Virtually Social

Although the so-called new wave of virtual reality hasn’t taken off as quickly as some enthusiasts had anticipated, market figures are quite encouraging. According to a report from Canalys,1 in Q3 of 2017, Sony shipped 490,000 PlayStation VR headsets, Oculus shipped 210,000 Rift headsets and HTC shipped 160,000 Vive units—totaling almost one million units sold. Projections for the near future show this positive trend. Research firm IDC has forecasted significant growth in both augmented reality and virtual reality (VR) markets, with headset adoption expected to increase from just under 10 million units in 2016 to 100 million units in 2021.2 Despite these promising numbers, most analysts would agree that the real potential of this technology will never be released without the full development of social VR. Actually, most of VR apps existing on the market provide solitary immersive experiences that significantly undermine users’ feelings of ‘‘social presence,’’ which is an essential component of the virtual experience. In this sense, we are still far from the forecast that Mark Zuckerberg made in 2016 at the Samsung Galaxy S7 event when he declared that VR would be ‘‘the most social platform ever.’’3 Inspired by science fiction novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the idea of a shared virtual world in which people interact through avatars has always had a central place in the development of VR. However, reconstructing the evolution of social VR is not easy, the difficulty lying in the lack of a commonly accepted definition of what constitutes a shared virtual world. Adopting a broad definition, one could include in this category the first Multi-User Dungeons and even the arcade combact games of the 1980s. Actually, these applications eventually led to massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, more commonly known as MMORPGs, a genre of role-playing games in which a large number of players interact within a virtual world. In 2003, the U.S. company Linden Lab launched Second Life, a virtual world in which users could design an avatar to live their ‘‘second life’’ online. Second Life was regarded by media as one of the most important innovations at that time. In 2007, at the apex of its popularity, this community counted more than 1.1 million actives users and a plethora of virtual places to explore, including cinemas, concerts, schools, discos, shops, and art exhibitions. However, despite the kaleidoscopic variety of its virtual scenarios, Second Life was not able to sustain interest beyond the hype balloon, and soon many companies and organizations that had created their branches in the virtual world diverted their resources back to ‘‘real’’ life. Nowadays, the number of Second Life active players has declined, but there are still more than half a million users. Fifteen years after Second Life, what are the most promising social VR applications? The options are not lacking, although the number of available services is not as high as might be expected considering the important added value that social presence brings to virtual experiences. A first example is Linden Lab’s Sansar (currently in beta), which is considered by many as the ‘‘sequel’’ to Second Life— although there are few important differences among the two projects. First, Sansar has a platform-oriented architecture that consists of a number of interconnected user-generated virtual worlds, while Second Life was built as a giant, continuous virtual space. Furthermore, in Sansar, each virtual environment acts as an entry point to the platform, whereas in Second Life, users access the world through one front door. Moreover, the creation of content in Sansar is expected to be more straightforward than it is in Second Life, giving the user the possibility to drag and drop objects directly into the scenes (although more sophisticated editing possibilities based on common 3D modeling tools should also be available for advanced users). Another social VR platform that has made recent headlines in the news is AltspaceVR, an immersive VR environment where users can meet through their avatars, play games, watch videos, and even browse the Internet using holographic-style windows. The platform was started in 2013 backed by $15 million from prestigious investors. In its first years, the service was quite successful, hosting live events of celebrities such as Reggie Watts, Bill Nye, and Justin Roiland to name but a few. By mid-2017, the company claimed 35,000 active users and was available for most VR headsets, including Facebook’s Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, and the HTC Vive, plus the web browsers. However, in August 2017, AltspaceVR announced it was closing down after running out of funding. A couple of months later, the company was acquired by Microsoft, which was increasingly seeking to incorporate communications technology into their mixed reality ecosystem. After joining Microsoft, AltspaceVR is a candidate to become a direct competitor of Facebook Spaces, the new virtual world of Menlo Park’s social media giant. Now in beta, Spaces allows users to create their own avatars using their Facebook photos, enjoy 360 videos, draw 3D objects, video call friends outside of VR, and share selfies of their VR memories on Facebook. Despite their huge firepower, Microsoft AltspaceVR and Facebook Space are not the only protagonists of the social VR arena. Other players, such as ConVRge, JanusVR, and VRChat, are sharpening their weapons and and oiling their armor to win the Metaverse race. Also worth mentioning is Decentraland, the first virtual platform completely owned by its users. As in other social VR applications, Decentraland users are immersed in a shared virtual world that they can contribute to create. However, the unique feature of this platform is that it operates on a public blockchain, meaning that all virtual environments created using this ecosystem are public and globally accessible. Users can purchase land through the Ethereum blockchain, creating a record of ownership, without building limitations and with full control over the owned land. The rapid emergence of social VR applications seen in recent years suggests that shared virtual worlds represent one of the hottest areas of development at the moment. Hopefully, this restless evolution will soon lead to the creation of easily accessible and scalable platforms, making the Metaverse dream finally come true.