Research
This is a place for collaborative research on the open metaverse. Feel free to be creative.
Have an idea? There are separate opportunities from the bi-weekly gatherings to conduct collaborative field research with the M3 organization by opening issues to form your proposal.
Table of Contents
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38 |
- Virtual World Economy Panel
39 |
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40 |
- Write-up 41 |
43 | - Virtual Market 3 Field Trip
44 |
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45 |
- Write-up 46 |
48 | - Traversing Disparate Virtual Worlds
49 |
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50 |
- Write-up 51 |
53 | - Previous Meetups
54 |
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55 |
- 2019-05-02 56 |
- 2019-05-16 57 |
- 2019-06-02 58 |
- 2019-06-16 59 |
- 2019-06-30 60 |
- 2019-07-14 61 |
- 2019-07-28 62 |
- 2019-08-11 63 |
- 2019-08-25 64 |
- 2019-09-08 65 |
- 2019-09-22 66 |
68 |
Virtual World Economy Panel
We’ve gathered an incredible cast of lead developers building VR platforms to discuss virtual economies. How can creative people make a living inside these worlds? What ingredients are missing to catalyze a thriving user-generated content economy? What’s the landscape look like? How can startups compete with big tech?
Tune in to hear about what’s around the corner and what excites these veteran VR developers in this riveting discussion filmed inside a virtual reality studio!
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69 |
- Link to proposal: https://github.com/M3-org/proposals/issues/6 70 |
- Link to write-up: https://m3-org.github.io/research/panel.html 71 |
Virtual Market 3 Field Trip
Virtual Market is the biggest social VR convention that takes place in VRChat and drew over 125,000 visitors during the Spring festival. Visitors can freely look, try on, and purchase 3D avatars and models displayed in themed worlds made entirely with user-generated content.
The M3 org went on a field trip to explore Virtual Market 3 and further discuss ideas around content discovery and marketplaces.
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72 |
- Link to proposal: https://github.com/M3-org/research/issues/2 73 |
- Link to write-up: https://m3-org.github.io/research/vket.html 74 |
Traversing Disparate Virtual Worlds
The M3 org did a field test to observe what the current state of hopping between multiple social VR universes looks like 5 years after a Metaversing article describes the theory.
75 |“Instead of building one large Metaverse and splitting it into pieces, as has been done before, I looked at a different solution. How do we start with a bunch of unrelated pieces of software and combine them together to form a larger Metaverse? … There are different authors, languages, graphics libraries, and more. If you wanted to create a way for players (avatars) to actually move between them, how could it be done? How would you move from JanusVR to Minecraft? How do you walk from Minecraft into VRChat?” - Traveling Between Unrelated Virtual Worlds by Atari_Historian
76 |
We also discussed questions about these worlds like what they were made with, who created the content, how easy was it, what tools they were using, and more.
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77 |
- Link to proposal: https://github.com/M3-org/proposals/issues/4 78 |
- Link to write-up: https://m3-org.github.io/research/worldhop.html 79 |
Previous Meets
M3 meets every other week on Sundays at 6pm PST in Mozilla Hubs. Each M3 meet has a full write-up along with the archived agenda, full livestream VOD, clips of individual lightning talks and discussions, images taken in Hubs, and Hubs text log from Discord.
80 |The checkmarks signal whether or not the meet has a completed write-up yet.
81 |
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82 |
- 2019-05-02 - How to Not Build a Metaverse / Cross-linking Worlds / What is a Shortcut? 83 |
- 2019-05-16 - Past Metaverse Attempts / Permissionless Innovation for VR / Teaching by Metaversing 84 |
- 2019-06-02 - Local-first Cyberspace / Incentives / World Traversal Recap 85 |
- 2019-06-16 - Mozilla Hubs / Editing XR in XR / Cryptovoxels 86 |
- 2019-06-30 - Long Discussion on Monetization 87 |
- 2019-07-14 - Grid City Collab / Linking Spatial Websites / Monetization Landscape of VR/AR Metaverse 88 |
- 2019-07-28 - Exokit Frontend 89 |
- 2019-08-11 - Discussion of Metaverse Talk by Tim Sweeney at Siggraph 90 |
- 2019-08-25 - Digital Identity / WebVR History / X Webpages in VR / Browser Inception 91 |
- 2019-09-08 - Create and Sell NFTs / Metaverse Browser Tech / Virtual Panel Recap 92 |
- 2019-09-22 - Construct Arcade / UX Principles / Virtual Market Recap 93 |
Virtual World Economy
tags: M3 research
We’ve gathered an incredible cast of lead developers building VR platforms to discuss virtual economies. How can creative people make a living inside these worlds? What ingredients are missing to catalyze a thriving user-generated content economy? What’s the landscape look like? How can startups compete with big tech?
Tune in to hear about what’s around the corner and what excites these veteran VR developers in this riveting discussion filmed inside a virtual reality studio!
Timestamps
Timestamps:
0:45 Introductions
38 | 7:58 Youtube is kind of Metaversey
39 | 10:00 Building Communities
40 | 12:30 3D social worlds catching on
41 | 15:12 Gaming and Web growing together
42 | 17:40 Stadia
43 | 21:37 Transferable ownership via NFTs
44 | 23:25 Blockchain 101
45 | 27:27 How do you maintain value of money?
46 | 31:00 Benefits of digital currency
47 | 35:25 What would you tokenize?
48 | 37:40 Value of human work
49 | 42:14 In-world transactions
50 | 43:40 Successes and Failures
51 | 46:40 Solving Plagarism
52 | 50:05 Missing Ingrediants
53 | 51:32 Real world economy
54 | 52:27 Play money for virtual worlds
55 | 55:35 Land Rush
56 | 58:54 The New Mesh
57 | 1:00:17 Metacafe advertising
58 | 1:05:00 Growth
59 | 1:07:25 Tickets
60 | 1:12:14 Prioritizing Platforms
61 | 1:18:25 Asynchronous Gaming
62 | 1:20:20 Standards are awesome
63 | 1:23:15 Advertisements in VR
64 | 1:24:50 Importance of non-VR
65 | 1:26:54 What would you pay for?
66 | 1:34:29 Trust and Integration
67 | 1:37:07 Closing statements
68 | 1:40:30 Credits
Introductions
James Baicoianu: Working on Elation Engine since 2011 building web based virtual worlds and JanusWeb for past few years as a framework for anyone to easily create social VR experiences. Bai has 20+ years of web dev experience, is a webgl / threejs contributor, and a part time internet archivist.
Ben Nolan: Built scenevr which lead to aframe, worked at Decentraland for awhile building their first web client. Currently developing Cryptovoxels full-time, a browser based virtual world owned by users via the Ethereum blockchain.
Avaer: Created a minecraft clone on the web about 6 years ago, ran into browsers at the time. Took C++ background and built own web browser named Exokit just doing WebVR / WebXR. Now focused on bringing people together and incentivized to work on proper Metaverse with Exokit Web.
SM Sith Lord: Lead developer of Anarchy Arcade, a 3D desktop with VR support. Has been using 3D desktops for 10 years and streams to Twitch regularly to show it off on twitch.tv/anarchyarcade.
Notes
What are your thoughts on live events? What would you pay to see in VR?
Avaer: Latest success story been thinking about that’s kind of metaversey is not even VR, it’s Youtube. The social aspect, interconnectedness, from video to livestream or between platforms (going from youtube to twitch, twitter to youtube, etc). Currency: there are things happening and I want to be part of them, live events are one of the main drivers of that.
One thing Sith would pay for is a live gaming tournament. Premium gaming events like special races one would put in some kind of currency into playing.
On another note, streaming builds community. It’s only until recently that things we’ve grown up wanting to do people are finding value in.
Bai: Virtual web and the communities around that have that callback to the early web - meeting online and finding like minded people. Those that were on during the early web days it was obvious where it was going: social, shopping, etc. It took awhile for people to wrap their heads around typing into a little box, electricity going through a phone line, then Amazon sends you a book. People are still in the mindset with social VR and still unsure what its going to be used for while for creators like those on the panel its more obvious but hard to get to the point where anyone can jump in and use it.
Bnolan: Social VR feels very futuristic, not evenly distributed. Unsure when its going to go viral and everyone realizing how cool it is to hang out with people in 3D.
Hanging out in a 3D world is catching on: the next generation is growing up playing games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox.
Bai: Growing up, it was Doom and Quake and communities around that and still talk to people from those days. The distinction from the online and real world being two separate planes of reality isn’t true, we’re interacting with real people in these virtual worlds.
Bnolan: Wonder if social VR will replace the web or change how the web looks?
Bai: Gaming world and web world are converging. If you look at what Epic is doing they’re growing into the metaverse from their direction from the game. Sweeney is investing heavily to build the Metaverse and is seeking inspiration from web in scaling / interoperability.
Stadia coming out that bridges web and gaming very close together. Perhaps this can onboard people into virtual worlds since its simply a link away and will have a free tier in a year.
Stadia can allow people who don’t have gaming PC to jump in without doing a large investment but it does lock people into this ecosystem where they rent media and processing power.
Epic’s worst nightmare would be people moving from Fortnite to something else.
Google started with building on open tech, indexing the web and offering an awesome search engine.
NFTs
How do people who care about freedom compete in a post-Stadia world?
Non-fungible Tokens are offering the ability to own digital assets and transfer them between worlds, how might they be used to build an open yet profitable business model for the future of web / gaming?
What are NFTs?
Fungible assets are interchangable like dollars and bitcoins where $1 = $1 wheras non-fungible is akin to a unique piece of art.
69 |NFTs are basically new and unique representations of goods or assets that take the form of digital tokens. Through the use of cryptography, NFTs can prove the authenticity, as well as ownership of such assets and goods.
70 |
If a virtual artwork that is tokenized, then whoever holds the token acts as the direct owner of the piece of art itself. If they sell the piece, they no longer can claim that they own it.
Like with a physical art piece, ownership causes patrons to be economically incentivized to support and spread the gospel of the creator, because the more famous the creation/creator, the more valuable the patron’s collection. Here’s some more links if interested:
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71 |
- https://www.tokendaily.co/blog/nfts-what-are-they-good-for 72 |
- https://www.coindesk.com/nfts-are-here-but-where-are-they-headed 73 |
- https://blog.coinbase.com/the-playful-paradigm-shift-4bf35d9d1d11 74 |
- https://decentraland.org/blog/technology/what-are-nfts/ 75 |
How do you maintain the value of what you’ve done in that transaction when the price of cryptocurrency fluctuates wildly?
Can sell NFTs for DAI which is a stablecoin built on Ethereum. In the end its not that different from dollars or other currencies which fluctuate also.
Many currencies have gone through hyperflation.
When it comes to NFTs, how does it benefit creators and collectors? There’s currently a lot of friction to opt-in to the ecosystem, is it worth it? What’s the endgame?
Use-cases of NFTs
Parcels that hold user-generated content on a virtual grid.
Interested in exploring concept of tokenizing time.
Perhaps everyone gets a certain amount of tokens for doing a chore, like physical work such as cleaning or swinging a pickaxe and rewarding tokens to the player.
Think we’re overcomplicating how to make money in VR.
We should be able to compensate content creators somehow, like the person who built the studio everyone is in.
Perhaps be able to tip tokens to someone busking or doing an interesting talk.
What are some successes and failures of virtual economies?
We’re still early on the curve, it’d blow most peoples minds that what we’re immersed in exists.
Opensea has many NFT collectibles and show that virtual economies and tokens on public blockchains are showing really well. The terraforming event that sold 28M worth of virtual land was record breaking. Fortnite sells billions of dollars worth of virtual goods but thats private.
When it comes to projects integrating VR and blockchain there’s only a handful of projects like Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, Somnium Space, and High Fidelity to some extent.
Plagarism is a very hard problem especially when it comes to a permissionless platform like a blockchain.
Finding the delta between certain pieces of content, sorta like Youtube has for audio detection.
Can whitelist creators that are trusted now like josie.
What other components do you see as necessary to catalyze a virtual economy?
Bai: One thing that bothers me is how we’re building upon foundation of scarcity. Real world economy doesn’t run on collectibles, it runs on commodities like food, metal, fridges, etc.
What’s missing?
Perhaps seed capital in a world, play money that can be airdropped to have some kind of clay to experiment with. Imagine a million dollars air dropped into VRChat and having players work out the channels and systems. At some point in the future people will have some sense that it’s going to be real as they experiment with the testnet version and have all the problems worked out.
Artificial scarcity sucks but it does make sense to tokenize 3D space in some ways. In VRChat’s instance, you don’t have any neighbors but like in the real world there would be something outside of this building and when you walk out there will be some part of the city. (bnolan)
You do run into problems of running a city like if you have bad neighbors or if you have people who don’t develop anything.
It’s important to think back to how cities got formed. They weren’t formed just by saying there’ll be a city in some place and throw a million dollars to make it so (with the exception of Vegas / Dubai).
There’s usually an economic activity such as natural resources or a port that people gathered around to start with. It made sense for people to live closer to the areas they work in. Cities tend to form naturally in the real world while ICOs are the opposite with someone declaring there’s going to be some industry after money gets poured in.
Cryptovoxels seems to counter some of these issues well since there was no massive land rush and parcels are being released gradually as people build content.
At this stage it doesn’t look like someones going to build one metaverse, there’ll be a bunch of interlinked metaverses to go between.
Contain the Madness
Story about ads on Metacafe and what happened when the site expanded to India and China.
There’s a ton of ad fraud going on, perhaps half of the clicks are fraudulent. The ad supported web industry is going through cycles of booms and busts as scammers go where the money is being made.
It’s easy to destroy potential before getting off the ground with the world wide web.
Startups in the valley are advised to start with a narrow focus, building up tinder for a fire and sparking it into much bigger. Facebook started with stalking classmates then became the largest social network in the world.
Don’t want this to be a World Wide Web mall. Want this to be local-first with local advertising and users. Not interested in expanding beyond. Virtual mall made up of mom and pop businesses in a local real world area. Walk through a mall to see all the things in one’s local community and know that the stores are actually real stores you can also physically visit.
Eternal September effect.
Virtual Tickets
Tickets and events are considered pretty high risk. If you look at most payment providers there’s special restrictions they’ll put on you if you’re offering ticket sales because:
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76 |
- maybe the event doesn’t happen 77 |
- maybe the event isn’t as good as people thought 78 |
- people over or undersell 79 |
- Fyre Festival situation 80 |
Which target platform is worth prioritizing?
Mobile is where the money is at, if its fun then great!
Desktop and VR should go hand in hand, not one or the other.
The business aspect, generally don’t want to be developing your app multiple times for different platforms which is why the web is awesome with this. With the web you can write it once and it can gracefully degrade across different platforms.
Asynchronous cross-play
Different experience on tablet/mobile than from main experience. Watchdogs did this.
WebXR and standards in general allow for unexpected awesome things to happen.
What is someting you would pay for in VR?
SMSithLord: VR games
Avaer: Pay to meet a famous or non-famous person in VR. On-demand people’s time.
Bai: On-demand presence with stackoverflow programmers or tutors.
END
To-do
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81 |
- Timestamping interesting bits after YT upload 82 |
- Add more hyperlinks in docs 83 |
- Embed video in here 84 |
- Finish street interviews 85 |
- Release WebVR panel demo 86 |
- Final edit of these docs 87 |
This topic has heated up by a recent job listing in the VR industry. VRChat, the largest social VR platform, has recently opened a position looking for a Virtual Economy Manager which includes responsibilities to plan, document, and design a virtual currency economy and marketplace around user-generated content (UGC).
Links
Virtual Market 3 Recap
Virtual Market 3 is a festival that takes place in VRChat where visitors can freely look, try on, and purchase 3D avatars and 3D models displayed in themed worlds made entirely with user-generated content. This year had about 600 spaces for booths across 15 unique worlds!
The entire project is a massive collaboration effort by the Japanese VR community. Together, they have pulled off 3 multi-day festivals in the past year featuring hundreds of interactive booths made by independent creators and over a dozen beautiful custom made maps.
The M3 org went on a field trip to explore Virtual Market 3 and further discuss ideas around content discovery and marketplaces. Link to the proposal: https://github.com/M3-org/research/issues/2
Oculus Quest Avatars
Our group’s first destination from the entrance was a cross-compatible avatar world. There are two large rooms with many mirrors positioned within rows of avatars one can try on.
It is amazing to see what designs are possible to pull off despite having low-poly constraints.
The Worlds
38 |Virtual Market 3 will be held across 6 different worlds, each featuring its own overarching genre. Each world is further split into 2~3 different variations, each featuring a different subgenre, totaling 15 unique venues. Each location will be assigned a set of thematically fitting keywords to allow exhibitors to pick and choose whichever venue best fits their content and better reach their targeted audience. Source
39 |
Virtual Factory
Castello Magica
Link to more worlds info: https://www.v-market.work/world
Shopping Experience
There was no in-game purchasing for Virtual Market 3 but, all the booths had QR codes and links that take you to the booth.pm storefront. Desktop users can simply take screenshots to remember booths they liked to purchase assets from there later. Booth.pm accepts paypal.
Many of the stalls contained objects that can be picked up like swords, shields, guns, hats, etc.
There were about 40-50 booths in each world that we explored, some were quite spread out.
VRchat implemented a custom script just for this event which allowed certain booths to open a web page. Any type of web related scripting is unavailable with the VRC SDK but Virtual Market 3 was a special exception.
Clicking OK opened up the web browser to the page https://v-market.work/user/10009 which then redirected to https://games.dmm.com/campaign/virtual_market.
Sponsors
The first Virtual Market was a for fun creative event but every year has gotten bigger to eventually become the biggest SocialVR convention ever! Since Virtual Market 2 the organizers have exceeded their crowdfunding goals multiple times over with an average of 1000 patrons: https://camp-fire.jp/profile/VirtualMarket/projects
Top sponsors such as 7/11 had rich presence in every world map with a virtual branch of their store featuring items from their real world catalog! Here we are hanging out in front of one.
40 |“It seems many Japanese players feel it symbolizes a kind of a link between real and virtual worlds. All package textures are taken from real one”
41 |
https://www.sej.co.jp/i/products/7premium/drink/ - View the Japanese 7/11 catalog here
Questions
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42 |
- What were some interesting observations or qualities you made about a booth that stood out for you? 43 |
Animations and having some items that you can grab. Picking stuff up and trying it, especially if the item is interactive like a gun that fired made the booth especially attention grabbing.
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44 |
- How easy was it to navigate the worlds? 45 |
With the secondary menu it made it easy to find your group by being able to teleport to other players. However, the VR experience was difficult to stay within the group which is probably why some of us rode on another person’s avatar. The walk speed of the entire world could probably use an increase as well.
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46 |
- What’s the experience like of buying something? 47 |
Fustrating, would of loved to buy something but couldn’t figure it out while in VR mode.
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48 |
- Would you be inclined to revisit the world if there were no other people? 49 |
Unanimously yes. If one wanted to buy any kind of 3D assets would totally return, it’s very useful to see and try before you buy. The purchasing experience could be improved if a shopping cart was implemented to save things later and then do a single large checkout.
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50 |
- How would you rank an in-world shopping experience versus 2D menus? 51 |
Depends if one is in desktop mode or in VR, but its hard to compare right now because it’s impossible to buy things in VR mode. If we can favorite things for now then checkout later it’d be much better.
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52 |
- What are your main takeaways from Virtual Market 3? 53 |
Lots of questions around the shopping experience and logistics around putting the entire project together. How was it built and how did people collaborate? The artistic direction was pulled off really well, how was it coordinated?
History
Virtual Market 1
The first Virtual Market took place August 2018 and was 1 world with ~100 booths.
Virtual Market 2
The spring festival comes about 7 months after the first event and drew a staggering 120,000 visitors to Virtual Market 2. There were 403 booths, each featuring a variety of virtual contents ranging from avatars to accessories for sale.
Links
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54 |
- https://imgur.com/a/sAzgyya - Field trip pictures 55 |
- https://www.v-market.work - Main website 56 |
- https://www.v-market.work/catalog - Catalog of purchasables 57 |
- https://booth.pm/en - Website to buy virtual goods from 58 |
- Virtual Market 1 Entrance 59 |
- Virtual Market 2 Entrance 60 |
- Virtual Market 3 Entrance 61 |
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfJMMyXneok - Virtual Market 3 tour (world hop) 62 |
- https://xrdevlog.com/nexus.html#Inspiration - Virtual Market 1 inspiration 63 |
Blockchain Virtual Worlds
tags:
M3Proposal: https://github.com/M3-org/proposals/issues/9
38 | Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv9Cl7yt-60
The aim for this field trip was to explore each platform, have meaningful discussions, and document our journey to share insight with the wider Metaverse building community.
We were fortunate for the lead developers of Cryptovoxels and Somnium Space to join our field trip. It’s always great when platform developers are able to take a break to explore other projects.
Route: Decentraland
Cryptovoxels 
Somnium Space
To coordinate, we all hopped into a Discord voice channel to stay connected.
Discussion Questions
39 |- Whats this platform built on?
40 | - How fast did it load?
41 | - What do you start out with?
42 | - How do you move around?
43 | - How fun is it to run around and jump?
44 | - General observations around the world
45 |
Decentraland
Website: https://decentraland.org/
46 | Twitter: https://twitter.com/decentraland
47 | Github: https://github.com/decentraland
48 | Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/decentraland/
49 | Discord: https://dcl.gg/discord
50 | Marketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/decentraland/
Video starts here: https://youtu.be/hv9Cl7yt-60?t=199
Decentraland’s team is mostly based in Argentina. The founders raised 86,206 ETH or $26,203,082 USD at press time during an ICO that lasted about 30 seconds on August 17th, 2017. The timing was extremely fortunate as the price of Ethereum soared from $300 during the time of ICO to over $1300 in 4 months, boosting the value of their ETH war chest well over $100M at one point.
Their main client is built on the non-free Unity game engine and it uses Typescript for the SDK. DCL has an in-game currency called MANA, an ERC20 token with total supply of 2,197,524,119 and a marketcap of 57M as of the time of writing.
The value of MANA is separate from the Ethereum from the ICO, giving DCL additional funding leverage.
MANA is used to purchase Decentraland NFTs such as LAND, wearables, and names. Developers can monetize their experiences on LAND using the SDK and MANA.
Loading took about a minute from entering the URL to being able to walk around in-game, you can try it out here: https://play.decentraland.org
One of the group members said it would be useful to have more communication about what is happening when things are loading while walking around. Currently we just see transparent greens walls and it was not immediately clear what that meant.
Guests are given a generated user name and randomized avatar. Guest avatars look different per client so we had to go by name to tell who was who. There was one public text channel to communicate on and messages didn’t float about avatars while talking which made it sometimes difficult to tell who was talking.
We used the mouse to look around and WASD keypad to move, pretty standard. Spacebar jumps but the Shift key slows a person down instead of the usual speed up / run.
When walking around Decentraland and things are loading in, there’s a green barrier that will block you until the scene has finished loading.
Decentraland doesn’t support flying globally so walking is the main way to get around town. There are commands for teleporting to different places but it will usually take a minute of loading in between hops.
Cryptovoxels
Website: https://cryptovoxels.com/
51 | Twitter: https://twitter.com/cryptovoxels
52 | Github: https://github.com/cryptovoxels
53 | Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptovoxels/
54 | Discord: https://discord.gg/22Sb9v7
55 | Marketcap: https://opensea.io/category/cryptovoxels
Video starts here: https://youtu.be/hv9Cl7yt-60?t=1449
Cryptovoxels is founded by Ben Nolan who is based in New Zealand. built on Babylonjs, an open source web based rendering game engine developed by Microsoft. Jumping into the world was pretty fast, can try it out for yourself here: https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play
Guest users are given a sprite avatar, but because of a bug right before our event everybody was given a sprite avatar. The sprite avatars look like plain mannequin models in 1 dimension, similar to NPCs in classic Doom.
Movement was used pointerlock mouse and WASD plus shift to run faster. We could teleport instantly to someone else in the chatbox by clicking on their name, which made it easy to group up. There is also the option to click links in the chat.
Walking around Origin City is like a experiencing a fusion of Minecraft and Geocities simultaneously. There is art in every direction, much of it is tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain.
One of the big differences between Cryptovoxels and the other platforms is that in CV the builder and the explorer are part of the same client. Whenever you press tab on a parcel that you own or have collaborator rights on (including sandbox parcels) to edit like a no-code website builder. You can build and hang out with your friends or collaborate together in real-time.
Another feature that comes out of the gate with Cryptovoxels is the ability to link to different parcels or out to external sites on the web. Clicking a link to another parcel within CV will teleport you instantly, while clicking a link to an external website will show a warning to confirm you want to leave.
Somnium Space
Website: https://somniumspace.com/
56 | Twitter: https://twitter.com/somniumspace
57 | Github: https://github.com/somniumspace (0 repos)
58 | Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SomniumNews/
59 | Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/somniumspace
60 | Marketcap: https://opensea.io/assets/somnium-space
Somnium Space is single instance persistent virtual world shaped by its users. It’s also made with the non-free Unity game engine. Out of the various blockchain virtual worlds we tested, it is the only platform that has day/night cycles and real-time shadows. We used their native desktop client in 2D and in VR mode, which you can install from steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/875480/Somnium_Space_VR/
One of the big differences from the other blockchain worlds was the lack of text chat in Somnium Space. There was not much UI, but perhaps this may come down the road since the 2D desktop support was brand new.
The island is pretty big as things are spaced about a 6km distance. We had a little trouble figuring out how to open the menu or to go in first person view.
The Somnium Space Builder features a drag n’ drop interface. There’s also a Unity SDK for uploading your own custom avatar although no in-game mirrors yet to view yourself in VR.
The terrain came with a lush interactive soundscape. When you jump in the water, it sounds like you’re swimming in water. Only a couple things would load in simultaneously but things were also spread more apart.
Somnium Space comes with a pretty good VR experience. There’s a tablet in VR mode to interact with a menu.
When we had the field trip, the 2D desktop client was brand new. There is no UI so it was sorta confusing at first to figure out how to change settings.
Somnium Space is PC only so Mac computer users had to follow along on Twitch. It’s unclear if a Webgl client for Somnium Space will come out although it is certainly in the realm of possibilities.
Data
Supply of LAND (June 2020)
Volume in USD
Average Price of LAND (All-time)
Source: https://nonfungible.com/
Daily Active Users between platforms, May 2020
Google Trends between the blockchain VR platforms
Google Trends comparing the blockchain VR platforms to popular virtual worlds
Comparing how active founders are on their Discord servers
DCLNodes.io: Real-time view of how many users are logged in Decentraland
Data dump of Decentraland and Cryptovoxels during April 2020