Tag: David Hall

A Look at the New Customization Features in Oculus Home

Some Oculus Home Decorations, Including a Mini Model of the Solar System

I must confess that I haven’t been paying much attention to Oculus Home, which I always saw just as a space to organize your purchased VR games and experiences. But Facebook/Oculus has been slowly but steadily building Oculus Home to the point where we can now consider it a true social VR platform. The VR news site UploadVR reports:

The latest update to Oculus Home adds custom environments support…

Support for user-generated objects was added back in June. A subsequent update even added animation support. And later in the month, the platform added real-time social, allowing up to 7 friends to visit your home and see those custom objects.

But until now the actual home geometry was the same for all users. The background could be changed between hills, space, a bay, or a future city, but the home itself could not.

David Hall (a long-time Sansar resident who has built a number of wonderful experiences including the Lord of the Rings-inspired Dwarven City and the futuristic Avalon social hub) has posted the following video to his YouTube channel. It is a livestream of him showing several of his own homes in Oculus Home, plus a tour of several other people’s homes:

I love the transition effects when David moves from one home to another, the way one home rezzes out of existence, and the new one rezzes in!

Oculus Home already includes functioning weapons such as bows and guns, as well as some cool animated content like a miniature model of the solar system you can see in a couple of visited homes in this video, and in the picture at the top of this blogpost.

I have now added Oculus Home to my list of social VR/virtual worlds.

Sansar Pick of the Day: Avalon Lounge

One of the often-heard complaints in Sansar is that there is no designated central meeting area. Sinespace has their Welcome Centre with greeters, AltspaceVR has their campfire where you can chat and toast marshmallows, and for a while High Fidelity used a Welcome Wagon concept, rotating between six different HiFi domains every two hours (I think they’ve replaced that with a single location now, though). Some people felt that having a common gathering spot would make it easier for avatars to meet each other.

Jenn, the Community Manager for Sansar, and Ebbe, Linden Lab’s CEO, both rightfully pointed out that there was nothing stopping any of us from creating such a space ourselves. And so David Hall has decided to create the Avalon Lounge, a comfortable, spacious lobby with helpful teleporters to other popular fantasy and sci-fi Sansar experiences.

It’s a large circular space on three levels. Flying cars arrive and depart from the uppermost level (these are actually teleporters to two of C3rb3rus’ experiences, 2077 and Darkwood Forest).

Avalon Lounge 1 10 Mar 2018

On the two lower levels, there are teleporters to other experiences located around the perimeter. Each has a sign indicating the destination.

Avalon Lounge 2 10 Mar 2018.png

And these are some wonderfully creative teleporter portals that David has made! Check out the video of them in action:

A nice touch is the addition of various objects around the lounge which remind you of other popular Sansar destinations, such as a statue I recognized from the Urban Art Experience, and arcade games from 2077. Thoughtful additions, and evidence of the care that David took in pulling all this together.

Avalon Lounge 3 10 Mar 2018.png
Vanity Fair in front of the steampunk teleporter to Bluebell Home & Garden

Vanity Fair is wearing an appropriate astronaut outfit created by the talented Nya Alchemi:

Sansar Creator Profile: David Hall

Linden Lab has released another short promotional video in its Sansar Creator Profile series of videos, created by Draxtor Despres (Bernhard Drax). This one is of Sansar creator David Hall, and it shows some of the process involved in the design and building of his Sansar experience called Dwarven City.