Road to VR and UploadVR both report that the popular social VR platform Rec Room is expanding to both the iPhone and iPad. If you wish to be an iOS beta tester, you can sign up here.
Rec Room also has plans to create an in-game economy where content creators can get paid. UploadVR reports:
Against Gravity has big plans for Rec Room with the goal that “someone in school with no coding knowledge can build a game in an afternoon and ship it on console, PC, mobile, and VR. We’re already seeing this happen, but we think the ability to instantly build and publish a game gets a lot more interesting when you open up the audience to anyone with a mobile device.”
In addition to cross-platform creation tools, the company is also looking into ways for creators to get paid for their works in Rec Room.
“We’re looking into letting creators charge in-app tokens for inventions they created, costumes, events, and for different things they can build into their games and rooms,” according to the company.
Rec Room is going into some interesting directions!
Virtual worlds like IMVU and Avakin Life, which are highly popular with tweens and teens, have one strong advantage over Second Life; they can be played on mobile devices (tablets and smartphones), which are now ubiquitous technology in modern-day society. Although Linden Lab has made a few half-hearted forays into mobile clients for SL in the past, these projects never went very far before they were shut down. Second Life is still, after all these years, primarily a virtual world played on a computer desktop (Windows, Mac, and Linux), which limits its potential audience somewhat.
Linden Lab is looking for an innovative mobile app engineer to deliver a compelling, responsive mobile interface into Second Life. If you’re passionate about the latest cross platform mobile technologies and would be psyched to wake up every morning knowing that your efforts will enhance the largest, most successful virtual world on the Internet then we want to hear from you!
Responsibilities
Expand and enhance access to Second Life – the most successful user-created Virtual World ever with tens of thousands of concurrent users.
Collaborate with other engineers in an iterative, agile development environment with a passionate commitment to improving the Second Life experience.
Participate in design and code reviews and discussions both within the web team and with other parts of Second Life development.
Knowledge, Skills, Abilities
To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
Results-oriented attitude and dedication to the user experience.
Demonstrated proficiency working in a geographically distributed team.
Experience developing consumer-oriented mobile applications for Android and IOS.
Experience with distributed version control (git or mercurial).
Experience with automated testing.
Experience with AWS or other cloud-based deployment models, especially streaming cloud-based rendering.
Demonstrated ability to accurately scope projects and negotiate deadlines within a flexible team structure.
Deep familiarity with and enthusiasm for Second Life is a HUGE plus.
It would appear that they are interested in building Second Life mobile apps for both Apple (iOS) and Android devices, which is good news!
[The] job is remote and “deep familiarity with and enthusiasm for Second Life is a HUGE plus”, so this could be a dream gig for SL’s many talented community developers. My recommendation, of course, is to hire Alina Lyvette, whose Lumiya viewer for Android has already sold well over 100,000 copies.
