There’s a special social event taking place this evening in the virtual world of Sinespace, a Snow Ball with prizes for best avatar costume as a mythical creature (e.g. elves, fairies, wizards, unicorns, cyclops, gnomes).
Here are the details:
Date: February 2nd, 2022 (2/2/22, truly a mythical date!)
Time: 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Place: Just search for “snowball” under the Explore menu as shown below:
Here’s a look at the Snow Ball venue (please click on each picture to see it in a larger size):
Thank you to Mimi Marie for the details! Mimi also shared a sneak peek at her mythical look for the Snow Ball:
This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).
This news is a little late, so I do apologize to Adam Frisby and his team at Sine Wave Entertainment (the makers of the metaverse platform Sinespace and it corporate cousin, Breakroom). I had decided to take most of December 2021 as a vacation from this blog, in order to refresh myself to meet the new year head on!
At an Office Hours presentation in Sinespace in early December, Adam (wearing his now-signature bunny rabbit avatar!) gave his Annual Keynote, in which he talked about how 2021 went, and what’s coming up for 2022. Here are some highlights from his speech:
Sine Wave were originally planning a promotional push for Sinespace last February, but the ongoing pandemic threw a monkey-wrench into those plans, and work shifted to Breakroom. Companies can now go to breakroom.net, buy it off the shelf, and customize it with little-to-no involvement from the team; this means that the Sine Wave team isn’t getting as tied up dealing with Breakroom customer issues as much as they have in the past.
Did a lot of work on compliance and auditing their back-end processes;
Did a lot of crossover stuff between Breakroom and Sinespace, including well-attended talks by Philip Rosedale and Matthew Ball;
Made a huge effort in Quality Assurance, fixing bugs and implementing feature requests in Sinespace (e.g. adding the ability to control your avatar turning speed);
The design and UX team is working on user interface improvements (including the Room Editor);
Usability improvements (e.g. click-to-walk now steers around obstacles; fixes to inverse kinematics for feet and hips on avatars for smoother movement);
Developer improvements (e.g. new LUA functions);
New network stack is coming out very soon (designed to have hundreds and even thousands of avatars in one location at once); Adam mentioned recent load tests with 650+ avatars; the new network stack works better on WiFi and cellular connections;
Vehicle improvements: a smoother experience, due in a couple of weeks!
New terrain system;
New parcel system (e.g. allows you to partition a region in three dimensions entirely within the client—drag and drop zones, set rent, etc.);
Unity 2020 support to come out in a couple of weeks;
Adam gave a demo of a new mobile-centric user interface for touch-screen devices such as monitors and tablets. Beta mobile viewers are available via the Discord server today if people want to test them out.
Coming up for 2022 (in roughly chronological order): the new network stack; Unity 2020 upgrade; improvements to virtual reality support; a new asset format; visual scripting tools; the new Room Editor; improvements to the base avatar (e.g. body shapes; they’re trying to find a good character artist).
When does Sinespace finally leave beta? Adam can’t give a firm answer, but he says “next year”.
If you want to watch the entire presentation, it has been posted to YouTube in a 38-minute video (the Q&A portion afterward was unfortunately not recorded):
This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).
On Thursday, October 21st, Matthew Ball, author of the influential Metaverse Primer and lead creator of the Ball Metaverse Index, was joined by Gene Park of the Washington Post and virtual world blogger Wagner James Au for a fireside chat in the virtual world of Breakroom. The chat covered a wide range of topics, including key trends to watch for, the mainstream adoption of the Metaverse, and the broader impact on society. Near the end, metaverse pioneer Philip Rosedale was also invited up on stage. You can read more about the event here.
Matthew Ball is a well-informed, articulate, and insightful speaker about the metaverse, and I highly recommend you watch the following 50-minute video of the well-attended event:
Please note that, as you watch this video, both Adam Frisby and Rohan Freeman of Sine Wave Entertainment, senior executives of the company who make Breakroom and Sinespace, were the ones responsible for spawning the dizzying array of items on and around the stage as the panel members spoke to the assembled audience.
I certainly don’t blame Adam and Rohan for wanting to flex the dynamic editing capabilities of their platform, especially in front of an audience full of big names in the metaverse! However, at first I thought it was a griefer attack! (I even DM’ed Adam to report the “griefer”, not knowing that it was him! How embarrassing.)
Anyways, I learned a lot from Matthew’s talk, and there were some great questions afterward from the audience, so I thought I’d share the video here with you. Stay tuned for news of the next in this free series of Fireside Chats in Breakroom!
This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).
Don’t forget that venture capitalist and metaverse writer Matthew Ball will be speaking at an event in Breakroom (Sinespace’s corporate cousin) today, Thursday, October 21st, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time/GMT or noon Pacific Standard Time/PST. You can register for the event here, through EventBrite (it’s free). When you register, you will receive an email message with a special link you must click on to load the web-based Breakroom app in your web browser (which works surprisingly well, based on past Fireside Chats in the series!). More details here.
Here are some pictures I took this morning of the venue; the first shot shows you the user interface, which I think you’ll find very similar to the layout of the Sinespace client. (One of the things I like the most about Sinespace/Breakroom is that I can adjust my avatar’s shape to more closely resemble the real-world Ryan Schultz!)
Your intrepid embedded reporter also attended the Zombie Ball last night in Sinespace—and won 1,000 Gold (Sinespace’s currency) in a random draw! Here are some pictures I took at the event; please click on each thumbnail to see it in a larger size:
This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).
