Well, I’m happy to report that I was finally able to visit Sinespace in my Oculus Rift VR headset! The latest version of the client software seems to work much better for me.
Now, all is far from perfect. I’m no longer sitting in the floor, but I still seem to looking out from within my avatar’s chest rather than his head, and shorter than the other avatars around me. Every time I tried to turn right, I turned left instead! And the screen of the pop-up user interface is a little too close to my eyes for my liking. When I pulled up the Explore screen, it twitched enough to make me feel sick.
But it’s a start. I can now officially add Sinespace to my list of virtual worlds that support VR!
Sinespace is one of those virtual worlds which has a Welcome Centre, which is where all new avatars spawn when they first set up an account. It’s always staffed with one or two greeters, called Sinespace Guides, who welcome users, answer questions and help troubleshoot problems. I had thought that they were part-time paid employees, but when I asked, they told me they were volunteers: “No, we help because we like to help people.” I think that this sort of program is a wonderful idea, one that most newer virtual world platforms should strongly consider doing, particularly in this competitive marketplace.
Sinespace’s Welcome Centre is an attractively designed tropical space, with a large pavilion, lots of palm trees, pools with water lilies and goldfish, and many wonderfully animated toucans flying around, landing here and there. Off to one side is a large sign posting upcoming Sinespace events, next to three tables where you can play the Greedy Greedy dice game (famous from Second Life):
(The translucent blue icons over the chairs indicate that you can sit down on them.)
The Sinespace Welcome Centre actually makes you want to come back, explore, and chat with the guides and other visitors. It’s a great example of a central meeting area!
This nifty item will animate your avatar’s face and torso from a connected webcam in realtime. Note: This feature only works on Windows and Mac downloaded clients. Facial coverings such as glasses can interfere with the tracking.
Here’s a one-minute YouTube video showing the facial driver in action. Very cool!
Now, I do wear glasses, otherwise, I would be tempted to spend the 800 Gold to buy this (that works out to about US$7.30) to try out this software add-on. (UPDATE: Sine Wave Entertainment’s CEO Adam Frisby told me he would send me a review copy to try it out. Thanks, Adam! I will let you know how well it works for me.)
Once again, Sine Wave Entertainment is really doing some innovative things with the Sinespace social VR/virtual world platform.
How do you find out what’s going on in the various social VR spaces/virtual worlds? Often the best way is to consult their upcoming events listings. In this blogpost I am going to link to all the various event schedules that I have been able to locate for each of the major metaverse platfrorms.
First, let’s start off with Second Life. The Events listing in the Second Life client (under Search in the Firestorm client) can be a bit overwhelming due to the sheer magnitude of events listed (there’s also a lot of store advertising spam mixed in). You can use the handy drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner of the Search window (under the General, Moderate, and Adult checkboxes) to limit your searching to, say, live music events. There’s also an events page on the Second Life website, which doesn’t appear to have as many events listed as you can find using the client. There’s also a Featured Events listing in the Destination Guide, which can direct you the major events happening around the grid.
Sansar has an upcoming events calendar within the client software, displayed prominently on the right-hand side of the screen when you first log in. There’s also a Rolodex icon labelled Events in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, which you can click at any time to see the events listings:
High Fidelity has an upcoming events page in pinboard, agenda, or calendar month views. Unfortunately, there’s no events listing within their client, on their tablet user interface, so you’ll have to rely on the website to get your information before you go in-world.
(Update: I just discovered that there is an in-world display board of upcoming events in High Fidelity’s Start domain, which you can search for on your tablet UI under the “Go To” icon:
Sinespace has an Events section on their official blog, but it’s not updated very often. You’re better off loading the Sinespace client software and getting information from the Upcoming Events section on the left-hand side of the log in screen:
There’s also an upcoming events board located near the spawn point at the Sinespace Welcome Centre:
VRChat actually has a VRChat Events website with links to their Discord server and to an online calendar of events. This is a separate Discord server from the very busy main VRChat Discord server, with different channels for each of the regularly scheduled events happening in VRChat, including the popular Endgame talk show. There’s simply no better way to stay abreast of everything that’s happening in VRChat! There’s also an official events calendar on the VRChat website. (Surprisingly, there is no upcoming events listing within the VRChat client, a glaring omission.)
