High Fidelity was a company building spatial audio and virtual world software; its blog covers its products and its shutdown.
Commenters point to its spatial audio tool as an effective way to hold quiet conversations among many people, and to its headset buying guide.
> Telepresence has been tried. It fails. Oculus won't succeed either. Why not? Because humans value eye contact. Your Oculus won't have that, and hence it will fail for that reason.
I don't want to get in the middle of the love affair between you two, but just want to add my 2 cents that telepresence will likely play a huge role in VR over the next 5-10 years.
Technology isn't quite there yet, but there are several interesting initiatives in this area. Philip Rosedale (yes, the same Philip from Linden Labs/Second Life) has been actively researching and pushing the boundaries of facial expression with his High Fidelity project [1]. Not sure it'll ever become a consumer product, but the potential is obvious. I saw him demo'ing his alpha version earlier this year, and it was amazing. Even though it was an avatar-based chat, the fact you can see the eyes moving and the face conveying emotions, brings the experience to a whole new level, well beyond the uncanny valley.
The addition of facial expressions and other forms of body language are obvious extensions for Oculus. Case in point: they just acquired Nimble VR [2], and will likely incorporate their hand tracking technology into a future CV1 or CV2. Facial expression and eye tracking is likely a bit further down the road, but not that far.
[1] https://highfidelity.io/
[2] http://nimblevr.com/
Arguably that's probably why Facebook's efforts are doomed to fail before they've even started. By branding and marketing and tying all of their "metaverse" activities to VR they've already lost in a lot of user mindset. The retrending blog post on the Requiem for the HMD [1][2] is more than enough reason to believe that VR (at it exists today, as it existed in 2019 when that blog post was written) is an albatross that Facebook has now tied around its neck as Meta.
People are already dismissing this "metaverse" furor as just more VR hype with a stupider name and the company "Meta" is risking killing the entire term "metaverse" and any usefulness it might have had altogether.
Ironically, by owning Facebook "Meta" should be in one of the best positions to build/sell a 2D "metaverse plane" as well as just about anyone else possibly could. Tear down some of the garden walls, allow a bit more of the old MySpace and Blog anarchy of clashing styles and user control, be a better web citizen. They aren't likely to do that because they are using "metaverse" as attempt to make more Oculus money and risking the Facebook lock in and walled garden for a vision with actual guts and takes risks doesn't seem to be in their interest.
[1] https://www.highfidelity.com/backlog/requiem-for-the-hmd
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29069381
A few more for your list:
https://altvr.com/
https://borrel.app/
https://calla.chat
https://cozyroom.xyz
https://cubechat.io/
https://gather.town/
https://happyhour.ianwdavis.com/
https://here.fm
https://hopin.to
https://icebreaker.video/
https://makespace.fun
http://mcparks.us
https://metaversehq.com/v/room
https://mixaba.com/
https://party.vipshek.com
https://rally.video/
https://rambly.app/
https://recroom.com/
https://remo.co/
https://sine.space/vr/
https://slashtalk.com
https://spatial.chat/
https://squadapp.io/
https://tivolicloud.com/
https://town.siempre.io
http://vircadia.com/
https://virus.cafe
https://wavexr.com/
https://welcome.topia.io/
https://www.airmeet.com/
https://www.banger.digital
https://www.brella.io
https://www.highfidelity.com/
https://www.huddlehq.io/
https://www.ivent-uk.com/
https://www.joinglimpse.com
https://www.kitely.com
https://www.muze.nyc/
https://www.sansar.com/
https://www.somniumspace.com/
https://yorb.itp.io
https://zonko.chat/
Aw. Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar once demoed that for me. Very cute, and amazing that they could fit the client in a Commodore 64 and run over a 300 baud modem. The classic paper on this is "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat". It would be fun to have it running again, but it might be easier to run the old code in an C64 emulator.
AOL originally ran this as QuantumLink Club Caribe. It didn't catch on, though.
If they're going to revive this, it ought to be phone-based. It's about the right level of detail for a phone screen.
(The current big effort in virtual worlds is High Fidelity.[2] This is from the guy who ran Second Life. Supports VR, face tracking, etc. It's supposed to be better visually than Second Life, but so far, it isn't.)
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Worlds/LucasfilmHabitat.html
[2] https://highfidelity.io/
High Fidelity -- San Francisco, CA -- Fulltime, ONSITE but work from home friendly.
High Fidelity is a San Francisco-based company working on Virtual Reality (VR) technology. The company has developed an open-source application for building and deploying virtual environments (domains) to desktop and server computers. The virtual domains are designed to be social and interactive, meaning they allow for the real-time addition, rearrangement, and gross modification of 3D assets in a hosted environment being used simultaneously by multiple users. Our goal is to deploy an open, flexible platform for a variety of VR applications rather than a specific, narrow VR experience.
We are looking for software engineers with solid experience in C++ and Javascript to help us build the Metaverse. Openings can be viewed at http://highfidelity.com/jobs.
To give a perspective. Former Second Life founder and CEO founded Highfidelity.com to create an open source social VR world platform. 5 years later, and with at least 75M dollars in funding the platform is empty[1], even though it is in Steam, and even hardcore VR creators dont seem eager to use it. They had to pay users to join them for their stress tests. The creators' stories in the forum may be telling about the shortcomings of creating amd using VR regularly[2].
Meanwhile, secondlife's open source clone, opensimulator, has thousands of regions and users online[3] despite being a super buggy platform, with less than $0 in funding.
1. https://highfidelity.com/user_stories?include_actions=concurrency
2. https://forums.highfidelity.com/
3. https://opensimworld.com/ (disclaimer:shameless plug)