Socializing in Virtual Reality (2015)
It’s been a while since the days of ActiveWorlds, There.com, and dare I say Digitalspace Traveler, but I have stumbled across yet another virtual world. Last night my buddy and I wanted to watch a Youtube video in-sync and a mutual friend on Skype suggested we should use some service that automatically syncs the videos together instead of doing the old ‘counting up the seconds’ method. Oddly enough, within a Hacker News thread of services that do just that, I gravitated to test out the oddest one, the one packed full of virtual reality 3d nonsense. Luckily for me, this was not as gimmicky as I first received it to be, not so much nonsense, and overall a good choice because I was able to see the dramatic difference tech has made in the VR realm.
Minutes into what I thought was simply some okay modeled apartment highrise playing a Youtube video on a 3d surface, it turned out to be more. You could load in apps, and when I figured out these 3d apps could be constructed in three.js, the possibilities and ease-of-development hit me. This was a product that hasn’t been out for more than 1 year and in development for probably 2 years and they managed to create a great VR platform.
Later on, after playing countless Youtube videos with my buddies we ended up seeing people we didn’t know show up and realized they were using VR headsets and motion input devices. It turns out this VR platform supports IR input from the Microsoft Kinect and Leap Motion. This guy comes up to me and waves, then the next moment he’s flipping me the bird. The ability to express movements as subtle as hand gestures was impressive and really connects you between the other person in conversation, throw in head gesturing and eye-ball tracking and you have yourself a really immersive and expressive experience.
Back ‘in-the-day’s of Digitalspace Traveler, you would have three things to do with others in the VR environments. Talk, Play hide-and-seek, and DJ music. Yes, they used to host some events, such as a Sunday church service where a Seahorse looking guy would preach to you in the morning, but you were limited to technical constraints of the time. No gesture recognition, just pre-defined gesture animations. This has changed with companies like Google pushing their V8 engine to perform faster, utilizing GPUs for processing. Web Dev has been really hot the past few years, and this has yet again excited me.
Today I decided to log in again and experienced a bunch of nerds playing virtual Dungeons & Dragons. I noticed one of the guys had an avatar with dreadlocks, and instead of just floating hands, he had entire arms. The arms were articulating with his speech, he was the Dungeon Master. :) Judging from the dreads and his voice, my guess is that it was Bruce, an employee for the company (https://twitter.com/cymaticbruce) and therefore got his own personal avatar. Bruce’s non-verbally communicated expressions really made DnD more interesting compared to those DnD campaigns people are playing today over voice-chat without video. Overall, it was a fun experience.
Finally the name of the VR platform I’ve been blabbering on about is AltspaceVR and if you’re interested, go check it out @ http://altvr.com
