Nowadays, the elusive term “The Metaverse” isn’t so foreign to most people anymore. It’s the concept of a virtual world in parallel to our actual reality. There are many ways for people to engage with this world- but by far the most immersive is through VR. You’re in the virtual world- a participant, rather than an observer. The most popular Metaverse “worlds” you can visit are VRChat and now Horizon Worlds. One of the first VR worlds to come to market, however, was Altspace, acquired by Microsoft in 2015. It has recently been shut down, but luckily I had the chance to try it out when it was still supported by Oculus Quest. I had gathered my thoughts and wanted to share the experience I had- also giving myself a chance to reflect on the factors leading to its shut-down in March of 2013.
My understanding from the 25 minutes I spent in this game was that it was an event hosting app, and worked similar to SecondLife, where avatars would meet and interact with one another.
Overall, the navigation was pretty intuitive. I usually only had to press one button at a time to interact with objects in the world. At times it was a little bit unclear as to what the point of each interaction was, even though they were cool. I didn’t seem to accumulate points or anything. But, then again, that’s not really the intended purpose of the app. It’s not a game, but more a social platform for people to meet.
One of the most important factors in the creation of video games is giving the player agency. They should feel like they can directly impact the outcomes of their gameplay. This is especially relevant in an open-world game like Altspace. This is why the first interaction I had in AltspaceVR felt really special, because it was the first time I saw just how much I could affect this virtual world. I was able to pick up and launch a bunch of little fireworks. It was great that there was no limit to how many I could pick up, no limit to which direction I could fire them in. This helped the experience feel really organic. I assume the point was to familiarize users with the types of interactions they could expect to use in Altspace. To this end, it was quite effective.
There was also a minigame to shoot baskets into a hoop. I really enjoyed this. It was very satisfying because the motions nearly exactly replicated that of a basketball throw in real life. You hold onto the ball, and then swing your arm to launch it and release. This is almost exactly the interaction that I had to perform in Altspace. This was very well-done, and only took me a couple of tries to get the hang of.
The only frustrating experience was figuring out how to move around. I was expecting to be able to walk around freely, but couldn’t find a way to do so and had to use the “teleport” function to move everywhere. It would have been very fun and more immersive to have the capability to move freely around the space I was in, and explore every inch of it.
In terms of social interaction, I was able to enter a few separate “spaces” and meet other users. I was able to turn on my mic and talk to them, one-on-one. For the most part, it seemed like a lot of the users were older. One of the most interesting players I met was a veteran who lived in a remote area, and found it stimulating to engage with people across the world with his VR headset.
When doing research on why exactly the space seems to be shutting down, I found a couple of pieces that stood out. Microsoft seems to be shifting towards more XR creation tools rather than platforms. After all, they are a technology company- their mission is very different from Meta (the company behind Horizon Worlds), which is a social platform company at its core. In their official statement, they said Altspace needed to be discontinued as they shifted their focus “to support immersive experiences powered by Microsoft Mesh” (Road to VR). This seems to be a recurring trend- straying away from replacing face-to-face human interaction with its VR alternative. Though XR has made great strides in terms of public adoption in the past couple of years, it still has a long way to go.
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