AltspaceVR

» see altvr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i never owned a vr headset. by 2015 i was thirty-one and working on edge-ai problems in ankara, and the case for strapping a five-hundred-dollar pair of goggles to my face for any reason had not arrived. altspacevr is a thing i know about from the outside, the way you know about a hobby cluster you can read about but cannot personally remember.

eric romo founded altspacevr in 2013, betting on the wave of vr enthusiasm that the oculus rift kickstarter had kicked off in 2012. the public product launched in may 2015, before either the rift or the htc vive had reached consumers. it ran on a desktop without a headset for the first year, which is the kind of pragmatic concession that let it actually have users while the hardware caught up.

microsoft acquired altspacevr in october 2017, after the company had nearly run out of money earlier that year. the platform stayed alive inside microsoft's mixed-reality division for six more years, hosting live events that ranged from vr meditation circles to actual broadcast network conferences during the pandemic. on january 20, 2023 microsoft announced the shutdown for march 10. the official line was that the team was moving to microsoft mesh, the enterprise vr platform that has gone almost nowhere since.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the unique thing about altspacevr in 2015 was that it shipped before the consumer hardware was ready. you could log in from a desktop browser and walk around the same virtual room as someone wearing a development-kit rift. avatars were rough and walls were clip-through territory. that desktop fallback meant the platform could grow a userbase before headsets were affordable, which most vr-first products did not bother with.

~ what it became ~

during covid altspacevr had its real moment. with conferences canceled and people stuck inside, the platform hosted improv shows and interfaith religious services. burning man ran its 2020 virtual edition there. for a few months in mid-2020 it looked like vr social was about to break out of the early-adopter ghetto. by late 2021 the moment had passed, and the meta-driven metaverse hype machine had absorbed all the oxygen in the room without ever delivering a comparable product.

~ the day it died ~

microsoft announced the shutdown on january 20, 2023, giving users seven weeks of notice. the official reason was a corporate refocus on microsoft mesh. the practical reason was that mesh was an enterprise product priced for fortune-500 companies, and altspacevr was a free consumer product that microsoft no longer wanted to fund. the community held a final memorial event on the closing weekend, with users in vr quietly waving goodbye to people they had met in places that no longer existed. on march 10, 2023 the servers went dark for good.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »