Tag: AltspaceVR

Another One Bites the Dust: AltspaceVR to Permanently Close on March 10th, 2023

Screen capture of the official announcement that AltspaceVR is shutting down

Well, it’s official: Microsoft has decided to shutter (or “sunset”, to use their corporate-speak) the social VR platform AltspaceVR. (I have actually known since mid-December that this was coming, but I had promised the person who informed me that I would keep that information to myself.)

Here’s the complete text of the official annpouncement:

When AltspaceVR first launched, our vision was to create a place where people from around the world could connect and socialize in real time. We knew virtual reality (VR) could be a fun place for immersive games, and much more importantly, we believed in the power of social VR to bring people together, build connections, and create share experiences. It was a bold vision, and with the help of our passionate community, the platform became a place where users made lifelong memories, formed cherished friendships, found love — and even married in IRL (in real life).

As we look to the future, we see the opportunity for VR expanding beyond consumer into business and now have an even greater goal: a more open, accessible, and secure version of immersive experiences in the metaverse. To achieve that we have made the difficult decision to sunset the AltpaceVR platform on March 10, 2023, and shift our focus to support immersive experiences powered by Microsoft Mesh.

The decision has not been an easy one as this is a platform many have come to love, providing a place for people to explore their identities, express themselves, and find community. It has been a privilege to help unlock passions among users, from educational opportunities for personal growth to the development of unique and wonderful events, groundbreaking art, and immersive experiences — enabling this community to achieve more. With Mesh, we aspire to build a platform that offers the widest opportunity to all involved, including creators, partners and customers.

Over the coming weeks, we encourage the many creators and developers who are part of the AltspaceVR community to host final events and download their content*. Information on how to download content is available here.

We want to thank all who have used AltspaceVR over the years to bring a delightful and enriching dimension to the world.

We look forward to what is to come, including our launch of Microsoft Mesh, a new platform for connection and collaboration, starting by enabling workplaces around the world. In the near-term, we are focusing our VR efforts on workplace experiences, learning from and alongside our early customers and partners, and ensuring we deliver a foundation that enables security, trust and compliance. Over time, we hope to extend to consumer experience a well.

To learn more about what is next for Microsoft Mesh, visit Mesh.com and sign up for updates here.

If you are an existing Microsoft enterprise customer, you can also reach out to your Microsoft account manager to hear more about Microsoft Mesh.

*Note: Customers will be able to download .csv files from AltspaceVR My Data. Downloadable content is limited.

AltspaceVR is a California-based company which was founded in 2013, and which launched its social VR platform in May 2015. They announced during the summer of 2017 that they had run out of money, and most people were expecting the company to fold. Then, in a surprise move, AltspaceVR was acquired by Microsoft at the last moment, literally saving the platform from closing down.

The closing of Altspace will be a huge blow to its user community; one only has to look at the upcoming events calendar to see how many different groups will be impacted by this decision. I suspect there will be many farewell parties and events before Microsoft finally pulls the plug. I do find it interesting that, although Microsoft is killing AltspaceVR (sorry, “sunsetting” it), the company still has plans for a new social VR platform targeted at corporate and business users, called Microsoft Mesh.

It’s clear from this announcement that a consumer-oriented social VR platform, a next-generation AltspaceVR, is not high on the priority list, although it is mentioned in passing as something that will happen “over time”. I’m not holding my breath. Microsoft has no doubt been watching Meta struggling mightily this past year, trying and largely failing to gain any sort of traction for its Horizon Worlds product, and taking copious notes.

You can find all of my blogposts about AltspaceVR (including this one) here.

Thanks to Carlos Austin for alerting me to the official announcement today!

UPDATED: AltspaceVR Support for the Valve Index VR Headset

Have you joined the RyanSchultz.com Discord yet? You’re invited to join over 700 people from around the world, representing every social VR platform and flatscreen virtual world, who discuss, debate, and argue about the ever-evolving metaverse and the many companies building it! More details here. 

The Valve Index

In a disappointing piece of news, it appears that the popular Microsoft-owned social VR platform AltspaceVR has dropped support for the Valve Index virtual reality headset (which is, of course, the one I currently use at home). All mention of the Valve Index has been removed from the documentation on its website:

A year ago, the Road to VR tech website reported that the Valve Index was the second most-used VR headset on Steam, and even as recently as last June, demand for the product has remained strong. So it is a bit of a puzzle as to why AltspaceVR would decide to stop supporting the still-popular Valve Index.

One person on the RyanSchultz.com Discord server reports:

It worked a year ago, but now when I try to start up the app using the Index, the login screen is skewed and distorted and appears on the bottom right of my field-of-view. Totally unusable now. So no more AltspaceVR for me.

Another noted, “It’s not even on the website anymore, I wonder why they keep it as supported on Steam, it confuses users.”

The Steam page for AltspaceVR still lists the Valve Index as supported

There has been some speculation that, with the recent announcement that Microsoft is working with Meta to integrate Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Teams with Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms, Microsoft might be preparing to shutter AltspaceVR. I do find this a little hard to believe, since it is still a popular social VR platform, supporting dozens of meetups and events. I guess we’ll see.

UPDATE Oct. 13th, 2022: BenG tells me:

Just saw the new blog post, the Valve Index was never listed as a supported headset anywhere except for the Steam page and that was only because it was automatically added to all SteamVR games when the Index launched. I’ve been asking for Index support ever since I got mine in 2019, but I was always ignored. So they didn’t drop support for it, they never supported it in the first place. It somewhat worked, but the controllers were seen as Vive wands, so it wasn’t great. I had a much better experience using Revive to get into AltspaceVR, since the Index controllers match up with the Oculus controllers.

Thanks for the clarification, Ben!

Thank you to passTheKetchup and CGVR on the RyanSchultz.com Discord server for the heads-up on this news!

I Was Interviewed by a Business Reporter for The Globe and Mail for an Article About the Metaverse

On March 10th, 2022, I was contacted by Joe Castaldo, a business reporter for The Globe and Mail (which bills itself as “Canada’s National Newspaper”). He was writing up a story about businesses entering the metaverse, and the current metaverse hype cycle, and he asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed.

After checking in with my union representatives at the university, who gave me the all-clear to go ahead, I was interviewed for an hour via telephone. The Globe and Mail had given Joe a Meta Quest 2 wireless VR headset, so a couple of weeks later, I gave him a guided tour of two popular social VR platforms, VRChat and AltspaceVR.

Well, Joe’s article was published in The Globe and Mail today, titled Is the metaverse the future of the internet? A Globe journalist steps inside to find out (if you should hit a paywall, here is an archived version).

I’m not going to reproduce the entire newspaper article here; I was mentioned in the final few paragraphs:

For Ryan Schultz, the widespread interest in the metaverse is a little weird. “My obscure, niche hobby has suddenly gone mainstream,” he told me. A reference librarian with the University of Manitoba, he spends a few hours every week strapped into a headset or exploring desktop-based worlds, and has been blogging about it for years.

Mr. Schultz finds the speculative nature of the digital land rush in some worlds off-putting. “People are investing in this basically as a flex and as a boast to their friends that they can afford these artificially limited items,” he said. Businesses with virtual office space, meanwhile, are likely spending money on a “really fancy three-dimensional brochure.”

He’s seen much of it before. Corporations flocked to Second Life when it took off in the 2000s. Coca-Cola installed soft drink machines, Toyota set up a car dealership, American Apparel built a clothing store, and IBM established an island for employee recruitment and training.

It wasn’t long before the corporate enthusiasm died. “Nobody came to visit these locations, because the people who were already in Second Life didn’t care,” Mr. Schultz said.

He understands the appeal of virtual worlds, though. When he first discovered Second Life, he spent hours there each day. Away from the computer, he has jokingly called himself an “overweight, divorced, gay librarian with diabetes.” At 58, he feels his body growing older, and he’s struggled with depression so bad he’s taken leaves from work. “I kinda suck at this whole reality business,” he wrote on his blog.

In Second Life, Mr. Schultz loved building avatars – angels, supermodels and a Na’vi from, well, Avatar. There was solace in becoming someone else. During the pandemic, he’s met his social needs through virtual reality, and a mental-health app became a lifeline. “I can put on my headset, join a group, and use cognitive behavioural therapy techniques to work through issues and problems, and it’s extremely powerful,” he said. “You feel like you’re really present.”

For those of us who are not already immersed, such moments are likely a long way off. I searched high and low for meaning and connection in the metaverse, but mostly found empty branding experiences, a speculative frenzy around digital assets, and people who were just as curious as I was to find out what this was all about, and were still searching for answers.

But given the relentless enthusiasm of those trying to turn the metaverse into some kind of reality, there will be plenty of chances to try again, for better or worse.

I think that Joe did a good job of describing the metaverse in a way that newspaper readers could easily understand, and there are a couple of videos included in the digital version of the article which made me laugh at certain points, as Joe and his producer Patrick Dell navigated Decentraland and Horizon Worlds!

I also appreciated that the online article linked out to my ever-popular list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds. I’m not really expecting a spike in traffic to my blog (I didn’t get one when I was interviewed by a writer for New Yorker magazine in 2019), but it was an interesting experience, nonetheless.

(By the way, I do receive more and more requests to be interviewed lately, because of my blog. I turn most of them down, but I said yes to this one, because The Globe and Mail is a major Canadian newspaper, and one which I read often.)

The Globe and Mail newspaper interviewed me for an article on the metaverse

P.S. The mental health app mentioned in the quote above is called Help Club; here’s the blogpost which I wrote about this self-help social VR app for mental health.

MANITOBA MEETUP! The Alternate Reality Club, Winnipeg’s XR Meetup, Hosts a Virtual Discussion Panel on the Metaverse in AltspaceVR, on April 28th, 2022

Winnipeg, Manitoba (and no, it’s not this green in April; photo by Mahesh Gupta on Unsplash)

This is a first for me! Usually, when I write about the metaverse on this blog, I write for a global audience. After all, virtual worlds and social VR platforms bring people together regardless of their physical location on the planet Earth!

But this is a local, made-in-Manitoba event, even though it will be held on the social VR platform AltspaceVR due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and therefore open to a broader audience.

Winnipeg’s Alternate Reality Club is a Meetup group with over 630 members, which has been around since 2015, and they describe themselves as follows:

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are entirely new mediums that are transforming many of the ways we currently interact with technology, which will have a massive impact on the world over the next 10-20 years. Let’s get together to discuss ideas, share knowledge and development techniques, foster new collaborations, and increase awareness of what local developers are creating in these amazing new mediums.

On Thursday, April 28th, 2022, from 6:00-8:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, I will be one of six invited panelists, who will be talking about the metaverse:

Meetup #15 Alternate Reality Club: Winnipeg XR Meetup

METAVERSE?

Curious about the metaverse? We’ve gathered a panel of people to share their thoughts on what the metaverse is, could be, should be, and what that means for all of us. In case it gets complicated, we’ll also do a Q&A! All are welcome.

Moderated by Jonathan Phú Son Lê, Training Manager at New Media Manitoba, the full line-up of panelists consists of:

  • Sheila Harris – Capstone Ridge Group / Transformation Consultant
  • John Luxford – CTO, Flipside XR
  • Daniel Blair – CEO, Bit Space Development Ltd. 
  • Dee King – Co-Founder, ZenFri Inc.
  • Ryan Schultz – Blogger and Librarian, University of Manitoba
  • Mike Himbeault –  Director of Business Solutions, Powerland Computers

As we’re still being a bit cautious about in-person events here in Manitoba, this meetup is being held virtually on AltspaceVR, and is open to all who want to join in virtual reality (Vive, Oculus or Windows Mixed Reality), or through their computers using AltspaceVR’s Desktop Mode. Please visit the AltspaceVR website to download the app and set up your account.  There are separate downloads for Vive, Rift/Quest, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets, as well as a 2D/flatscreen desktop version for Mac and Windows.

The Manitoba Legislative Building in Winnipeg, Manitoba—again, NOT in April! We’re still in the tail end of winter up here in the frozen Canadian prairies. (Photo by Mahesh Gupta on Unsplash)

I’m looking forward to making some local connections at this virtual event. See you there!

UPDATE April 29th, 2022: Here’s a picture of the panel from the AltspaceVR event! (I’m second from the left, wearing a blue-and-white sweater).