Tag: Music

UPDATED! Visit the Metaverse Festival in Decentraland, October 21st to 24th, 2021

The Metaverse Festival is a four-day celebration of music, culture, and creativity in the blockchain-based virtual world of Decentraland (DCL), starting today and running through to October 24th, 2021. Here’s a sitemap with coordinates (you can see this in a larger size on the Metaverse Festival website):

The festival boasts an impressive lineup of over 75 performers, including 3LAU, Alison Wonderland, deadmau5, and Nina Nesbitt. You can get details on when and where to catch your favourite artist on the Decentraland events listing. A complete lineup of performers is on the Metaverse Festival website, which features a suitably trippy design:

A four-day celebration of music, culture and creativity in the virtual social world of Decentraland, the Metaverse Festival is a grand collision of light, sound and portable toilets.

It’s the first event of its kind – a fully decentralized celebration of music that offers a weird and wonderful brew of world-class headline acts, mind blowing stages, games, exclusive artist merch, collectibles and more.

So, on October 21, dress your avatar in your very best wearables and jump into an experience like no other.

And if this is your first time in the virtual world, be sure to take a look at our Festival FAQs, which explain how you can be a part of the fun.

We can’t wait to see you in the metaverse!

Gah, that word again…”decentralized”. Decentraland may be many things, but one thing it is most certainly not is decentralized. Everything runs on Decentraland’s own servers, on Decentraland’s artificially scarce and increasingly expensive virtual land (called, of course, LAND).

It just irritates the hell out of me when PR people cavalierly toss around meaningless descriptions like “a fully decentralized celebration of music”. And “the first event of its kind”? Second Life would like a word. Festivals in virtual worlds have been around for years, people.

Apparently, even Paris Hilton herself is making an appearance at Decentraland’s Metaverse Festival (hmmm, I guess she gave up on Staramba Spaces/MATERIA.ONE, another blockchain platform which I savagely reviewed here and here on my blog). God only knows what she’ll be doing up on stage (probably trying to deejay).

Anyway, that’s enough kvetching for one day. If you want to visit the Metaverse Festival, you will likely need to set up a wallet (here’s a quote taken from the Festival FAQs document):

The best way to fully enjoy the Decentraland experience is to get yourself a digital wallet. Digital wallets work as your personal account, keeping all your digital assets (such as NFTs, LAND, cryptocurrency) and in-world progress safe. And when you return to Decentraland, you just need to hit ‘connect’ and you’re in.

You can still enter Decentraland without a wallet, by signing in with your email address (via Fortmatic) or as a Guest, but you won’t have the chance to – for example – receive daily rewards and airdrops, trade in the Marketplace or log in with a different device using the same ID and avatar.

Learn how to get a wallet with our simple Beginners Guide.

Got all that? Cryptonewbies might also want to refer to the blogpost I wrote when Decentraland first opened its doors to the general public: A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Get Started in Decentraland (and Some Caveats for New Users).

Have fun and enjoy the festival!

You can follow what’s going on in Decentraland via Twitter and Reddit, or catch up the latest news via their blog. You can also join their official Discord server.

UPDATE Oct. 23rd, 2021: I have been informed that Decentraland actually is decentralized; Jin (one of the 600+ members of the RyanSchultz.com Discord) shared the following paragraph from the DCL FAQ:

Does Decentraland run on top of its own blockchain?

Decentraland uses the Ethereum blockchain to store and verify information about LAND ownership and LAND content. It does not run on its own independent blockchain. Content within Decentraland is hosted and served to users via a network of community-owned content servers.

So, I stand corrected! Thanks, Jin 😉 Here’s the GitHub for the software if you want to set up your own DCL content server (and, of course, you need LAND!).

Stageverse: A Brief Introduction

Stageverse is a new social VR platform for musical performance, currently available for the Oculus Quest only (not other VR headsets), as well as iOS and Android mobile devices. The platform features full-body, customizable avatars and spatial voice chat.

Today, Stageverse launched their first show, a 360° video recording of a 2-hour Muse concert held in Madrid, called Muse: Enter the Simulation. According to their website:

Muse: Enter the Simulation is a mixed reality experience of the Simulation Theory live show, recorded at the sold-out tour stop at Madrid’s Wanda Metropolitano Stadium in Madrid. This is an interactive, social experience allowing you to meet up with friends and fellow fans as avatars, at the Stageverse Stadium. You can explore the show from 16 different viewpoints, all in 360 degrees – and in 3D in virtual reality. You can express yourself with interactive toys, and exclusive virtual outfits from Muse and Balmain Paris, including the recreation of Matt Bellamy’s jacket worn onstage. Available on mobile or Oculus Quest headsets, guaranteed to transport you out of reality and into the simulation.

From this video, it would appear that you and your friends are avatars in a space where the 360° video is being played, and you can switch viewpoints to catch the concert from various angles. The concert is free to attend “for a limited time only” (whatever that means; I assume it means that they intend to start charging for future events).

Also, Stageverse has future plans to hop onto the NFT (Non-Fungible Token) bandwagon, with something called the Future Culture Club, which you can sign up for on the website:

For more information about Stageverse, please visit their website, join their Discord server, or follow the project on social media: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I will be adding Stageverse to my ever-expanding comprehensive list of social VR and virtual worlds.

NOYS VR: A Brief Introduction

NOYS VR logo

NOYS VR is a social VR platform for live music performances, by a Hamburg, Germany-based startup, and based on the Unreal game engine.

According to their website, they describe their project as follows:

INTERACTIVE MUSIC EXPERIENCES IN VR

The social platform for music experiences and concerts, native to virtual reality.

NOYS VR is a new way to connect musicians with their fans and listeners. Instead of replicating an already existing concert in 360 [degrees], we co-create concerts natively to virtual reality! Enabling everyone to have fantastic and never before seen music experiences.

Fans have complete freedom of movement, are able to meet like-minded [people] from all over the world and experience their favorite artists close up.

Last year, NOYS VR hosted a virtual edition of the Elbjazz Festival, the real-life version of which takes place at the harbourfront in Hamburg, Germany:

Among the musical artists who have performed in NOYS VR so far are rock band Ripe & Ruin, Swedish pianist Martin Tingwall, the Michael Wollny Trio jazz group. More recently, NOYS VR hosted a July 22nd, 2021 concert by Emily Roberts and HE/RO:

NOYS VR is currently available for the Oculus Rift VR headset, and Oculus Quest users can sign up to be a beta-test user. I also stumbled across an application for HTC Vive users to sign up to be a beta tester, so I assume that NOYS VR will launch on Steam at some point (and I would love to be able to test it out in my Valve Index headset!).

For further information about NOYS VR, please visit their website, join their Discord server, or follow them on social media: Facebook and Instagram. I will be adding NOYS VR to my ever-expanding comprehensive list of social VR and virtual worlds!

Pandemic Diary, February 6th, 2021: I Need a Miracle

When my best friend John called me at 12:45 p.m., my iPhone announced his FaceTime call. I groaned, rolled over, and pulled the covers over my head. The winter cold and the pandemic lockdown combined have tipped me over into full-blown hibernation mode, and made me a grumpy, sleepy gay bear.

It is currently -27°C (-16°F) up here in Winnipeg, and with a strong north-west wind, it feels like -44°C (-47°F) with the wind chill. These are the kinds of things that you do not learn from the glossy Travel Manitoba brochures, people.

Even worse, we are expecting a full week of bone-chilling temperatures:

I have learned (and written previously about) how my subconscious sends me messages through song lyrics. At that precise moment when I become aware that I have a particular song running through my head, the lyrics usually have some sort of meaning—something that I’m not consciously thinking about, but which my subconscious is trying to tell me.

Well, on Friday morning, I woke up to this song running through my head:

In other words, my subconscious is telling me: I need a miracle. Or something akin to a miracle, to get me out of this weeks-long period of acedia, depression, and despair, triggered by these unprecedented circumstances. I am having serious trouble getting out of bed and facing the day, and I am having serious trouble feeling motivated to get any work done, both around my house and at work (which, of course, is also “around my house”, as I have been working from home since March 16th, 2020).

I know that a great many other people are struggling, and I also know that I am luckier than most. But honestly, the combination of a bitterly cold patch of Winnipeg winter, combined with the continued province-wide pandemic lockdown (which has been in place since early November), leaves me struggling to cope at times.

Finally out of bed, and low on staples like bread, I decide to bundle up in my down-filled winter parka, don an N95 mask, and head out to warm up the car. My local McDonalds has been closed to in-store dining for three months, but the drive-through is still busy, and I place my order for a burger, fries, and a diet Coke (lunch) and a box of six muffins (breakfast tomorrow, I tell myself, although they will likely all be gone by midnight).

I carefully remove my mask, scrub my hands liberally with hand sanitizer (just in case), and dine in my car, engine running to keep the heat going full blast, in the McDonalds parking lot. This time, when John calls, I pick up, and we chat via FaceTime about how our respective weeks have gone. My day has finally begun, albeit a bit later than usual! And so it goes…I drive home, brew a large pot of coffee, put I Need a Miracle on auto-repeat and crank it, and face whatever challenges come my way.

I hope that you are all taking good care of yourselves and each other in these unprecedented times. Stay strong, say safe, and stay healthy!