Tag: Core

My Predictions for Social VR, Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse for 2022

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I was going to write up another entry in my ongoing Pandemic Diary series today, but then I read Wagner James Au’s predictions for 2022, and I suddenly realized I had neglected to write up my own blogpost, with my predictions for the next twelve months! So let me polish my crystal ball and see what comes up… 😉

Among Wagner’s predictions is this one, which I agree with 100%—make that 1,000%!

There will be a major scandal or controversy around one of the blockchain/NFT-oriented Metaverse platforms.

With NFTs beset by scams and NFT/blockchain-oriented metaverse platforms seeing low user numbers but extremely high investment and speculation, this is only a matter of time.  

It’s only January 12th, 2022, but I have already written about a number of questionable NFT projects which at best are crazy schemes, and at worst are outright scams! MetaWorld springs to mind as the perfect example of the latter (ALLEGEDLY, I hasten to add, although IN MY OPINION, I don’t believe there is any actual MetaWorld platform, aside from a prototype which was created years ago by someone who has since left the company to work for Somnium Space).

By the way, I have been reliably informed that, after an absence caused by the publication of this damning recent piece of investigative journalism by Engadget, Dedric Reid is once again active on Clubhouse, shilling MetaWorld in his own rooms and in other rooms about the metaverse on the still-popular social audio platform. He’s also relisted his (ALLEGEDLY, IN MY OPINION) worthless virtual land NFTs on OpenSea, after NiftyKit took the original listings on his website down when the original artist he stole the images from to illustrate his NFTs lodged a copyright complaint.

Despite all the negative press from the Engadget exposé and my series of blogposts about MetaWorld, Dedric continues undeterred. Someone joked to me via Discord DMs that Dedric Reid is the Elizabeth Holmes of the metaverse, and I laughed out loud because it’s such an apt, concise description! Harsh, savage, but accurate.

But on to other topics; I am tired of talking about Dedric Reid and MetaWorld (and frankly, whoever falls for his ALLEGED scam at this point is simply not doing their proper due diligence, IN MY OPINION). There’s a lot of actual progress being made by many legitimate metaverse companies building social VR/AR platforms and virtual worlds!

First, Facebook—sorry, Meta! I predict that Meta is going to have a very bumpy year ahead. The company was roundly criticized by the virtual reality community when they announced that. starting in October 2020, all Oculus VR hardware users had to set up accounts on the toxic Facebook social network. While Mark Zuckerberg, in his now-infamous Connect 2021 keynote, said that the company was looking at removing this requirement, I’ll believe it when I actually see it happen. Words are hollow, Mark; what matters are actions.

I predict that Facebook (sorry, Meta) is going to have a rough year

Meta is facing such a never-ending litany of complaints, scandals, and even legal actions that this is, once again, a very easy prediction to make for 2022.

Next prediction: there’s going to be a lot of activity this year in the fuzzy overlap area between games and virtual worlds, what I like to call the “metaverse-adjacent” space. Both games (e.g. Fortnite, Minecraft) and game platforms (e.g. Roblox, Core) will continue to add new features in an effort to become more like social VR/AR apps and virtual worlds. And, given their immense popularity, especially among children, tweens, and teens, many people will get their first taste of the metaverse via these games and game platforms, in much the same way as an entire generation got their start in the metaverse via Second Life.

Speaking of Second Life, in my predictions for 2021, I wrote the following:

And, indeed, 2021 was the first year in which VRChat began to consistently surpass Second Life in user concurrency figures (Rec Room did too, I believe). VRChat has been breaking new user concurrency records, leading up to and including New Year’s Eve 2021, as Johnny Rodriguez tweeted:

Last night, 88,700 people put on a VR headset and decided to join the VRChat New Years event to countdown [to] the new year. For reference, this is Husker’s Memorial Stadium [at the University of Nebraska], which fits around 86,000 people when completely full. VR is here to stay.

Turning back to Second Life, the coronavirus pandemic caused a temporary surge in usage (and the current Omicron wave might well prompt people to dust off their avatars and give it another try, too). I still estimate that SL has somewhere between 500,000 and 900,000 active users per month (that is, people who sign in at least once in the past thirty days). I really wish that Linden Lab would regularly release statistics like this, but if they are declining (slowly or quickly), I can also understand why the company would be reluctant to do so.

It doesn’t help matters that Second Life’s userbase skews significantly older than most other social VR platforms, virtual worlds, and metaverse-adjacent apps like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox. SL users are (literally) dying off! However, Second Life still remains popular enough (and a reliable cash cow) to keep merrily coasting along for many years. And with the deep pockets and good connections of the Waterfield investment group (of which Second Life is now a part), the future looks bright.

I wish I could say the same about Sansar, which from my (admittedly limited) perspective, seems to be circling the drain. I wrote the following post in the official Second Life community forums late last year:

I was part of Sansar since I was invited into the closed beta in 2016/2017, and I was there for the whole crazy ride. Sansar is now on life support (the company that bought it from Linden Lab, called Wookey, furloughed all of its staff recently, and I believe that they could shut down at any moment without warning). Being there from beginning to end, I still marvel at how Linden Lab thought they could build a new virtual world/social VR platform and just put it out there, and expect it to sell itself in this competitive marketplace for metaverse platforms. “Build it and they will come” might have worked for SL in 2003 but it sure ain’t gonna work nowadays. You have to PROMOTE yourself to get noticed.

Also, Linden Lab could have done a lot of things to try and entice SL users to a) visit Sansar and b) make them want to stay, build worlds, create content, and form a new community. Instead, what happened is that Second Life folks (rightly or wrongly) saw Sansar as something which distracted LL from its work on SL, and as a result most SL folks hated Sansar and refused to have anything to do with it, hastening its downfall in my opinion. It also didn’t help that Linden Lab made a bet that many people would be owning high-end VR headsets tethered to high-end PCs with good graphics cards, and instead the Oculus Quest wireless headset took off.

I still shake my head and wonder “what if?”. Say a prayer for Sansar, it needs it. 

Right now, Sansar’s best hope for survival in 2022 is for another company who wants to enter the metaverse marketplace to buy the platform from Wookey, much the same as Microsoft stepped in at the eleventh hour to snap up AltspaceVR.

Another prediction: we are going to see an increase in the number of companies providing services to metaverse platforms. Wagner James Au mentions the Linden Lab subsidiary Tilia, which provides financial services, in his blogpost which I linked to up top; I predict that they will land a few more clients this year. Another example of a company doing well in this niche is Ready Player Me, the avatar system currently in use in VRChat and over 1,000 other apps and games on VR, mobile, desktop, and web. Expect this nascent business-to-business sector to explode this year!

Well, that’s it for me, for now. I might update this blogpost with other predictions for 2022 as they come to me.

And I ask you, my faithful readers: what predictions are you making for the next twelve months? Feel free to leave a comment, or use the feedback form on my blog if you’d prefer to contact me directly. You’re also welcome to join the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, a cross-worlds community where over 600 people, with experience in various metaverse platforms, welcome you! Just click the button on the left-side panel of my blog as shown (image right). If you are connecting via a smartphone or tablet instead of your computer desktop, just click the three-bars menu button in the upper-right hand corner, then scroll down until you see the Discord widget displayed.

Core to Build a Virtual World for DJ Deadmaus5*

In my sometimes-obsessive quest to cover as many virtual worlds as possible on this blog, I have yet to write about Core! Core is an Unreal-based world-building and gaming platform similar to Roblox and Minecraft, whose company, Manticore Games, recently raised US$100 million dollars in venture capital as part of the renewed interest in all things metaversal.

What brought Core to my attention is that it is following the precedent set by Roblox and Fortnite, and other game platforms, in branching out into music! And Core is starting out with a well-known musical artist: Joel Zimmerman, better known as deadmau5! According to an article in Protocol:

Game development platform Core is offering its own twist on the metaverse by pitching musicians to use its tools to build their own virtual worlds. Manticore, the company behind Core that in March raised $100 million, has its first artist onboard: Joel Zimmerman, known better as the electronic music artist deadmau5.

Zimmerman plans to launch his own virtual world on the Core platform this fall, the company announced at the Gamescom Opening Night Live event on Wednesday. The world, called Oberhasli, will feature live music performances, games and other experiences both created and curated by Zimmerman himself. A former programmer and 3D animator, Zimmerman is an avid gamer and game development enthusiast who over the years has taught himself some of the tools of the trade for use in his live productions.

The partnership is Manticore’s biggest entertainment crossover to date as it gears up to compete with the likes of Epic’s Fortnite, Roblox and other titles that have become both popular development platforms for young and burgeoning creators as well as lucrative destinations for large-scale virtual concerts and brand tie-ins.

It turns out that deadmau5 is himself a geek at heart, even trying his hand at building his own music platform form scratch before abandoning the effort:

Right now, the company is focused on bringing more people to Core, especially those who are excited about the prospect of building virtual worlds. Zimmerman, who has spent much of the past decade teaching himself real-time graphics and other game development techniques for use in his live productions, was an ideal candidate.

“I dove down the rabbit hole and decided I could take a good stab at producing a real-looking thing from Unreal Engine solo,” Zimmerman told Protocol in an interview over Zoom from his home in Toronto. That was a gigantic mistake, he said. “I soaked in too much, but I realized that’s why it costs $200 million to make a video game.”

Zimmerman says his efforts in learning how to push his stage productions, lighting and graphics to the next level gave him a newfound respect for the art of game development. That led to conversations with a number of companies over the past few years trying to build a bridge between traditional entertainment and video games. With the COVID-19 pandemic shifting many music events online, combined with the efforts of Fortnite and Epic’s pioneering virtual concert series, the timing felt right, Zimmerman said, and Manticore made an appealing pitch.

My first thought on reading this new is that the many companies who are vying to become music performance venues (and I especially thinking of Sansar here) are going to have to pull up their socks in what is becoming a feverishly competitive marketplace! I can only assume that a lot of money is being thrown around to woo big-name musical performers such as deadmau5, and I have no doubt that some bidding wars have already reupted!

It should be noted, however, that despite launching deadmau5’s virtual world with a live concert in October 2021, the focus here appears to be more on building a music-oriented virtual world, something that persists for fans and visitors, as opposed to one-time-only musical events.

Core can be downloaded for free. I note with a mixture of bemusement and chagrin that the minimum PC specifications for Core are an Intel Core i5-7400, or AMD equivalent, while my 4-year-old desktop computer is chugging along with a mere Intel Core i5-6600. Yet another reason for me to upgrade! It’s such a shame that high-end CPUs and GPUs are as scarce as hens’ teeth due to the cryptomining craze, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other reasons. I may have to make do for a while!

For further information about Core, please visit their website, join their Discord server, or follow them on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, and YouTube. And I will be adding Core to my comprehensive list of social VR/virtual worlds.

*Yes, I know, it’s supposed to be lowercase-d deadmau5. But it just looks wrong to me in a blogpost title! And I learned from the included video that it pronounced “dead-mou-five”, and not “dead-mouse”.