Massively Overpowered (MO) posted: These Are The Companies That Are Trying To Build The Metaverse. While Linden Lab (214+ employees) is mentioned so is their competition; Altspace VR (20± employees), Facebook, and High Fidelity (). It seems Comcast and the Japanese company Tencent are investing in Altspace.

Down in the holler

Palmer Luckey is mentioned as talking about it being harder to abusive in VR than in the current 3D virtual worlds we have now. MO doesn’t exactly point us to where it is Palmer is talking. But, their article is inspired by an article on Re/code and they quote Palmer, “Virtual reality will make it a lot harder to be a total dick to somebody online.” Re/code says Philip Rosedale, co-founder of Second Life™ and CEO of High Fidelity, agrees.  I think it is way too soon to make such a claim. The people that Palmer and Philip can see in VR right now is a very select and unique portion of the people interested in VR. I don’t see the present VR space as being a good feeding ground for griefer types we see in Second Life or other MMO’s. Only as the VR space becomes more populated will we see griefing on a comparable level. Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab CEO, is anticipating griefers and is designing to minimize their presence in Sansar. One of the things land owners will be able to do is restrict access to those avatars that are past a certain age. This would force griefers to invest more time and effort than most are willing to do. The article on Re/code is much longer than the MO article, which tend to be 250 to 350 or so word articles. Re/code gets into other concepts. One of those is Altspace’s exploration of watching movies as avatars… being in VR with someone as you both watch TV, movies, or play games together like Flappy Birds. Netflix is an investor. Thus the exploring and testing, possibly… Will Netflix provide a feature for delivery of content to your favorite VR world? They really only have two products, DVD or Internet delivery of movies and TV shows. I remember when it seemed odd to me that people would watch videos or TV in SL. But, there are people we can’t physically be with that we would like to share a movie with. VR is a way to do that. Surreal (4 employees) is another company working in the VR area. They are looking at what is labeled avatar-powered social games. (Are they using ‘social’ in place of MMO?) That makes me think of IMVU (devoting about 20 of its 135 employees), which is also developing for VR and looking at adding user created content to IMVU. Page links below…