Cymatic Bruce is the head of developer relations at AltSpace VR, and he talks about the three main goals for their company:

Enable social interactions within virtual environments

Connect the 2D web within VR in order to share media and livestreamed events

Enable developers to bring in 3D web content into shared VR spaces



Part of what makes AltSpace VR unique is their mission is to create integrations with the open web. They’re building their application on top of Unity at first in order to ensure stable and accessible platform that performs well, but their long-term plan is to enable developers to create their own customized virtual environments.

Some of the topics that we discussed are:

Experiencing livestreamed events in VR with a collaborative web browsing component, as well as sharing animated GIFs and viral videos in a group context.

Plans to integrate with multiple HMDs and various input devices.

Their focus on non-verbal cues & limb tracking since facial tracking with an HMD is a difficult problem.

Their unique point-and-click teleportation solution to VR locomotion.

Integrating an open source audio solution, volume attenuation, positional VoIP & creating realistic sound profiles.

Plans for virtual environment customizations with via their SDK and API to create Ready Player One-like environments for expressing identity.

Their pragmatic approach towards solving the low-hanging fruit features of the Metaverse.

Cymatic Bruce says that part of what makes social VR so compelling is that memories are created based upon locations in VR, and it’s made even more salient when interacting with our friends and family. There are already people who are creating shared social experiences of watching TV shows and sports events together, and he foresees AltSpace VR being a part of how people experience these types of events in the future.

Be sure to sign up for AltSpace VR’s beta in order to check out some of their social experiences.

Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio

Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.