This week in Vircadia: Community Village Project

A Shared Living Space

The concept of metaverse is not simply only to have many worlds, but rather the primary allure is that metaverse is connected. Therefore, our goal is that we may have infinite servers, but we can share each server with many people. Because after all, not everyone that wants a space in the metaverse wants to have to administrate it. Sometimes creation and relaxation are the name of the game.

Thus, the Community Village was born. We set out not to do something perfect, but rather to just do. With a small and tight knit community, it’s the best time to experiment!

Anyone can drop in and claim a parcel (denoted by a large white box) by putting their name on it. The guidelines are mainly, “use common sense.” We try to utilize every bit of performance optimization that we can in creation. If someone’s having a tough time optimizing, community members help each other out to learn better techniques and apply them. The space is a free-for-all in terms of design, meant to allow people to have fun as a hang out place.

Space is extremely limited in order to keep things manageable. We would be more likely to deploy a new world to provide more parcels rather than expand the current one.

But, there is an overarching goal for the village and worlds like it. People should be comfortable hanging out in-world, in VR, and in full-body tracking to watch movies, play games, and to simply just relax.

The primary reason for this village project is to learn and prioritize. The goal is to get many people living together in shared spaces, however that’s no small task! So, with participation and observation… we will be able to determine next steps between privacy, security, and performance for areas of improvement.

Launcher

The Vircadia Launcher on Windows has received a bit of love recently with its version selection layout being streamlined.

Content

“Hap” has completed the prototype for database indexing of the Vircadia Content repo. This means that we’ll be able to list various scripts, models, and entire worlds for you to use in a neat little free marketplace in the Interface.

Quest & Android

Many of our developers and community members have received their Oculus Quest 2 preorders. Testing and troubleshooting is already underway to see about getting support rolling for it. We can expect to see good progress over the coming months, though support is still very much experimental!

Experience gained whilst developing for the Quest will also carry over into the pure Android version of Vircadia.