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.

The New Ready Player Me Hub: The Ability to Import Your Avatar to Any Supported Platform!

An example of the avatars you can create using the new Ready Player Me Hub (source)

Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me, the customizable avatar system I have written about before here, here, and here, has issued a brand new update! In the email I received yesterday:

The Ready Player Me Hub lets you create one or multiple avatars and use them in all apps that support Ready Player Me. With one click, you can import your existing avatar or create a new one and add it to apps like VRChat, LIV, and Somnium Space.

According to the official blogpost announcing the update (which I recommend you read in full):

Ever since we launched Ready Player Me back in May last year, our goal was to create a cross-game avatar platform for the metaverse – one that gives you a consistent digital identity everywhere you and your avatar go. Think of it as a passport that gives you access to thousands of virtual worlds. Today, we are making the metaverse passport real with the launch of the Ready Player Me Hub

When you sign in to the Ready Player Me Hub, you can see all your avatars and connect them to your favorite applications in one click. To import your avatar into a partner app that uses Ready Player Me, all you need to do is sign in with your account.

VentureBeat reports:

Wolf3D’s platform allows users to travel between video games, virtual reality experiences, and other apps using a single virtual identity, said cofounder Timmu Tõke in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We’re trying to build a cross-game service to enable a lot of virtual worlds to exist,” Tõke said. “We see more people spending more and more time in virtual worlds. The metaverse is kind of happening around us. But most of it isn’t happening in one world or one app. It’s a network of many different worlds that people visit for work and play and collaboration. And doesn’t really make sense for the end user to create a new avatar identity for each of those experiences. It makes sense to have one portable entity that travels with you across many different games and apps and experiences.”

In fact, 300 games, apps, and social VR/virtual worlds now support the Ready Player Me avatar system, including the following platforms (all links below redirect you to blogposts I have previously written about each platform, which might be somewhat out-of-date, as I am covering so many different platforms on this blog!):

You can peruse the complete list of Ready Player Me partners here.

If you are interested in trying out the Ready Player Me Hub to create an avatar (either from a selfie or from scratch), you can access it here. You have a choice of making either a full-body avatar or a head-and-shoulders avatar:

The Ready Player Me Hub starting screen

When your avatar is ready, simply click Next in the top right corner of the website. You will be redirected to the new Hub interface. To save your avatar, click Claim now and sign in with your email address. You will get a one-time login code that you need to type in the Hub. You can use the Hub to connect your avatars to available apps in the Discover Apps tab. To import your avatar into a new app, all you need to do is click Connect avatar (some applications may require a few extra steps).

We are getting ever closer to the dream of having a consistent avatar which you can use in multiple social VR platforms! Be sure to give the Ready Player Me Hub a try.

UPDATED! VRChat Launches Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me Avatar Creation System: Create a Humanoid Avatar from A Selfie in Just Minutes!

Launching officially today, Wednesday, February 24th, 2021, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time, Wolf3D‘s Ready Player Me avatar maker now supports importing avatars into the popular VRChat platform!

VRChat integration was always among the most requested features from the users of Ready Player Me. The avatar creator allows for generating a 3D avatar based on a single selfie. Users can select from 200 customization options, including outfits, hairstyles, and tattoos. Wolf3D set as a goal to bring the same set of personalization and customization options to their VRChat avatar creator.

Starting today, the VRChat community can create personal 3D avatars based on a selfie and use them in VRChat on both PC and Oculus Quest versions of the game. Ready Player Me avatars are compatible with AV3, allowing players to use the platform’s new expressions system.

For many, creating an avatar in VRChat is both a daunting and very important task. We’re excited to work with Wolf3D to help make avatar creation easier and more accessible for everyone in the VRChat universe!

—Graham Gaylor, Co-Founder & CEO of VRChat

Like full-body Ready Player Me avatars, all users need to do is upload a selfie. The company’s machine learning algorithm (based on 20,000 high-resolution facial scans) will generate a 3D model based on the photo. It’s possible to skip this step and go directly to the avatar maker if the user doesn’t want to share their photo.

Here’s a brief video on how to create an avatar using Ready Player Me:

To get started, simply head over to https://readyplayer.me/vrchat. Have fun! For more details, please see the official press release from Wolf3D.

UPDATE March 1st, 2021: Timmu Tõke, the CEO of WOlf3D, reported in an email:

In the first 24 hours, the VRChat community has created over 20,000 Ready Player Me avatars, peaking at 30 avatars per second and almost melting our servers (for real). We were featured on Road to VRUploadVRVRFocus, and many more.

Congratulations to Timmu and his team on their successful launch!

UPDATED: Tivoli Cloud VR Has Integrated Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me Avatar Creator: Now You Can Create a Tivoli Cloud Avatar from a Selfie!

Today, on a bitterly cold, -20°C winter day up here in the frosty Canadian prairie hinterlands (which felt more like -30°C when you factored in the wind chill from a strong wind), I was able to spend a convivial hour sitting around a campfire on a warm, tropical desert island, chatting with Caitlyn Meeks of Tivoli Cloud VR and a few other avatars (including a personable, OpenAI-controlled toaster named Toastgenie Craftsby, who every so often would spit out some toast, or even a delicious rain of hot waffles, during our delightful, wide-ranging conversation!).

Tivoli Cloud VR’s Desert Island (picture by Caitlyn Meeks)

Tivoli Cloud VR, a successor platform to the now-shuttered original High Fidelity social VR platform created by Philip Rosedale’s company of the same name (and based on HiFi’s open-source software code), has had a few new developments since the last time I visited, back in September! Among them is the full integration of Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me avatar creation system, as demonstrated in this two-minute YouTube video by Tivoli Cloud ambassador and well-known social VR personality XaosPrincess:

This is the same Wolf3D system which I first reported on back in September 2019, when High Fidelity issued an app called Virtual You, where you could take a selfie on your mobile device and then use that picture to create a HiFi avatar. As a matter of fact, I still have the avatar I created using Virtual You saved to my hard drive, and I hope to upload and resurrect him as one of my avatars on Tivoli Cloud VR! In the case of Tivoli Cloud, the app is fully integrated into the client software; there’s no need for a separate app!

Note that Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me avatar creation system is also used by Mozilla Hubs, although the Mozilla Hubs avatars are only head-and-torso, as opposed to the full-body, rigged avatars used in Tivoli Cloud. In fact, one of the people sitting around that campfire today was animating his avatar’s hands and fingers using a Leap Motion Controller! It was amazing to sit across the campfire from Max and watch him wiggle his avatar’s fingers in real time.

Max Huet, Caitlyn Meeks, and Roxie sitting around the campfire (all three avatars were created using Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me software)
Here’s a closer look at some Ready Player Me-created avatars, provided by Caitlyn Meeks of Tivoli Cloud VR

Using Ready Player Me, it is possible to create endlessly customizable human avatars—and Caitlyn tells me that you don’t even need to start from a selfie! You can just jump right into the program (as shown in the video above) and start creating your perfect virtual representation!

Here’s a thirty-minute interview with Timmu Tõke, the co-founder and CEO of Wolf3D (the creators of Ready Player Me), where he talks with Cristian-Emanuel Anton, the co-founder and CEO of MeetinVR, about VR avatars, meetings in virtual reality, and the metaverse. (MeetinVR is yet another social VR platform using Wolf3D’s avatar system to create their own head-and-torso-with-hands avatars!)

I suspect that we will see other platforms join Mozilla Hubs, MeetinVR, and Tivoli Cloud VR in using Ready Player Me avatars! Such corporate partnerships bode well for the future of the metaverse we will all live, work, and play in.

If you are interested in Tivoli Cloud VR, you can visit their website, join their Discord server, or follow them on Twitter to learn more. As I expect I will be writing more often about Tivoli Cloud VR, I have created a new blog category called (surprise!) Tivoli Cloud VR on the RyanSchultz.com blog (and I will go back and add all my previous blogposts about the platform to that new category).

UPDATE Feb. 10th, 2021: Daniel Marcinkowski of Ready Player Me has just published an interview with Caitlyn Meeks, the CEO of Tivoli Cloud VR, about the recent integration of Ready Player Me avatars, which you can read here.


Thank you to Caitlyn Meeks and XaosPrincess of Tivoli Cloud VR, and thanks to Rainwolf for the heads up on the interesting Timmu Tõke interview!