Vaughn M Hannon

Category: Virtual Worlds

  • What a (last) week!

    What a (last) week!

    Last week was unintentionally eventful! I hadn’t planned on attending any of these in advance and, in fact, learned about a couple of them only the day before. No matter! They were each unique and interesting.

    TV Academy Emerging Media – Themed Entertainment Mixer

    Hosted by the Television Academy

    Organized by Gregg Katano, a great mix of folks from the world of media and themed entertainment pros. There some excellent conversations and two panel discussions. It’s clear there is a lot of interest in the crossover between these two worlds and how they can collaborate to bring new experiences to the world.

    Thanks to Butcher Bird Studios for hosting!

    LA Siggraph – State of the Metaverse

    Hosted by LA Siggraph, moderated by Ed Lantz

    Panel: Athena Demos, Deidre Lyons, and Larry Rosenthal

    Metaverse is a loaded word now because one company tried to own it and…well, we know how that went. This conversation circled around the issues of building for a specific platform that may, at any time, be shutdown taking all of your work with it. Open standards have (and continue to) emerged as we build towards a functional 3D Web (we won’t call it the Metaverse for now) that anyone can easily access and participate in.

    Check out the Virtual Worlds History Museum for a look at current and past worlds.

    TEA – AI and the Creative Toolkit

    Hosted by TEA North America Western Division, moderated by Kathleen Cohen

    Panel: Michael Libby, Logan Olson, Kyle Shannon, Matt Spremulli, and Dolce Wang

    AI (I still don’t like calling it that) is a divisive topic and even more so among a group of folks who create stuff for a living. Each member of the panel had about 10 minutes to talk about how and why they use AI in their creative pipeline. The takeaway? Nobody should be just generating content with a prompt. Use the AI tools for the hardest parts along with the finish and polish of your project. The tech is moving fast but it’s still just a tool and can be highly useful when applied appropriately.

    Archiving Immersive Art – A Symposium on Preserving Immersive Media

    Hosted by the USC Mobile & Environmental Media Lab

    Four excellent panel discussions on the why’s and how’s of archiving extended reality experiences. Across all of the panelists was a wide range of experience with XR and a rich history of tech and creative knowledge.

    I wish I had taken better (any) notes during these panels. The consensus is that XR is a viable format for creation and highly effective at transporting your audience to a world you want them to experience. While the current trend may be away from immersive headsets (until it’s not) there are countless worlds to build, stories to tell, and we must archive these for future generations to experience.

    Take a look at The Immersive Archive for ongoing projects to capture the history and created projects in XR.

  • A little something new…

    I’ve been excited about virtual worlds for a long time now. I dabbled in VRML wayyyy back then, built things in Second Life, explored Mozilla Hubs, poked around in VRChat (more to come there) all in the pursuit of virtual spaces to augment the physical world.

    There’s been a consistent problem with all of the platforms created so far. They’re silos. You build for them and your content is stuck there. We’re just now getting to viable, open, standards for spatial experiences on the web – the most accessible and open platform.

    With that I’ve created a new space to showcase the various projects I’ve worked on. This space will evolve and change but I wanted to make something that hearkened back to the days when the internet was fun. When people were building weird, wild things and uploading them for all to see. This is also my first step in creating a virtual space that is open and accessible and not locked to a platform (using three.js, webGL, and some help from Claude). If I DO upload something to a platform you can bet it’s all built offline and ready to go anywhere. But that’s future me stuff. Current me has this to show you:

    A screenshot of my new projects display tower built in three.js and webGL.

    https://vaughnhannon.com/projects

    (it also makes a great fidget spinner on your phone)

  • Can we pump the brakes on the metaverse talk…please?

    Can we pump the brakes on the metaverse talk…please?

    I’ve had this post titled (but unwritten) and sitting in my WordPress drafts since January of 2022.

    You remember…it was the height of Metaverse fever. It was the Next Big Thing(tm) and you were a fool if you weren’t making some sort of play to build “a metaverse.” (have I mentioned I hate it when someone refers to A metaverse…there is only one, there cannot be many, it just…sigh.)

    Of course the majority of Metaverse plays were secretly NFT plays as if a web of virtual worlds couldn’t possibly exist without web3 tech. Much of the hype came from the big social network with the big blue app and the guy who renamed his company because the Metaverse was inevitable. He then went on the spend billions trying to build a singular virtual world completely controlled by him. Not the Metaverse.

    Meanwhile…real work is being done all over the web to build unique and interesting 3D spaces that will, hopefully, connect. I’ve gone on about this before but for the Metaverse to exist a few things have to happen.

    1. Open Avatar Standards
    2. Open and Accessible 3D worlds
    3. Self hosting

    There must be an open avatar standard. We must have the ability to create a 3D representation of us that persists across worlds. You can decide if it looks like you or a giant pink raccoon but that version of you should be able to enter any 3D space without issue. ReadyPlayerMe was the closest but they were recently purchased by Netflix and their services shutdown soon (Jan 31st!). Fortunately, there’s work being done. See the Reference Canonical Skeletal Framework and the KHR Character and Avatar Extension Set.

    Any world must be open and easily accessible. I was pretty excited by Mozilla Hubs because it was so easy to launch a world and get started all via the browser. Unfortunately Mozilla abandoned it BUT open sourced the technology so it lives on as the Hubs Foundation. I’m also excited by Arrival.space and what they’re doing with web based 3D spaces but also Gaussian splats all easily experienced, again, in your web browser (both on your computer/phone or in a headset). These spaces must remain accessible from a variety of devices.

    A screenshot of my avatar standing in the middle of my Arrival.space.
    My ReadyPlayerMe (RIP) avatar standing in my Arrival.space running in a desktop browser.

    Like the 2D web any of us should be able to host our own space. Many will opt to use a hosting service or a prebuilt world that they customize but the option to build it and host it yourself from the ground up must exist to create a vibrant community of virtual worlds.

    I came back to this post with the recent announcements from the guy who renamed his company and the initial feeling that we were, once again, heading for a VR/Metaverse winter. We’re not. Valve has the Steam Frame coming soon. Google, for now (I know I know), is pushing ahead with AndroidXR. Open source tools and game engines are making it easier and easier to build things once and publish to multiple platforms (until standards unite them all!) allowing for rapid experimentation. Organizations like ImmersiveX and the Virtual Worlds Museum (2D site here) are actively building and evangelizing and engaging in multiple worlds.

    While I feel for all of those who built something only to have it bought up and then killed and the numerous folks laid off this is likely all better for the greater ecosystem. The giant tech company was taking up a lot of space and now, perhaps, we can grow the Metaverse we want and deserve. There’s still a long road ahead of us but the foundation is being built now.