Developer Tomáš ‘Frooxius’ Mariančík, known for his work on the early Oculus experience SightLine, recently announced that NeosVR, the multiuser VR world creation engine, is headed into open beta starting May 4th.
Update (04/25/18): Mariančík recently released a video announcing the open beta’s availability (seen below). In it you can see some of the complexity you can create with NeosVR, all of which is possible in the company of multiple users.
We’ll be taking a deeper look at the beta before it opens to the public next month, so check back soon. The original article follows below.
Original article (04/11/18): Mariančík describes NeosVR as a “metaverse engine,” although you might think of it more as a multi-user platform that lets you build worlds and experiences in VR itself while collaborating with others in real-time.
Here’s Mariančík in his own words:
My primary VR project – a VR universe for our ideas, thoughts and imagination, bridging the gap between people’s minds and technology. It uses many novel technologies and approaches to create a dynamic virtual world that has a mind of its own, but grants you “superpowers” to change and influence this universe, creating your own experiences and sharing them with others.
Check out the video above for a sneak peek of what’s to come. The scene, Mariančík says, was “built and recorded in NeosVR in realtime multiplayer.”
The freeform mass of floating stuff in Mariančík’s example is a worthy illustration of the complexity a single world can hold, but what is it all for?
In its latest update, named the ‘User Friendly Update’, the alpha version saw a new mechanic that allows you to interlink individual worlds, represented as tiny orbs. The “world orb” also has a 360 thumbnail and number beside it to indicate how many users are within it. This essentially allows you to build several interlinked, multiuser spaces filled with objects of all types, so you could make your own art gallery, photogrammetry-based tour through a physical place; almost anything you can imagine using NeosVR’s toolset.
If you’re interested in signing up for access to the NeosVR beta, head over to the project’s main site here (see update above). Once we get our hands on NeosVR, you can bet we’ll have a deep dive into what makes it tick. In the meantime, check out the time-lapse video below for a quick demo of just how you might make such a complex scene.