Tag: Blockchain

VIBEHub Has Launched Their Platform

Back in March I wrote about a new, blockchain-based virtual world called VIBEHub. There has been much grumbling on the VIBEHub Telegram about the recent lack of news in terms of product development.

Well, I discovered today that they have completely redesigned their website and launched their platform:

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You can visit what they call “hubs” using a web browser on your desktop or, if you are using a WebVR-compatible browser, you can also visit them in your VR headset.

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You can create your own hub, and even charge an admission fee for entrance. Here’s a brief tutorial video from their YouTube channel:

Interestingly, there are future plans for many different kinds of experiences, everything from music to gaming to education to comedy, listed in the left-hand side panel. These are all listed as “Coming Soon”:

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There’s also a Marketplace, where you can spend VIBEHub credits (their blockchain-based in-world currency, called VIBE) on things such as avatars:

VibeHub 8 23 Sept 2018

Currently, the only way to get VIBE credits is to buy them using cryptocurrency (they support the MetaMask wallet). They say that you will be able to buy VIBE credits using your credit card in future.

You have a choice of a robot or human avatar. I must admit that I found the robot avatars to be kind of cute:

VibeHub 9 23 Sept 2018

But I found the human avatars to be, well, let’s just say “aesthetically challenged” (at least compared to other platforms such as Second Life and Sansar) and leave it at that. The oversized hands and overly-long fingers are the stuff of nightmares:

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(You have to go through the avatar selection menu every time you enter a new hub. It does not appear to remember what you saved from the previous hub.)

I found the brand-new platform to be somewhat buggy, both in desktop and in VR mode. Hubs seem to take a long time to load (and I have broad bandwidth and a fast gaming computer).  In desktop mode, either I could not move my avatar at all, or I could not get him to stop running. In VR mode, I found that I could move, but I could not turn. Rather a frustrating experience overall. But it’s early days.

The new VIBEHub website home page webpage states:

We support HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Daydream by Google, Samsung Gear VR. Don’t have a VR/AR headset? No problem we also support WebGL/WebVR on compatible modern browsers on your desktop or mobile devices. Other hardware platforms like Magic Leap and PSVR coming soon. Experiences will vary depending on device capabilities. However no one gets left out.

Magic Leap One support “coming soon”? That would make VIBEHub the first platform to support both VR and AR headsets. I’ll believe that bit of marketing hype when I see it.

VIBEHub is the second cryptocurrency-based virtual world platform to actually launch (after Mark Space, which is rather underwhelming). It will be interesting to see how the platform develops over time.

Hulk Hogan on Staramba Spaces

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Staramba Spaces (Remember them? The blockchain-based virtual world where you can be neighbours with Paris Hilton?) has been busy uploading promo videos to Vimeo. Among the celebrities called upon to shill for Staramba Spaces is Hulk Hogan:

https://vimeo.com/288500770

“Come train with Hulk Hogan! Come hang out on the beach with Hulk Hogan! Come surf on a tiger shark with Hulk Hogan!”

Uhhh… gimme a sec to think about this… how about…

NO. 

As I have said before:

How much interaction with real celebrities will you actually get, with all this talk of “lifelike scans” of celebrities and soccer stars? Why would you want to hang out with a 3D scan of a famous person in the first place?

I would dearly love to see the market research that shows people are willing to spend money hanging out with a 3D scanned likeness of Hulk Hogan, for any reason.

As far as I can tell, all that Staramba seems to have at this point, that its competitors do not, is a large and growing collection of 3D celebrity scans that they can (possibly) animate. How exactly does that translate into a virtual world platform that people will want to visit? How will people interact with Paris Hilton and Hulk Hogan? It sounds like Staramba Spaces is creating a version of Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. “Get closer to the stars!”

I just don’t think this idea is going to fly. (Sorry, Hulk!)

https://vimeo.com/288537371

UPDATED! The BBC Covers Decentraland: Virtually Making a Fortune?

I will hand it to the folks at Decentraland: for a virtual world that you can’t even visit yet, they are certainly attracting an awful lot of press attention (mostly for their expensive land prices). Today BBC decided to cover the platform on their Trending program.

Titled Virtually Making a Fortune?, the 23-minute BBC World Service radio program offers a good overall introduction to the Decentraland project, especially if you’re new to it.

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I am amused to note that the BBC used a still from the rather misleading “artistic concept” promotional video for Decentraland to illustrate their radio program. (You currently can’t do anything like what is pictured in the YouTube video on the platform.)

The program also failed to mention that you can already use platforms such as Sansar and High Fidelity to build VR-capable, fully-functional, visitable experiences at a much lower cost than Decentraland. As I have said before, spending a small fortune on 10 m-by-10 m plots of virtual land makes absolutely no sense when you can now build up to twenty 4 km-by-4 km experiences for free in Sansar, to cite just one example!

The program also goes into the whole idea that the company plans to build its virtual world and then withdraw, leaving Decentraland’s governance up to the resident landowners themselves. This is a somewhat fascinating but still-untested idea, which may not work out as intended.

UPDATE Aug. 27th: If you want to see some video with your audio, the story has now been placed on the BBC News website: The virtual land selling for millions.

Here’s a direct link to the six-and-a-half-minute news video (press F11 to see it full-screen on your monitor): https://www.bbc.com/news/av/embed/p06j77zq/45275461

Oasis Labs Raises $45 Million to Launch Privacy-First Cloud Computing on the Blockchain

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There’s still a lot of skepticism about blockchain. The technology still has hurdles to overcome in order to be truly useful in certain applications such as healthcare and the energy industry. But, as the MIT Technology Review reports, one recent blockchain startup, called Oasis Labs, is attracting a lot of attention and investment:

The cryptocurrency world is overflowing with big claims, but Song is a well-known computer science professor at UC Berkeley and a MacArthur fellow (as well as one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2009). And a number of big-name funders seem to think her company, Oasis Labs, is on to something. This week, the startup announced that it has raised $45 million in a private token presale to a group of high-profile cryptocurrency investors and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. It also became the first project to get backing from Andreessen Horowitz’s new $300 million crypto fund.

Song says Oasis Labs has developed new “privacy preserving” smart-contract technology that overcomes fundamental limitations of today’s most popular smart-contract platform, Ethereum. She and several colleagues described a major component of the system in a recently published research paper (PDF).

According to a July 9th, 2018 press release:

Oasis Labs today announced it has raised $45 million from a16zcrypto, Accel, Binance Labs, DCVC (Data Collective), Electric Capital, Foundation Capital, Gaorong, Metastable, Pantera, Polychain, and more. Founded by a team of academic and entrepreneurial leaders, Oasis Labs is designing a platform to overcome performance, security and privacy limitations that have hampered blockchain adoption to date. The company has garnered investment support from a wide spectrum of the blockchain ecosystem including venture capital, crypto funds and hardware manufacturers.

“Today’s internet is experiencing significant growing pains when it comes to providing effective security and privacy protections, which is only compounded by the rise of data-intensive services like AI,” said Jake Flomenberg, partner at Accel. “At the same time, however, the opportunity has never been greater to responsibly leverage data in the web’s next phase of products and innovation. Oasis Labs is forging a new path by giving people control over their data while delivering a high-performance blockchain platform that will reshape the future of the cloud.”

Given the problems that people like Adam Frisby have pointed out in trying to apply blockchain to virtual worlds, this is an interesting development in blockchain research. You can follow Oasis Labs via their website, or via Twitter, Reddit, Gitter, or Telegram.