I tried the Altspace VR Burning Man for a couple of hours. People put a surprising amount of effort into creating content for it, and at times the scenery brought a warm glow of familiarity that left me smiling. Freed from the constraints of the physical world, visual experience designers have created Burning Man style art without the constraints of materials or gravity, and it’s interesting to see their styles converge in a new medium. The collection of content feels a bit like the rough and charming early days of the web, where people made basic webpages or created ad hoc communities on places like livejournal. The graphics are rough and thus have a retro cyberpunk feel, but the user-generated nature of them feels homey, so it works.
I like that a significant number of theme camps created their own content, so many in fact that it felt sparse at times, where I found myself wandering alone through elaborate worlds. Sometimes the actual plays can feel like that, and you get a surprising amount of solitude in a 70,000 person event.
The tech is definitely a bit glitchy - a good fraction of the other people had garbled audio, especially in larger groups. However, it shows the potential of where all this could go.
People have been trying to do online collaborative 3D virtual worlds for 25 years now, and even though they’ve had some traction, they’ve never quite hit the mainstream. I think in part it’s because technological limitations (slow internet speeds, the data management and rendering challenge of allowing people to make arbitrary amounts of 3D content in a shared space, limitations in interaction methodologies) prevented the level of immersion from being what it needed to be to succeed broadly.
Centrally designed 3D virtual worlds (starting with games like WoW) have succeeded though, probably because controlling the content helps with technological challenges, and controlling and structuring interaction methods helps with social challenges.
It’s possible that we’re getting closer now to making these kinds of worlds work. VR makes the interaction methodologies a lot more satisfying, and the relentless growth of GPU capacity is giving developers more margin to work with.
