[Photo: ©courtesty of Sinewave Entertainment]
For several years, since the release of the Oculus Rift, HTC’s Vive, Samsung’s GearVR, and other headsets, consumer virtual reality has been seen as the future of social 3D worlds.
But while there are numerous social VR projects, such as Facebook Spaces, Altspace, VR Chat, High Fidelity, Sansar, and others, no one has yet cracked the code of building a fully three-dimensional, open-ended, extensible virtual world that can handle many dozens, or even hundreds, of users in a single space. Now, Sinespace, a new metaverse project from a London-based company called Sinewave Entertainment, is seeking to be the first to offer all those features.
While some analysts have predicted that VR will be a $38 billion industry by 2026, the nascent consumer technology has yet to achieve true mainstream adoption–so it’s not clear exactly how many people might be looking to have immersive social VR experiences.
Starting in 2003, graphical virtual worlds like Second Life took the technology world by storm. But while they presented fascinating social, economic, and technological innovations, worlds like Second Life were fundamentally limited–they were 2D, mostly had keyboard-only interfaces, and were often so difficult to learn to use that the vast majority of people who created accounts bailed before spending any meaningful time in-world.
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[Photo: ©courtesty of Sinewave Entertainment]
With Sinespace, founder Adam Frisby–himself a long-time entrepreneur in Second Life–argues that a true VR metaverse is finally here. Already, Sinespace has signed up a few thousand users, as well as big institutions like the U.S. Department of Defense, the Smithsonian, the University of Edinburgh, Michigan State University, and others, some of whom have commissioned private, white-labeled Sinespace worlds.
But previously, the virtual world has been available only for PCs, either through a downloadable client or a Web interface. Now, Sinespace will be available on high-end VR systems like HTC’s Vive, the Oculus Rift, and those running Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality. As well, the British company, which was first founded in 2014, and which has been working on developing its virtual world platform, plans on releasing clients for iOS and Android in the coming weeks or months.
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[Photo: ©courtesty of Sinewave Entertainment]
Sinespace’s metaverse has been in the works for about a year, and already has about 1,500 weekly users, it says, a relatively small number that is nonetheless growing at about 20% week-over-week. One of the most interesting features of true virtual worlds is their functioning economies, and while Sinespace is still a nascent platform, the company says that 10% of its users are already spending money on things like clothing, vehicles, houses, and other products made by fellow users. To date, the average user generates about $45 a month in revenue. It says that users spend between 60 and 140 minutes a day on average in the virtual world.
Frisby is someone who should know what success in the metaverse looks like. Sinewave Entertainment developed and ran two of the largest brands in Second Life, each generating annual seven-figure revenues. With Sinespace, he’s hoping that cross-platform functionality and modern technology will lead to user numbers far in excess of the low seven-figure numbers a world like Second Life ever achieved.
Sinespace’s biggest selling point, Frisby says, is that it is built using Unity’s game engine, the most popular in the world. That means that unlike a virtual world like Second Life, which was extremely hard to fundamentally change, Sinespace is modular, and its core functionality can be regularly updated. It’s designed, he says, to be extensible and upgradeable. That alone could help overcome the problems that led so many people to abandon the difficult-to-use Second Life.
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Source: Fast Company