Glue, a corporate collaboration social VR platform I first wrote about in November 2019, has declared bankruptcy. In a post dated April 10th, 2024 on the Glue website, Glue’s CEO, Jussi Havu, writes:
We regret to inform you that the company responsible for Glue has been declared bankrupt on 8 April 2024 by decision of the District Court of Helsinki. Despite our best efforts to prevent this outcome, we were unable to find a timely solution.
During the next two weeks, we are dedicated to exploring all options to secure a successor for the Glue service. As we cannot promise a definitive solution, users should prepare for the possibility that the Glue service may soon be discontinued.
The process to sell the assets of the company is undergoing and, at this stage, the bankruptcy estate cannot provide any further information on whether the company’s business operations can be sold to someone who would be willing to continue the business. Unless a successor can be found, the company’s business operations will be discontinued within the course of two weeks or even earlier if the service providers for the company’s servers decide to shut the servers down or deny access due to unpaid invoices.
We sincerely apologize for this disappointing outcome.
While updating my comparative spreadsheet of social VR platforms, I had already noticed a distressing number of platforms I had written about in 2019 were no longer around as of 2024, among them popular services such as AltspaceVR, which shut down almost exactly one year ago today, on March 10th, 2023. The category of platforms which I jocularly refer to as YARTVRA (an acronym standing for Yet Another Remote Teamwork Virtual Reality Application) has seen a number of companies come and go during the recent boom-and-bust metaverse hype cycle. Now that the hype over the metaverse has moved on to artificial intelligence, it would appear that the venture capitalists have followed, so it is no suprise to me that firms such as Glue have struggled to find a viable business model.
One thing which any person or company which uses a social VR app for remote teamwork, meetings, and conferences needs to keep in mind: don’t put all your eggs into one basket! Investigate multiple platforms, and be flexible. That way, you won’t be caught off-guard when a company whose product you have been relying on goes under.
Sadly, I just noticed today that the XR Collaboration website, which used to offer a very useful searchable directory of workplace social VR platforms, has folded (the website address appears to have been sold to another user, who is primarily posting articles about how to find out if your boyfriend or husband is cheating on you!). This is yet another sign that the entire YARTVRA space is in difficulty.
(And no, despite my best efforts, YARTVRA has not taken off as an acronym…)
I have—finally!— had an opportunity to update my Google spreadsheet of social VR platforms, removing those which are no longer around, and adding a few new ones since the last update, which was several years ago. Please note that this spreadsheet is focused solely on metaverse platforms which support virtual reality, i.e. social VR. If a platform is flatscreen access only (e.g. Second Life), it is not included in this spreadsheet.
If you are associated with any of these social VR platforms, I would appreciate it if you could please check the entries in the following spreadsheet for any omissions or errors. I will eneavour to keep this spreadsheet as up-to-date as I possibly can. Thanks!
Also, you will note that I have a long, long, alphabetical list of potential social VR platforms which I am planning to add to this spreadsheet, located at the very bottom. If you know of any other social VR platforms that should be added to this list, please contact me with any pertinent details (name of platform, company building it, website, etc.).
Please note: any changes made to this spreadsheet are done in real-time, as information comes in; this link will automatically update every five minutes.
Please note: this PDF has to be generated by hand, and I will only do it once per day, near the end of the day, if there have been any changes made that day, Therefore, you should consider the Google spreadsheet link to be the most up-to-date content!
UPDATE April 17th, 2024: Upon request, I have slightly updated the Google Sheets spreadsheet so that the column header text now always displays at the top of your screen, even when you scroll down! This means you don’t have to keep scrolling up and down to figure out what a spreadsheet cell value refers to.
Thank you to Mat of the XR Live Discord server for the suggestion, and the explanation of how to set it up! I learned something new today. 🙂
The HelloSpace team (makers of InSpaze) met with Apple CEO Tim Cook in late March (source: Twitter)
In its emphasis on the term spatial computing (instead of virtual reality or augmented reality), some observers have commented that there is a somewhat puzzling lack of social VR/AR apps for the Apple Vision Pro. Well, I recently learned (from the very active r/VisionPro community on Reddit) that there is a social app for the AVP, called InSpaze. Here’s a 15-minute YouTube video giving you an idea of what is possible now:
Please note several interesting things about this video: First, when you see the hands of the person capturing this video in his Apple Vision Pro (using the built-in video recording features), they are actually his real hands via pass-through, not an avatar’s hands!
Second, one of the features of InSpaze is real-time voice translation! One of the participants spoke a sentence in Chinese, which was translated into English and displayed as a subtitle under his Persona (at the 6:45 minute mark in this video).
There are people in this video participating around the table via their own Vision Pro headsets, in which their avatar appears as the still-in-beta-testing Personas (which is based on a scan of their real-life face, as a part of setup). While the Personas feature of the AVP can still be a bit unsettling, with uncanny valley vibes, and they appear currently in InSpaze only via a flatscreen view right now, Apple has just announced (and released) Spatial Personas, which look like this:
So, I expect it will only be a matter of time before Spatial Personas are added to InSpaze, replacing the locked-in-flatscreen look that current AVP participants have in InSpaze with a three-dimensional version. Mind blowing! It’s certainly a refreshing change from a Zoom call!
Also, note that iPhone and iPad users, running the InSpaze app, can also participate in InSpaze rooms! iPhone and iPad users actually have a cartoonified version of their real-life face, which honestly kind of matches the cartoony look of the AVP Personas. I couldn’t help but notice that one of the iPhone participants was standing outside, and the wind was blowing his hair around, which looked really weird combined with his cartoony face! Another guy (the one speaking Chinese) was behind the wheel of his car (let’s hope he wasn’t driving!).
InSpaze is already available on the Apple Store, for the Apple Vision Pro, iPhone, and iPad. It is made by a company called HelloSpace (website; Discord; Twitter/X). Apparently, it’s been quite a hit among AVP users, who seem to appreciate having a way to connect with each other in virtual space! In fact, in the first video up top, they talk about how Apple employees themselves like to use InSpaze to connect with their customers.
Things are happening so fast in this space that it’s been hard to keep on top of all the developments! I do find that a daily visit to the r/VisionPro subreddit is a very good way to stay abreast of everything that’s going on with this rapidly-evolving technology. I’m still patiently waiting for when we Canadians can pre-order the Apple Vision Pro (hopefully sometime this spring or summer). And I’m quite envious of the Americans who have already gotten their hot little hands on a unit!
HOUSEKEEPING NOTICE: Today is the first of twelve successive Mondays which I am taking as research days from my full-time paying job as an academic librarian at the University of Manitoba. During this time, I am finally tackling two long-delayed tasks:
Of these two, I have decided to immediately start on the second project, which I have not worked on since 2019 (but I would like to thank Dr. Fran Babcock, who made some updates to this spreadsheet in 2021).
This task is longoverdue, and there are many entries of metaverse platforms which have shut down since the first version of this spreadsheet, among them:
Tivoli Cloud VR (which closed on February 20th, 2022) was a social VR platform based on the original open-source code of High Fidelity, the Philip Rosedale-helmed company which shuttered its doors as a metaverse platform way back in 2019, choosing to refocus the company around its spatial audio technology. However, two other social VR platforms using HiFi’s codebase, Vircadia and Overte are still up and running, at least, the last time I checked!
Helios, an Unreal-based social VR platform which actually came and went before I even had a chance to add it to the spreadsheet!
On February 13, 2024, Mozilla announced an organization-wide restructuring impacting a number of products housed within the Mozilla Corporation. Unfortunately, Hubs is one of the products impacted and it will be shut down later this year. This will be a multi-month process with three members of the Hubs team overseeing the transition.
We look forward to having more time to reflect on the full history of the Hubs project, where we succeeded, where we came up short, our feelings about it ending, and Hubs’ overall legacy. However, right now our only goal is to support you as you have so lovingly supported us after learning this sad news and over the last six years...
While we hope that Hubs can have a vibrant life outside of Mozilla, there are a number of pieces of Hubs that will end as part of the shutdown. These include the Hubs Demo Server (hubs.mozilla.com) and the Managed Subscription, the two services actively maintained by Mozilla that most of our users rely on.
Community Edition is designed to help developers deploy the full Hubs stack on any Linux-based infrastructure, including AWS, Google Cloud, and even your own computer. In the same way that Hubs Cloud mimicked how the Hubs team ran the server managed by Mozilla, Community Edition mimics the infrastructure our team uses for the managed subscription service. Community Edition simplifies and automates most of the complex deployment process using Kubernetes, which is a containerized software orchestration system.
The obvious benefit of a solution like Community Edition is that it gives developers more choices for hosting Hubs. The less obvious benefit is that it offers greater flexibility when dealing with significant updates to a hosting platform. In the past, if there was a major update to the AWS platform, Hubs Cloud developers had to wait for our team to release a new version of AWS launch configuration. Community Edition eliminates this limitation.
Unlike Hubs Cloud, Community Edition is designed for developers who are well-versed with the full Hubs stack and comfortable navigating cloud hosting platforms. While we will be providing examples and guidance on how to host Community Edition, we will not designate a primary hosting platform, as we did with AWS for Hubs Cloud. Community Edition users will be responsible for researching, evaluating, and staying informed about the hosting options available to them.
Setting up Community Edition will require more effort than many of our current Hubs Cloud customers may be accustomed to. However, we believe that this direction best empowers our developer community. Many of you have already chosen to bootstrap and self-host the codebase on your own instead of using Hubs Cloud, and we hope that Community Edition will offer a more straight-forward approach for achieving your goals.
In the Feb. 15th announcement, Mozilla stated that the sunset plan and timeline for Hubs Cloud has not been changed. The company has already ceased support for Hubs Cloud on AWS as of January 1st, 2024, however existing Hubs Cloud instances will not be automatically shut off, as the FAQs section of the October 2023 announcement explains:
We will be ceasing to support Hubs Cloud on AWS starting on January 1, 2024. Existing Hubs Cloud instances will not be automatically shut off on January 1. On that date, we will de-list Hubs Cloud from the AWS marketplace to disable new sign-ups. Existing customers will then have a minimum of 90 days to migrate to another Hubs service before their subscriptions to Hubs Cloud come to an end. The earliest date for these subscriptions to cease will be March 30th…
Developers may continue to use their subscription and manually maintain their instances until we fully remove Hubs Cloud from the AWS marketplace (March 30th, 2024 at the earliest). After January 1, it is difficult to predict which AWS platform updates released will impact current Hubs Cloud customers, given the variability in current Hubs Cloud instances. Many customers, whose instances were created years ago, may not have kept their code current with the updates that have been released. However, if you have experience with AWS development, there’s no reason you cannot manually troubleshoot these issues yourself to continue using your existing instance…
We are currently working on tools to automate the data migration process from existing Hubs Cloud instances to Community Edition and Managed Subscription instances. These tools may vary from platform to platform, however expect to see them released in the lead-up to January 1st. Join our Discord server and check out the #community-edition channel to stay tuned!
March 1st, 2024: The creation of new subscriptions will be disabled. Existing subscriptions will be able to continue using their instances until the full shutdown is complete. The demo server will continue to function as normal.
April 1st, 2024: A tool to download your data will be released. Demo users and subscribers will be able to begin downloading their data.
May 31, 2024: Existing subscription instances and the demo server will be turned off. All Mozilla-run community resources and platforms will also be turned off.
From this timeline, it sounds as though the official Mozilla Hubs Discord server will also be shutting down on May 31st (I have just posted a question in that Discord to confirm that assumption, though, and I will report back). I am also somewhat concerned that all the links to join the Mozilla Hubs Discord server in the Feb. 15th blogpost give me errors, but I have generated a new invite link here (and reported the problem in their Discord):
The invite links in the announcement blogpost all give errors! Here’s a new one.
So, all of this means that Hubs users have some difficult decisions to make over the next few months, as the sunset timeline marches ahead. However, the future looks promising for Hubs to continue as an open-source, community-run initiative. As Mozilla states in their sunset blogpost:
Hubs’ code is open source, which means that it can have a life outside of Mozilla. Since [the February 15th] announcement, many former Hubs team members have returned to the Discord server to remind the community that Hubs was built with life outside of Mozilla in mind. The project’s commitment to open source and focus on self-hosted versions of Hubs mean that no one entity can determine Hubs’ future; only this community can do that.
And (as we have seen with Tivoli Cloud VR, Vircadia, and Overte springing from High Fidelity), there is already precedent in having a metaverse platform move from company-run to community-run (albeit with varying degrees of success!). I wish the team at Mozilla, and the Hubs community, nothing but the best during this transition, and I look forward to participating in Hubs Community Edition.
Mozilla Hubs will be missed!
UPDATE Feb. 27th, 2024: Michael Morran, of the Mozilla Hubs team, has responded to my questions about the Hubs Discord server and the invite link:
Hey Ryan, thanks for the write-up. The broken link is not intentional, so I’ll update that now. As far as what happens to the discord after May 31, we are currently unsure what Mozilla can transfer over to the community, but we hope to get clarity on this soon.
