Social VR – Page 43 – Ryan Schultz

XRSpace to Launch a Social VR Product—But It’s a Secret

There’s a very interesting article over on the CNET website by Shara Tibken about a company called XRSpace, titled My peek inside a secret VR headset shows a more social virtual reality. The writer got a chance to experience a new VR headset at a trade show, but unfortunately, she can’t tell you anything about it:

I pick up a virtual reality headset and place it over my eyes. Before I can even blink, it transports me to a world far away from the bustling IFA electronics show. I know that I’m in the bowels of the dismal Berlin Messe convention center, but my brain thinks I’ve managed to escape. I wish I could tell you more about it. I wish I could describe the experience, what the hardware felt like, what the software showed me, what I felt. But I can’t.
That’s because XRSpace, the new mixed reality company from Peter Chou, co-founder and former CEO of HTC, won’t let me tell you. Chou, in partnership with German wireless giant Deutsche Telekom, plans to launch something in 2020, but the companies don’t want me to detail it until then. At IFA, I became one of the first people on the planet to use the technology, not that I can say much about it.
All I can tell you is that I wasn’t alone in that virtual world.

It sounds as if XRSpace wants to get in on both the hardware and software aspects of social VR, working with partners like Deutsche Telekom (no small partner!) and seeking to enable social VR experience developers:

The primary aim for XRSpace is creating a place for people to virtually interact and communicate with each other. The company isn’t making its virtual social environment on its own but instead is working with developers to get them to build experiences for users.
“We want to make social very good,” Chou said. “We want to develop really good digital avatars that can be everywhere, not just one little social app [where] you can only go chat.”

Shara goes on to talk about various social VR projets to date, including Facebook Spaces, Rec Room, and High Fidelity. It’s a good article and I would encourage you to go over and read it in full.

Lindsey Stirling to Perform in Wave Monday, August 26th

Wave Logo

While I was busy blogging about other platforms, the music performance social VR platform TheWaveVR has renamed itself to, simply, Wave. (I will retag all my blogposts about TheWaveVR to date with the new tag Wave so they will still be easy to find.)

In the past, innovative musical artists such as Imogen Heap have performed in concerts on the social VR platform:

This coming Monday, August 26th, electronic violinist Lindsey Stirling will be performing live in her first virtual concert on Wave:

Electronic violinist Lindsey Stirling is putting on a new kind of interactive virtual concert, performing live to fans in avatar form. The concert, put on in collaboration with streaming platform Wave, will take place at 3 p.m. (EST) on Monday 26 August.
Stirling will perform through her avatar, powered by art body motion and face capture technology. Fans will also be able created their own avatars and attend the virtual show by downloading the Wave virtual reality (VR) app, supported by HTC Vive and Oculus Rift…
The show, streamed live from Wave’s Los Angeles studios, will be available to watch live via the artist’s YouTube channel and Facebook page, or Wave’s Twitch channel. Fans that miss the live performance can watch it back for 24 hours after premiere time.

Lindsey excitedly tweeted about her upcoming performance, sharing a video (which I can’t embed here on this blogpost, please use the link I posted to see the video on Twitter):

VRScout adds a few more details:

In a video posted to Stirling’s official Twitter account, the musician can be seen wearing what appears to be an XSens 3D motion capture suit and Manus VR Gloves. This device captures Stirling’s movements and translates them into VR in real-time, allowing her to perform complex dance routines just as she would in real-life. While Stirling will be performing the entirety of the show, she’ll be doing so as her character “Artemis,” goddess of the moon and the protagonist of her latest album.

Wave is available both on the Oculus Store for the Oculus Rift and on Steam for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index, and Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets. You can also follow them on Twitter and Facebook, or join their Discord server.

Which Social VR Platform Has Been the Most Successful at Raising Money?

There’s been a very interesting discussion taking place today on the RyanSchultz Discord server. One of the regular contributors to the many conversations that take place there, Michael Zhang, pulled together the following information from Crunchbase:

Today I Learned: Building social VR, MMOs, and virtual worlds are a lot more expensive than I imagined!
From Crunchbase:
-High Fidelity raised $72.9 million over five rounds and is struggling with their recent pivot to enterprise.
-Rec Room raised $29 million over two rounds, $24 million only recently, so they lived off of $5 million for several years.
-Altspace raised $15.7 million over three rounds, went bankrupt and shut down, then revived when bought by Microsoft.
-Bigscreen raised $14 million over two rounds.
-TheWaveVR raised $12.5 million over three rounds.
-vTime raised $7.6 million over one round.
-VRChat raised $5.2 million over two rounds.
-JanusVR raised $1.6 million over two rounds.
-Somnium Space raised $1 million over two rounds.
In comparison:
-Epic Games raised $1.6 billion over two rounds, $1.25 billion coming after Fortnite.
-Mojang’s Minecraft launched in 2003, started making profits in 2007, earned $237.7 million in revenue by 2012, and sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. (Wikipedia)
-Roblox raised $187.5 million over seven rounds.
-Linden Lab’s Second Life raised $19 million over two rounds.

Then, another contributor named Jin put together this graph to illustrate how successful the various social VR platforms have been in raising venture capital (please click on this picture to see it in full size on Flickr, or just click here). As you can see, High Fidelity is far and away the leader in raising money!

(In comparison, Decentraland raised 24 million dollars in their initial coin offering. Jin also made a second chart including Decentraland, but I have not included it here because, unlike the other platforms, it does not currently support VR, and it is unlikely to do so anytime in the near future.)

Thank you to Michael Zhang and to Jin for their work!

RyanSchultz.com

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: