With the huge success of Minecraft, a generation of gamers have grown up expecting to build and create in, as well as ‘merely’ play their games. Voxelus aims to tap into that creative spark with it’s new Voxelus Creator platform, which is supposedly designed to allow ‘everyone’ to build their own virtual reality, one block at a time.
Voxelus is a platform for virtual reality content creation which debuted at last month’s Oculus developer conference ‘Connect’. The ethos behind the project is simple; give people of all ages and technical aptitudes the tools to build virtual reality worlds and content from scratch.
The platform comprises 3 components:
Voxelus Creator – a ‘code free’ suite of tools which allow the creation of games and content for virtual reality in real time. “Create games without writing a single line of code”. This was launched at Oculus Connect last month by CNET founder Halsey Minor and has apparently been downloaded over 200,000 times.
Voxelus Viewer – Launched this week, the Voxelus Viewer lets people experience content created using the Voxelus Creator platform. The system supports either the Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Rift DK2 headsets.
Voxelus Marketplace – Planned for launch next year, the Marketplace will be a place where you can browse assets for content creation and full games produced using the Voxelus platform. The system will use a platform specific currency ‘Voxels’ and will allow creators to sell their own assets back to the community (or give them away for free should they wish).
“One of the biggest problems facing the VR industry is content. There just isn’t enough, but we’ve solved that issue with our Voxelus Creator,” said Martin Repetto, co-founder and CEO of Voxelus. “Now we’re unleashing the Voxelus Viewer to work with all major virtual reality hardware so that our creator community can experience their new VR worlds immediately after creating them.”
A platform like Voxelus will live or die on it’s promise for ease of use and accessibility, and happily, it seems care and attention has indeed been lavished on this aspect. 3 modes are available within the Voxelus Creator allowing you to build the base of your content quickly whilst still allowing you to finesse the look at a later stage. It all looks nicely intuitive with nice attention to user experience and interfaces.
The idea of building a specific portal for content creators isn’t new of course, but if Voxelus can successfully keep the technical ability barrier of entry low enough, the promise of quick and intuitive creation of ‘stuff’ in virtual reality may well be quite a strong draw. It’s clear Voxelus has an eye on building an ecosystem however, and building a new community from scratch is no mean feat. It’ll take time and further maturation of the virtual reality market at large next year, before we see how well people receive the