ avatars; the new network stack works better on WiFi and cellular connections;
  • Vehicle improvements: a smoother experience, due in a couple of weeks!
  • New terrain system;
  • New parcel system (e.g. allows you to partition a region in three dimensions entirely within the client—drag and drop zones, set rent, etc.);
  • Unity 2020 support to come out in a couple of weeks;
  • Adam gave a demo of a new mobile-centric user interface for touch-screen devices such as monitors and tablets. Beta mobile viewers are available via the Discord server today if people want to test them out.
  • Coming up for 2022 (in roughly chronological order): the new network stack; Unity 2020 upgrade; improvements to virtual reality support; a new asset format; visual scripting tools; the new Room Editor; improvements to the base avatar (e.g. body shapes; they’re trying to find a good character artist).
  • When does Sinespace finally leave beta? Adam can’t give a firm answer, but he says “next year”.

If you want to watch the entire presentation, it has been posted to YouTube in a 38-minute video (the Q&A portion afterward was unfortunately not recorded):

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here). 

Video: Matthew Ball Talks About the Metaverse Road Map in Breakroom

On Thursday, October 21st, Matthew Ball, author of the influential Metaverse Primer and lead creator of the Ball Metaverse Index, was joined by Gene Park of the Washington Post and virtual world blogger Wagner James Au for a fireside chat in the virtual world of Breakroom. The chat covered a wide range of topics, including key trends to watch for, the mainstream adoption of the Metaverse, and the broader impact on society. Near the end, metaverse pioneer Philip Rosedale was also invited up on stage. You can read more about the event here.

Matthew Ball is a well-informed, articulate, and insightful speaker about the metaverse, and I highly recommend you watch the following 50-minute video of the well-attended event:

Please note that, as you watch this video, both Adam Frisby and Rohan Freeman of Sine Wave Entertainment, senior executives of the company who make Breakroom and Sinespace, were the ones responsible for spawning the dizzying array of items on and around the stage as the panel members spoke to the assembled audience.

I certainly don’t blame Adam and Rohan for wanting to flex the dynamic editing capabilities of their platform, especially in front of an audience full of big names in the metaverse! However, at first I thought it was a griefer attack! (I even DM’ed Adam to report the “griefer”, not knowing that it was him! How embarrassing.)

Anyways, I learned a lot from Matthew’s talk, and there were some great questions afterward from the audience, so I thought I’d share the video here with you. Stay tuned for news of the next in this free series of Fireside Chats in Breakroom!

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here). 

Breakroom Implements High Fidelity’s Three-Dimensional Audio

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Sinewave Entertainment’s Breakroom (the corporate cousin of their social VR/virtual world platform Sinespace) has recently implemented the spatialized, three-dimensional audio API offered by the revamped High Fidelity.

VentureBeat reports:

The deal is a convergence of pioneers who have made their mark on the development of virtual life. Philip Rosedale is the CEO of High Fidelity and launched Second Life in 2003. Sine Wave Entertainment, the creator of Breakroom, got its start as a content brand in Second Life before it spun out to create its own virtual meeting spaces for real-world events.

Adam Frisby, chief product officer and cofounder of Sine Wave, said in an interview conducted inside Breakroom that the High Fidelity spatial audio will help Breakroom create a triple-A quality experience in a virtual world.

“The real benefit of having 3D audio in a virtual world like this is you can have lots of conversations going on simultaneously,” Frisby said. “3D audio is the only way to replicate the real-world experience in an online environment. You can have a 150-person conference and end up with 10 groups of people talking at the same time. That has helped us with engagement.”

Breakroom is among the first group of clients for Philip Rosedale’s company. Adam tells me that they are looking at implementing the same 3D audio in Sinespace at some point in the future.

Here’s a two-minute YouTube video where Adam Frisby explains and demonstrates the new 3D audio:

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).