Tag: AltspaceVR

The Educators in VR 2020 International Summit, February 17th-22nd, 2020, in AltspaceVR, ENGAGE, Rumii, and Other Social VR Platforms

This morning, I decided to submit an application to be a speaker about applications of social VR to libraries at the upcoming Educators in VR 2020 International Summit, which will run from February 17th to 22nd, 2020. Wish me luck! I’m crossing my fingers that my proposed talk will be accepted!

Instead of a physical real-world location, the entire conference will take place on various social VR platforms, including:

AltspaceVR is actually a pretty good choice as a platform for this conference, since it is pretty much accessible to almost everybody, including flatscreen PC users (although I still object to the cartoony avatars from a purely aesthetic standpoint 😉 …).

Picture taken at the first Educators in VR meetup in AltspaceVR, October 2018

Here’s a brief description of the summit, taken from their website:

The 2020 Educators in VR International Summit is a free, open-to-the public, virtual event lasting 6 days (over 80 round-the-clock hours) with a diverse range of speakers and presentations covering:

• The Basics of VR/AR/XR/MR
• Research into Spatial Technologies in Education
• Corporate Uses for Training and Education
• Language Arts Training, Education, and as a Classroom
• Coaching and Personal Development
• Medical and Science
• Computer Science and Math
• Student Maker/Creator Projects, Collaborations, and Apps
• Virtual Applications and Hardware for the Classroom

And so much more. We have topics under consideration covering the use of social media with virtual reality, education in religion and virtual worlds, world building, VR/AR app development, social and educational VR platforms, and open discussions with some of the world’s foremost experts in education and integrating extended reality.

The Educators in VR group that is putting on this event is an open, international, cross-platform community of educators, researchers, and trainers exploring and collaborating with and in virtual and augmented reality. They host weekly meetups in AltspaceVR on Tuesdays. They also have an active Discord server (here’s the invite link to join if you are interested). They’re also on Facebook and Twitter.

Even if I am not accepted as a speaker or panelist at the summit, I do plan to attend as much as I can of this event! The best part is, I don’t have to spend any money on conference fees, or buy a plane ticket to fly anywhere! (Trying to fit my tired, old, fat ass into economy airline seating for several hours at a stretch is no longer my idea of a fun time.)

If you wish to submit a proposal yourself to present at the conference, here is the link (the deadline is December 30th, 2019). The summit is also looking for volunteers; here is the link to apply if you want to help out.

A List of Christmas Events in the Various Social VR/Virtual Worlds

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This is a list of the various Christmas events which are taking place this holiday season on the various social VR platforms and virtual worlds I cover on this blog. If you have an event that I have missed, please let me know and I will update this listing, thanks!

Sinespace

Sinespace has a Winter Festival with events running every day from Dec. 21st, straight through until New Year’s Eve! Here’s the complete schedule. (And don’t forget to take advantage of one month of free Premium membership!)

Second Life

As usual, there is so much happening in Second Life around Christmastime that it is impossible to compile a full list!

  • Your best bet is to check the Events listing under Search; you can do a keyword search, or select events using the drop-down category menu in the upper right-hand corner of the Events window in Firestorm (for example, “Live Music” to catch a live performer’s show).
  • The official Second Life Destination Guide lists eight pages worth of winter attractions to visit.
  • The Seraphim website has a list of fairs and events that you might want to check out.
  • Among many other club events happening throughout Second Life over the holidays, Bryce Sun is DJing on Christmas Day at the FMD Club, which bills itself “the premiere destination for Second Life’s sexiest and most fashionable residents”.

Sansar

On Dec. 21st, Solas and Drax will host a special holiday edition of Harvest Hopping (the long-running Sansar worlds exploration event formerly known as Atlas Hopping). All are welcome!

And on Dec. 27th, there will be a Christmas Community Campfire at Witchy’s Winter, hosted by Beverly Zauberflote:

Please check the Sansar Events page for more details on these and other events during this holiday season.

AltspaceVR

Check the AltspaceVR Events Listing for all the news on what’s going on, including four separate VR Church Christmas services on Dec. 22nd: one at a time zone for Australians, a second at a time zone for Europeans, and two back-to-back services for North Americans.

VRChat

The best place to find out what Christmas events are happening in the busy world of VRChat is the VRChat Events website, with an online calendar of events, and a link to join the VRChat Events Discord server.

Also, there is a brand new Winter category in the Worlds menu in VRChat, with places for you to explore!

VRChat is also home to the annual New Years Times Square, where you could run into just about anybody! It is described as a developer-made world with hundreds of posters from the VRChat community.

My source, Fionna, also tells me:

I will be hosting an event for the world builder community on New Year’s Eve as well, featuring a world made by Sentinel, which is a gorgeous Art Deco lounge.

NeosVR

Medra, an organizer of the NeosVR Creator Jam series of events in NeosVR, posted:

The holidays are almost upon us and the 30th Creator Jam…so it’s time for:

Creator Jam 30: 3rd Megajam & Winter Holiday Party

Sunday December 22nd
Starts at 2 p.m. EST(11 a.m. PST/19:00 UTC).

As an anniversary and Holiday celebration come hang out exchanging gifts, dressing up, and voting on Christmas trees. This will be a party and Swap Meet. NeosVR is wonderful for people unloading their inventories. What a better way to be in the spirit of giving than for people to share what they have or made. If you have a cool avatar, share it! If you have a cool gadget, please share. Pack neat Logix snippets in adult beverages or prezzies. We will be be exploring all the previous nine Creator Jam worlds in a livestream with Nexulan.

Secret Santa gift exchange will be held during this party at 2:30 p.m. EST (11:30 a.m. PST/19:30 UTC) Even if you aren’t a part of the Secret Santa gift exchange feel free to give gifts to specific people or everyone.

Everyone is welcome. I look forward to seeing all!

Somnium Space

Somnium Space is simultaneously saying goodbye both to 2019 and to the first version of their Steam client, with a Farewell Party on Dec. 30th with special guests Vivian Chazen (the host of The Hive VR) and musical artist Luke Reynolds:

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.

An Updated Comparison Chart of Social VR Platforms

Have you joined the RyanSchultz.com Discord yet? You’re invited to be a part of the first ever cross-worlds discussion group, with over 300 people participating from every social VR platform and virtual world! More details here. 

IMPORTANT NOTE, PLEASE READ! This version of the comparison chart is very out-of-date!! You can find the updated version here.

UPDATE Feb. 6th, 2023: Thank you to Dr. Fran Babcock, who made some updates to this spreadsheet in 2021. I am currently working on a complete update to this spreadsheet for 2024. Thank you for your patience.

I haven’t published an update to my popular November 2018 comparison chart of twelve social VR platforms for quite some time. There never seems to be a perfect time to update. At first, I wanted to wait until the Oculus Quest was released. And then, I was wondering whether or not I should wait until Facebook releases the Oculus Link update to the Oculus Quest (which means, theoretically, that Oculus Quest users can use a custom cable connected to their VR-ready Windows computer to view content originally intended for the Oculus Rift).

In the end, I decided to go ahead and publish a first draft of the updated comparison chart now, get feedback from my readers, and update the chart as necessary. So here is that first draft.

I removed two of the 12 platforms in last year’s comparison chart: both Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms were shut down by Facebook on October 25th, 2019, in preparation for the launch of Facebook Horizon sometime in 2020. I have not added Facebook Horizon to this chart (yet) because we still know so little about this new social VR platform. And I decided to add six more social VR platforms to the chart: Anyland, Cryptovoxels, Engage, JanusVR, Mozilla Hubs, and NeosVR.

Rather than publish the chart as an image to Flickr, as I did last year, I decided to create a spreadsheet using Google Drive, and publish it to the web here:

Comparison Chart of 16 Social VR Platforms (Updated and Expanded Draft © Ryan Schultz, November 13th, 2019).

Please leave me a comment with any suggestions, corrections or edits, and I will update this new comparison chart accordingly. You can also reach me on the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, or any other virtual world Discord that I might belong to (my handle is always the same, RyanSchultz). You can also use the contact form on my blog.

UPDATE 3:48 p.m.: I’ve had a request to add userbase figures to this chart, but I am not going to do that for a very good reason: there’s absolutely no way I can get accurate figures from the various companies, many of whom want to keep that information private. And even ranking them using a scale like low, medium, and high would just be guesses on my part, misleading to a lot of people, and liable to lead to a lot of arguments. Sorry! I will leave it up to you to check Steam statistics for those platforms which are on Steam (which, again, may or may not be an accurate measure of the actual level of usage of any platform).

UPDATE Nov. 13th: I’d like to thank Frooxius (of NeosVR), Artur Sychov (of Somnium Space) and Jin for their corrections and suggestions. Any updates to this table are shown in real-time, which is a unexpected bonus to publishing a spreadsheet directly to the web from Google Drive! I should have thought of doing it this way last year.

And it would appear that there is a great deal of disagreement of what constitutes “in-world building tools”. I am referring to the ability to create complex objects entirely within the platform itself, and not using external tools such as Blender or Unity and then importing the externally-created objects into the platform. For example, High Fidelity has very rudimentary “prim-building” tools in-world, which are not often used by creators, who prefer to import mesh objects created in tools like Blender, Maya, or 3ds Max instead. To give another example, Somnium Space now offers a completely in-world tool for constructing buildings on your purchased virtual land. Sansar has no such tools for in-world building, although you can assemble premade, externally-created objects into a world by using their Scene Editor (which is something completely different from what I am talking about here).

One reader had suggested adding in a few more columns to this chart to include various technical aspects of these social VR platforms: game engine used, open/closed source, support for scripting, etc. Using the table provided to me by Enrico Speranza (a.k.a. Vytek), I have now added three more columns to the original comparison table: architecture/game engine, open/closed source, and scripting. Thank you for the suggestion, Vytek!

Please keep your suggestions, corrections and edits coming, thanks!