Microsoft is jumpstarting its social VR effort by acquiring AltspaceVR and its remaining team.
Altspace was a pioneering social VR service available on all major VR headsets as well as traditional screens. It allowed people to meet up in a virtual world together and play games or share other activities. The startup burned through a hefty chunk of cash and nearly shuttered in recent months before it was unexpectedly resurrected. Now we know why they kept the lights on.
Microsoft will continue the service.
According to Microsoft, “AltspaceVR will stay AltspaceVR. Microsoft is most interested in preserving the current community that uses AltspaceVR to connect and interact with new and old friends. These first few months will focus on fostering our community and making sure AltspaceVR remains a friendly, welcoming and vibrant place to hang out in virtual reality.”
While that might be the case immediately it is easy to imagine Microsoft fast tracking an effort to make its virtual homes into places where you can invite friends, or integrating services like Skype. Such advancements would help Microsoft match some of the most compelling aspects of competing VR platforms. For example, Facebook’s Spaces lets you call people in the real world through Facebook Messenger and conference them into your virtual world while Valve’s SteamVR Home offers a customizable virtual home where you can invite friends and show them your gaming trophies. If Microsoft’s Xbox ends up ultimately supporting VR that latter feature would be a fun part of the experience.
We’ll of course have to wait and see what becomes of Altspace over time.
Rec Room (2016), the popular social VR app for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, is coming soon to PlayStation VR. Production studio Against Gravity announced Rec Room‘s PSVR release via the PSVR reddit page, saying that the game is slated to arrive by the end of this year.
Rec Room offers a slew of active social games using the respective systems’ motion controllers. With the specific aim to get you up and out of your seat, the app features co-op ‘Quests’ that take you on battles through classic sci-fi and medieval settings, and has a number of group activities like paintball, disc golf, and 3D charades. Whatever it is, Rec Room always seems to give you a reason to come back, and it’s such an excellent experience (when not chocked full of ankle-biters, but hey, who would’ve thought kids like games too) that we put it on our ‘Top 5 Games for HTC Vive’ list.
Against Gravity maintains that PSVR support will include cross-play with Rift and Vive at launch, and just like the PC VR version, will be entirely free. That includes no ads, in-app purchases, subscriptions, paid rooms, or micro-transactions of any kind.
The studio is currently taking applications for its beta, which they say will be on a closed, PSVR-only server during the testing period. Only players connecting from North and South America can apply, something Against Gravity says has to do with the available PSVR regions Sony is currently allowing them to use prior to launch. The studio says regions could be added in the future however, and will push a separate form if Sony allows it.
There’s no firm date yet for the beta’s starting point, but Against Gravity Community Designer Shawn Whiting says it should kick off in “weeks, not months.”
Rec Room is widely considered to be one of the best examples of social VR right now. Launched in Early Access on Vive last year and then later arriving on Rift, the game allows friends to meet up online and play different games together. Think of it as a sort of virtual leisure center. Now it’s on its way to PlayStation VR (PSVR) too.
Against Gravity confirmed as much over on Reddit this week. Rec Room will launch on PSVR in Q4 2017. As with the PC version of the game, it will be completely free. Better yet, PSVR owners will be able to play with Rift and Vive owners too.
Rec Room is constantly getting updates in Early Access and has had several major features added since initial launch. Players will be able to compete in games like paintball and disc golf but also go on cooperative quests together and hang out in social spaces.
Interestingly, players won’t need to be subscribed to PlayStation Plus, Sony’s multiplayer service, to get access to Rec Room.
The developer is looking to run a beta for the PSVR version before launch, and you can fill out an application to take part here. Sadly it’s only for North and South America right now, though the team is hoping to add other regions too.
Ruffian Games, a Dundee, Scotland-based game studio, recently announced their long-awaited hot-seat multiplayer VR party game, RADtv, finally has a release date.
Update (July 4th, 2019): It’s been a while since we last reported on RADtv, and while we thought the innovative (and admittedly pretty rad-looking) social VR party game had gone by the wayside, Ruffian Games recently tossed out a new announce trailer, bringing with it a launch date of August 2nd, 2019.
Along with it comes a brand new announce trailer, linked above and at the bottom of the article.
You can wishlist the game on Steam here. RADtv is priced at £6.99/$9.99/€7.99, and will also be available through the Oculus Store for the Rift platform.
Original Article (September 26th, 2017): RADtv features 2-6 multiplayer, letting you and a group of friends play any one of its 25 madcap games, which if the trailer tells us anything, are mini-games in the vein of the Mario Party franchise.
Ruffian Games animator and UI artist Gary Whitton told us RADtv has been developed on the Oculus Rift, but will “ideally [target] every major platform.”
According to Ruffian, the game delivers a fast and fun ‘hot seat’ experience including a challenge mode, 25 sets of unlockable player customizations, and even unlockable feet and hands. Brilliant.
There’s also supposedly a premise to all of this, although considering how fast-paced and fun it looks, it’s hard to say if it really needs one. Here’s what the studio has to say:
You and your friends are sucked into a sentient TV – transporting you into a virtual world of weird and wonderful challenges where your mental and physical skills are tested in 25 hugely varied rapid-fire games.
From hurling old records at Zombies to Quick Draws against Cowboys to flying Drones through checkpoints to speed eating burgers – the situation changes as quickly as surfing TV Channels.
There’s no specific launch date yet, although the studio says on their website they’ll be launching “maybe 2017-ish” (see update).
Viele Unternehmen arbeiten an der Aufgabe, die VR zu einem sozialen Ort der Geschehnisse zu machen, sowohl für den privaten Bereich wie auch zu Businesszwecken. Entsprechend ist auch HTC fleißig auf diesem Feld unterwegs und wählte nun einen neuen strategischen Partner: Das Team um die soziale VR-Plattform VRChat wird zukünftig enger mit HTC Vive zusammenarbeiten.
Kooperation zwischen VRChat und HTC Vive
Die soziale VR-Erfahrung VRChat ermöglicht das Chatten und Interagieren mit anderen Personen auf der ganzen Welt. Ähnlich wie bei Facebook Spaces erstellt ihr einen Avatar, um in die virtuelle Umgebung einzutauchen. Dort stehen euch außerdem weitere Möglichkeiten zur Verfügung: So kann man verschiedene Spiele wie beispielsweise Bowling spielen, zeichnen oder mit anderen Menschen zusammen Videos anschauen.
Außerdem ist es möglich, mit Unity seine eigenen Welten und Räume zu erstellen. So wurden innerhalb der VR-Erfahrung bereits ein eigenes Capture-the-Flag-Spiel und eine VR-Kneipe geschaffen. In der virtuellen Kneipe The Great Pug finden regelmäßig Veranstaltungen statt, darunter Karaokeabende oder Musikauftritte verschiedener Personen. Fast genauso wie in der realen Welt.
Zukünftig werden die Entwickler von VRChat näher mit HTC Vive zusammenarbeiten, denn diese wählten das Unternehmen als einen strategischen Partner aus. Zudem fungierten sie als Schlüsselinvestoren und leiteten die letzte Investitionsrunde, bei der große Unternehmen wie Brightstone VC, GVR Fund und Rothenberg Ventures teilnahmen.
Dadurch konnte das Unternehmen rund vier Millionen US-Dollar sammeln. Durch die neue Zusammenarbeit möchten die Entwickler von VRChat neue Ideen und große Updates für die VR-Erfahrung umsetzen. Dafür setzen sie auch weiterhin auf das Feedback der Community, um ihre soziale App auf die Bedürfnisse der Nutzer anzupassen. Die VR-App ist kostenlos auf Steam für Oculus Rift und HTC Vive erhältlich.
Wir dürfen gespannt sein, wie sich die Kooperation zwischen VRChat und HTC Vive auszahlen wird und was wir zukünftig von der sozialen VR-Erfahrung erwarten dürfen.
VRChat, one of the earliest social VR apps, announced that they’ve completed a $4 million Series A investment round lead by HTC’s Vive group. Joining HTC are venture capital firms Brightstone VC, GVR Fund and Rothenberg Ventures.
The Series A funding round comes one year after the company’s initial seed round of $1.2 million, also raised by the previously mentioned firms. VRChat says HTC is both a key investor and strategic partner now.
“Our goal is to enable anybody to create their own social VR experiences,” said VRChat CEO Graham Gaylor. “Partnering with HTC gets us that much closer to achieving that, and driving social experiences for VR forward.”
Because the team behind VRChat is entirely remote, they actually use the power of their own social VR platform as they expand it, calling the virtual spaces created within ‘their office’.
“For many of us, the first time meeting each other was at a real world event despite years working together in VR. To create the best Social VR experience, you have to be immersed in it, and that’s what we do at VRChat.”
You’d be mistaken if you thought VRChat was all business though. As a community-built space, touted as one of the first real stabs at making the sort of metaverse seen in popular fiction, VRChat is constantly evolving to include community-built rooms like The Great Pug, a popular pub and gathering point for the platform’s users. If you’re handy with the Unity game engine though, you can even design your own detailed spaces and full-body avatars, and import them for others to enjoy.
image courtesy VRChat
VRChat regularly hosts events, including trivia game shows ‘Nautilus’ and ‘What’s in the Box’, and also one of the longest-running VR panel shows, Gunter’s Universe. Keep an eye on the full calendar of events to see what’s coming up next.
VRChat supports SteamVR-capable headsets including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and OSVR, downloadable via Steam and Viveport.
Facebook Spaces, the company’s experiment into social VR, launched to much fanfare back in April. Following a string of updates, the app now supports PC desktop sharing, allowing friends to stream any content from their computer, opening up a world of new possibilities within the app.
Facebook Spaces did a lot right at its initial launch, but after playing with the volumetric markers, exploring some Facebook-hosted 360 photos and videos, and maybe calling a few friends via Messenger video chat, you may have run out of things to do.
A slow but steady set of updates to the app has added a keyboard to make it easier to search for 360 media, the ability to respond to Messenger messages, and live streaming functionality. And now users can share their PC desktop screens, which opens up a major new channel for content sharing, like the ability to share local or web videos, play PC games next to one another, collaborate on content creation, and much more—pretty much anything you can do on your PC can now be shared with your friends in VR.
Mike Booth, Facebook’s Social VR Product Manager, talked about the new PC desktop sharing functionality in Facebook Spaces during a session at VRDC Fall 2017 today. He confirmed that the feature was experimental for a time but is now rolling out widely to users.
The feature is found in the app on the ‘tool shelf’, and looks like a computer monitor. Users can drag their screen to the center of the table to enlarge it for the whole room to see easily, similar to sharing flat video and photo content in the app.
An interesting new tool builds upon the PC desktop sharing: a new cutout pen, which allows users to trace anything on the screen and cut that thing out as a texture to be manipulated in the virtual space, offering interesting possibilities, like cutting out pictures of people, pets, and objects to create collages, game pieces, and more.
PC desktop sharing surely opens up lots of new functionality in the app, though similar functionality has been available to VR users for some time now through apps like Bigscreen, which is built entirely around the concept of PC desktop sharing between users.
Massive multiplayer online (MMO) games with persistent worlds and real economies like Second Life haven’t reached critical mass in VR yet, although many in the community are counting the moments until they can live out their days immersed in all-encompassing virtual worlds.Enter MetaWorld, one such MMO launching on Steam Early Access September 29th that hopes to bring about an age of virtual land ownership.
On the surface, buying a scarce resource (albeit immaterial) seems like a sound investment for virtual pioneers, the same instinct that continues to drive the cryptocurrency boom, but the waters invariably get murkier the farther you descend.
The Pitch
Considering MMOs require a healthy player base to function, MetaWorld is hoping to invigorate its procedurally generated 10,000 square mile digital wilderness with a wide swath of the VR headset-owning market, including cross-play support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR, and Gear VR. For reference, MetaWorld is planning to cover an area about as large as the island of Malta.
Developed by HelloVR, a studio founded by ex-Altspace VR director of user experience Dedric Reid, MetaWorld first suffered a rocky IndieGogo campaign that saw less than 10 percent of its $50,000 funding goal. Undeterred by the lack of community support, Reid continued development on the free-to-play world, which he’s hoping to monetize by selling plots of land that come with ready-made structures, ranging from a 1/2 acre plot with rustic log cabin to a 2-acre plot with ultra-modern space intended for vendors.
Built with SpatialOS, a platform that lets game developers stitch together multiple servers and game engines to power large-scale persistent worlds, MetaWorld also purports to offer detailed environmental simulations, complete with wind-swept trees and different animals like fish, foxes and deer that roam the map.
image courtesy MetaWorld
Prospective vendors will own a larger piece of the world, and have access to world-building tools that let them create a unique space as well as the still undefined ‘vendor tool kit’, presumably a way of creating unique world items so you can earn in-game credits. The company also promises its class of vendors a more ‘true to life’ avatar created by the team based on a picture of the person.
image courtesy MetaWorld
The economy, while presented in vague terms, promises to allow users to buy and sell anything, and also let vendors monetize their space. The company hasn’t mentioned its in-game currency outside of the IndieGogo campaign, so there’s still no telling if it will essentially be based on microtransactions, or function like Second Life’s Linden dollars, a currency that you can actually buy (and earn) and use for digital purchases and then convert back to regular currencies like the US dollar or Euro.
Co-founder Abandons Ship
HelloVR co-founder Carleton DiLeo left the company before the ill-fated IndieGogo campaign was devised. According to a post on DiLeo’s blog where he distances himself from MetaWorld, he isn’t sure how Reid can deliver everything he’s promised.
Last year, I began the journey to create MetaWorld. Being one of the first developers to use SpatialOS and being the first using it for VR was a huge challenge. Documentation was sparse and Improbable [the studio behind SpatialOS] was tied up growing their company. After a 3-4 months we had something to show to the world. The response was good, people who tried MetaWorld really connected with the world
Unfortunately, after the press showing, I ran into a number of issues with SpatialOS due to required version upgrades and bugs with SpatialOS itself. Improbable was busy with other things so they were unable to help. I slowly worked through some of the problems but progress was slow. I started to feel that making a massive VR experience wasn’t going to be possible. At our current trajectory it would just take too long.
I still wanted to create something that allowed people to be able to visit a living world together from around the globe. To get there we would need more support from Improbable and a much bigger team. Funding efforts weren’t going well because investors wanted to see more before investing. The time required for one developer/game designer and a designer to create what we need would just take too long, we needed more help which costs money. This became a contention point between me and my business partner. Eventually I just didn’t see a future in continuing the way we were. I decided to stop working on MetaWorld and focus on a new title called Community Garden. Community Garden would start small to prove the viability of building persistent VR worlds in SpatialOS.
I was surprised when I found out my partner had started an IndieGoGo fund. To avoid confusion, I wanted to make it clear that I’m not currently working on MetaWorld and I don’t know how my partner plans to deliver on the promise of the fund. If you plan on donating to the IndieGoGo fund, please note that none of the work I produced for the MetaWorld you see in videos like the one above is what will be delivered.
Buyer Beware
MetaWorld is headed into Early Access, which partly excuses it from being an incomplete product, but the inconsistency in messaging around the game’s core mechanics and features ought to leave you worried about the stability of the still unreleased MMO. The game purports to feature a variety of activities including hunting, fishing, camping, snorkeling, sailing, sports, training, RC, drones, and go karts—all well and good—but according to the company, the core gameplay is based around survival. “You’ll have to defend your land against other players as well as opportunistic animals,” the company says.
You won’t find this information conveniently listed on the MetaWorld website though, but rather strewn across various Reddit pages where the creator sporadically posts, oftentimes in cryptic, single-word answers. At the time of this writing, the game’s website only consists of press blurbs gathered from before the IndieGogo campaign was launched and a small marketplace selling the game’s three plot sizes. The custom avatar mentioned above is only detailed in a 2 month-old post on the company’s Reddit page.
image courtesy MetaWorld
It still isn’t clear how much is truly at stake for landowners or the landless free-to-players at the moment either. Questions like: can animals or other players kill you? If you die, do you lose your items? Can you trade in-game credits back to real cash? Can you craft items, or do you have to buy everything from vendors? The list of unaddressed questions goes on in the game’s largely abandoned discussion board on Steam.
To quell fears around the general lack of communication about the core game mechanics, the studio took to three major VR Reddit pages on Saturday (r/Vive, r/Oculus, r/PSVR), saying that the game won’t only be a wilderness area with cookie-cutter buildings as featured in the promo, but rather a growing framework “we can use […] to create many other worlds. Fantasy, Sci Fi etc.”
“We are building the world as a community, a few square miles at a time,” the company says. “Early pioneers will gather in world and decide on what types of diverse biomes to build. People in the world are discover-able through the UI. We figured out a way to make a huge world that feels alive, rich with things to do. One of our primary goals is to introduce an experience with lots of divergent game play, that you’ll never get bored of.”
For potential customers, HelloVR also had this to say about refunds on the PSVR Reddit page:
“MetaWorld was founded out of passion. Our team doesn’t expect to generate much revenue from the project. Our early access goal is to build a core community that has ownership in the world. Anyone can ask for a refund at anytime by emailing metabot@metaworldvr.com“
Anyone can ask, but it remains to be seen if anyone can actually have a refund—something to keep in mind for digital prospectors looking to settle a virtual frontier that might just as likely turn out to be a barren wasteland.
It used to be that the only way to play videogames with your friends was to grab a pad, take a seat on the couch next to them, and hit start. Over the years the advent of online gaming slowly eroded the appeal of local multiplayer, but many still long for the thrills that come from having two or more people competing in the same room, and not just over voice chat. Dominique Vande Walle is one of those people; he even got out of gaming for a while when online competition became mainstream. But, thanks to the Oculus Rift and Bigscreen, Walle has recently reconnected with his past.
He’s since spent over 1000 hours inside Bigscreen.
Walle loves fighting games. He’s a fan of everything from casual brawlers like Super Smash Bros to more hardcore series like Soul Calibur. He has a particular love for 2007’s Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3, one of the better videogame tie-ins to the anime behemoth. He’d play these games a lot as a kid, but didn’t see the appeal of playing them online.
“As it progressed local split-screen games started to die out a bit,” Walle tells me. “Everyone was playing some game online over the internet and I lost any interest in gaming except for your occasional Mortal Kombat match at a friend’s house.”
What Walle did have an interest in, though, was virtual reality. Walle was an owner of the Oculus Rift’s second development kit (DK2), a device the company made readily available to anyone. He describes the two years in which DK2 was in circulation as fun, but lacking in compelling content. That changed when the consumer Rift arrived in 2016.
“Litte by little it started to dawn on me that I had a device now capable of putting me into a setting with random strangers from over all the world,” Walle says. “And those people were interacting with everything I say, every single one of them has a different background, culture, whatever silly story to tell you.”
Then he came across Bigscreen.
For those that don’t know, Bigscreen is a sort of virtual desktop app. It allows users to bring up a virtual screen in a number of environments and interact with their PC applications from inside VR. You can scroll through Twitter, do a little work, watch videos and, yes, even play traditional 2D games. Better yet, the app supports multiple users that can summon their own screens.
Two players could boot up copies of any online game and effectively play them as if they were split-screen multiplayer games. Most VR apps have barely 10 hours of content, but by simulating your desktop Bigscreen gives you access to an unending amount of software within VR.
“The moment I saw their concept I knew that was going to be an application made for me,” Walle says. Bigscreen launched in beta in April last year, though Walle got his Rift in May.
Naturally, Walle got Tenkaichi 3 up and running on the platform with the help of the Dolphin emulator. He got online play working, too. And that was pretty much that; playing one of his all-time favorite games with anyone in the world as if they were sitting right next to him was a dream come true. He meets up with his friend to fight in public rooms that anyone can come and watch in. You can see one of their matches below.
Walle loves the social discovery behind Bigscreen. He’s fine when people pop into his rooms and then leave, but he’s found someone that shares his love of gaming, someone that he feels he could play all day with. Judging by his hour count, they do.
“Bigscreen eliminates the borders in the world, you get to see and meet new people all over the world whom I would never have met otherwise in my life,” Walle says. “No way would I have a daily opponent from Sweden right now if it wasn’t for Bigscreen and VR in general.”
He’s quick to stress he’s not addicted to the app, though. “I am just very lucky to have a certain work schedule that allows me at least 4 hours spare time alone each day, so it’s easy to get some gaming time in there with a buddy.”
Even then he’s surprised he’s racked up that much time; he’s only spent a fraction of that time inside other VR apps, and he doesn’t complain of tired eyes or any kind side-effects from being in a headset for so long.
Going forward, Walle is eager for the arrival of second generation headsets to help push Bigscreen even further, but he’s entirely happy with it in its current form. I have to say I’m surprised; when I heard about how long he’d spent in VR, I’d assumed he’d been using Bigscreen for far more than play time. But all it’s really done is serve as the platform for him to continue what he loves doing most; no different to anyone that’s spent 1000 hours playing on any other console or platform.
And that’s really the key behind social VR; it gets the complications of the physical and digital worlds out of the way. No distance to travel and no complicated apps to navigate, just yourself in a virtual space with your friends. When you look at it that way, spending 1000 hours in Bigscreen seems like an entirely normal thing to do.
Oh, and Walle wanted to give a special shout out to his girlfriend, who puts up with his VR obsession. I think that’s definitely worth a nod.
Against Gravity, the developer behind Rec Room, released the latest update for its free to play social VR game today. While the patch features an array of small fixes and improvements, there is one new feature that steals the show, the Sandbox Machine.
Hosts of private Rec Room games can now activate the “sandbox machine,” which dispenses equipment to play regardless of your location in the virtual world. This means that the community can now mix and match virtual sporting equipment to create new games inside of Rec Room. “Want to play Quest bows vs. JumboTron pistols on Paintball River? Go for it! Want to play Ultimate Sport Disc in the Shield Soccer arena? Now you can,” say the patch notes for the latest update.
As we highlighted last January, it’s the community and their wishes that fuel Rec Room’s development. The players have been creating their own house rules for the social experience’s mini-games from day one. The new equipment dispenser embraces that creativity and nudges more traditionally-minded players toward it. According to the developer, “The Sandbox Machine was inspired by the creativity we saw in the community, creating new games and activities for each other. This is a first step in making it easier to create richer activities, and we very much want you to try it and give us feedback about how to make it better.”
Other improvements include a new matchmaking system, balance tweaks for paintball, and small changes to the moderation system.
Tell us your stories. Have you or your friend invented your own house rules for Rec Room?
