It’s been a couple of months since we last checked into VR Web Browser Janus and developer James McCrae has certainly been busy updating his project with some key features that make the overall experience a memorable one.

If you haven’t seen Janus VR before or know how it works please view our Software review first before continuing with this feature for a full and more detailed explanation.

The first major update since we last visited is of course Multiplayer browsing. You can now see other users browsing through Janus and you can text or voice chat directly with them. This adds a whole other dimension to Web Browsing with Janus VR as an experience shared also feels like an experience doubled.

This new voice chat feature works extremely well and doesn’t seem to lag at all. You also have the ability to load your own Avatar into Janus which is a nice feature and as with the rest of Janus everything from the room layouts to the custom shaders are all extremely customizable which is one of Janus’s major draws.

Shaders are in simple terms small programs, running on the graphics card, that tell it how to texture an object. One great example of shader use in Janus is the Disco Room with swirling galaxies and geometric videos all playing on the walls. This disco room is beautiful in the rift and the ED – 209 robots at the door way makes for an interesting dance partner.

Janus has also had a massive influx of other minor updates the past couple of months with the vast majority of them focused on usability and room building features but on the advice of prominent Oculus and Reddit community member Nuke Marine I decided to visit the Dot Matrix room built by Dante Vasquez and I was pleasantly surprised by the experience as it had some of the most memorable hours of VR browsing I’ve had to date.

When you enter Dot Matrix you might immediately recognize the colour palette if you’re a gamer in their late 20s or early 30s as that of the original game boy which was released 25 years ago this month. Its classic olive green textures are a perfect fit for this retro inspired world and the first area you come to in Dot Matrix is the train station which links all other areas together through this central hub. This train station looks to be scaled to what you might expect in the real world but one thing that you certainly won’t see in real life is a dance floor next to the platform.

In front of the station you can see a larger city that is for the moment just building facades but the humour of the developer can clearly be seen with the slogans on the bill boards. The station It’s self has some interesting door ways to other areas and the first place I decided to visit was the Exhibits section. In the Exhibits room I was presented with 3 doorways to 8 bit retro inspired rooms. The most interesting of which is the Megaman 2 Room where you are transported to the top of the skyscraper from the opening title. This really was a trip back to my childhood and made me grin from ear to ear.

After some time I decided to go visit the Wax Museum on the bottom level of the station. This room is sectioned off as smaller rooms for faster loading and each small room loads 4 avatar models. This is very reminiscent of The Museum of Games demo which is an excellent demo available on Oculus Share at the moment.

Just around the corner from the Museum is Shurui’s Sandwiches which is for the moment just an interesting meeting point but flesh’s out the overall feeling of the train station being a real location with a real purpose.

To the right of the train station is an apartment complex which is an area available for more user rooms but for the moment all the apartments are vacant. This area will likely see some very interesting rooms in the future as more content is being built daily for Janus.

On the opposite side of the train station The Town section is the most populated area with regards content. The first door way you come across is VRSites.com which offers free hosting for your Janus VR rooms and also an index of interesting rooms for you to explore. Among the rooms quite a lot of adult content has been added recently but this will be the subject of another video in the future. If you’re thinking of creating your own Janus VR rooms I recommend you try visiting VRSites.com as it’s a great way to get started start. We will put a link in the description below.

Walking further into town you will come across the Elysium Metaverse by user FirefoxG which recreates a version of the Elysium space station filled with doors to other interesting Janus rooms. This is a very vast space to explore and you can quite easily get lost for an hour or so just exploring the room and its many door ways. I especially like all the Sci Fi References on the buildings like the Cybernetic Systems Building and Weyland Industry’s Head Quarters.

One interesting room to check out is Dino’s Arcade & Bar, it has 3 beautifully rendered Arcade cabinets inside with Dig Dug, Mrs Pac Man and Asteroids machines but unfortunately they are not playable at the moment but the sense of nostalgia just standing in this room is heart-warming.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what is available to explore in Janus VR and Dot Matrix is only one of the Highlights that I have come across. Janus VR always surprises me every time I visit as the quality and quantity of the content becoming available daily is mind boggeling and I can really see a bright future for VR web browsers in the future.

Even though James has made the Janus framework very easy to build your own room’s with if you have ever dabbled in any type of coding in the past, it can be a little daunting for non-coders to get started. I feel that if James can make a visual editor like the MineCraft or the Little Big Planet examples, then the advantages of Janus VR will become apparent as you can literally build anything and express yourself more freely without being tied to the game assets provided in the two fore mentioned programs.

Even if you don’t have a VR head set yet and want to start working in Virtual Reality building environments or your own rooms I suggest your check out Janus VR as a step in the right direction. With passionate people behind the project and a friendly fledgling development community building rooms you will always receive helpful advice and encouragement to help you on your way to becoming a Metaverse builder.

Download Janus VR Here

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