The metaverse and virtual reality (VR) go hand in hand in the public imagination and platforms like Somnium Space, Crypto Voxels and Meta’s Horizon Worlds already support this technology.
However, despite describing itself as a “virtual reality decentralized platform” on its website, the browser-based 3D metaverse platform Decentraland still lacks VR.
Sean Ong, founder of XR Dev Studio, specialists in extended reality, is part of a team that has developed an “alpha” version of the VR platform. He explained that, Although “VR has always been part of the Decentraland vision”, the Decentraland Foundation has been prioritizing the implementation of core features over VR.
“The team that has been primarily responsible for the development of Decentraland has been very busy implementing so many major features that VR hasn’t made it very far on the priority list.”
Ong is a member of the Decentraland DAO, and he and his team received grants after submitting a proposal to bring VR to the platform.
However, the funding only allowed them to create an alpha version of the VR client, which was simply a “VR port” that lacked stability, he said.
Ong told Cointelegraph that the challenges in bringing VR to Decentraland were because it was “fundamentally incompatible with VR.”
VR porting (or VR porting) involves reworking the original code to make it compatible with another platform, and Ong notes that, although this saves initial time and effort, the developer would have to make changes to the port each time the main project was updated.
Building a dedicated VR client would take much longer, but this would insulate it from the main project, making it more resilient in the long run, he explained.
Ong and his team requested additional funding of $240,000 through a proposal submitted on December 14 to develop a dedicated VR client, but the vote failed.; had more than three quarters of the votes against.
VR from The Sandbox?
Cointelegraph also reached out to Sébastien Borget, co-founder of blockchain-based metaverse The Sandbox, for your take on virtual reality in the metaverse.
Borget suggested that while metaverses will eventually exist in VR, The Sandbox’s priority for 2023 is mobile and that they have “no immediate or future plans for VR.”
“We believe that VR technology is not mature or pervasive enough, so we are focused on making the metaverse more pervasive and accessible to everyone,” he said.
When asked about recent criticism of Decentraland’s 8,000 daily active users, Ong points out that these numbers are still relatively low. and that the platform should aspire to millions.
“Today, metaverse is synonymous with virtual reality,” says Ong, and believes that Decentraland could attract many more users if it were able to incorporate virtual reality into the platform, adding that “virtual reality definitely has to be a major component” of a truly comprehensive metaverse.
In an emailed response, The executive director of the Decentraland Foundation, Agustín Ferreira, stated that the DAO could eventually take over development of the platform, and that the foundation aims to support community development and create “incentives for developers to add value to everything.” the ecosystem.”
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