It’s an exciting year for Virtual Reality, probably an inflection point:
- Second Life and the hundreds of thousands of users of its virtual world celebrated SL’s 14th anniversary. SL Avatar makers are beginning to release avatars that use the optional new rigging, called Project Bento, which has many new capabilities, including movable fingers and more expressive faces.
- Facebook, who bought Oculus for $3B, announced the forthcoming Facebook Spaces for the Oculus Rift in April, and now has an early access program for developers.
- Sansar went into Public Beta at the end of July and has nearly a thousand high-resolution VR experiences in its Atlas already.
- Decentraland, a decentralized VR running on a blockchain and IPFS, released an Alpha/Demo, and raised $25M in about 30 seconds via a cryptocurrency ICO on August 18, funding years of development and inaugurating a VR land development boom of up to about 100M sq m. Decentraland will use A-Frame and WebVR to run on inexpensive hardware including mobile devices.
- AltspaceVR was acquired by Microsoft
- VR Headsets are beginning to come down in price, foreshadowing their commoditization. Oculus has announced the Oculus Go, a new untethered HMD, at $199.
