This is one of the most critical posts I have to write about because no one is writing about it. Without answers from the Altspace team, I’ve had to venture out into the web to find information to support any indication of what the Altspace platform may look like in 2022. The reality is, I’m not sure if Altspace will be around in Christmas 2022, and it’s an unfortunate and grim prediction to make, but I’m going to break it down into the reasons why I feel this way in the hope that this information reaches the people who are invested in the platform including myself and I want them to consider preparing themselves.
Jimmy’s dissapearance & The end of community meetups
In recent weeks AltVR engineer Jimmy has been re-assigned within the Altspace team. He is still active as an existing staff member and still has his admin permissions. Still, he has been very much absent from the official Altspace discord server and only rarely seen back on for a reply then jumping back off the server entirely. From my general understanding of HR and non-disclosures, Jimmy may have been too emotionally invested in the community and may have been seen to be a liability to keep things under wraps.
The last community meetup hosted by AltVR announced that now former-admin ‘Q’ left the AltspaceVR company and also announced that there wouldn’t be any more community meetups for a while. I was personally there for that meetup, and it did raise a few nervous red flags for me at the time.
Within the two weeks after the last community meetup, Jimmy was told he couldn’t continue his meetups, and this was at the same time that he was pulled back.
Speculation: Why Jimmy has vanished
All that is commonly known is that “Jimmy is working on other projects” and in some conversations, I have heard he is working on Microsoft Mesh related projects.
I have found an article from the Mixed Reality blog from the Microsoft website that announces the introduction of HoloLens 2 support for Unreal Engine.
Currently: AltspaceVR uses Unity for their platform, so adapting to Unreal Engine is news.
Continued Updates to Microsoft Mix Reality Toolkit
Yep, they even have a logo for the download now, so it is very much still in development. Before the URP update, we had a taste of installing the Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit into our Unity projects. This package also included many other tools that weren’t required. This begs the question, why did they move us back to having the uploader manually again? I’ll get to that.
Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit is still very much in development. Was it just a test run?
The Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) for Unity is a Microsoft-driven, open-source project that provides a set of components and features to accelerate cross-platform mixed reality app development in Unity.
Learn more at http://aka.ms/MRTK.
Microsoft Won Award for Best Developer Tool (Microsoft Reality Toolkit)
The toolkit is 100% being maintained because they just won an award.
The MRTK team would like to extend a warm thanks to you, the MRTK community. Your contributions, feedback, and votes have helped MRTK win the 2021 Auggie Award for Best Developer Tool! Without your support, we would not be where we are today. Whether it’s adding new platform support, new features, bug fixes, suggestions, questions, or any of the other numerous ways you might have contributed: Thank you!
We’d also like to thank our dear friend Lachlan Ford for accepting the Auggie Award on our behalf and for making sure that we received the award safe and sound.
Cited: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/mrtk-unity/release-notes/mrtk-27-release-notes?view=mrtkunity-2021-05
Huge Recent Patch Updates to Microsoft Reality Toolkit
In the same post announcing the award, included notes of the MRTK 2.7.4 bug fixes and changes. The list was too long, but you can read the full notes here. It’s fascinating that so many updates are happening to the toolkit but very little or none to AltspaceVR.
While on the same day, this was the only update pushed to AltspaceVR, which was a patch for holoportation service. My take from the recent updates is that we are test subjects for a future platform change, and we don’t be seeing any significant updates until it’s time for some migration??? My speculation is AltspaceVR are only doing urgent patches while testing hologram and other mesh technology.
What is Microsoft’s Metaverse?
The title of the video says it all. It’s Microsoft’s Metaverse, not our Metaverse but nevertheless, this video shows different avatar systems. It looks similar in some ways but there is a moment at 1:09 of the video below where you can see a resembling AltspaceVR avatar. These avatars look different enough to require an overhaul of existing prop MRE’s.
What’s going to happen to Altspace?
Anyone’s guess but I am not sure if Altspace could support Unreal Engine worlds at the moment so the fact they aren’t announcing supporting Unreal Engine worlds and win awards for Mixed Reality Toolkits allows them to do awesome integrations that you can find in this video.
It is clear that these features aren’t going to be on Altspace anytime soon considering the current state of MRE’s. It wouldn’t surprise me if Altspace did merge with the other Mesh integrations that MRE’s as we know them to be removed/remade.
Microsoft seems very fixed on providing public updates for Microsoft Mesh. It is much easier to find news and updates about the Mesh side of Microsoft and I can currently find the roadmap for Microsoft Mesh but none for AltspaceVR.
It feels like AltspaceVR isn’t addressing the graphical issues caused by the changes to URP and may indicate that Microsoft is pulling back away from Unity to be more focused towards upskilling developers to integrate using Unreal Engine.
Articles to support this:
It is important to note they have released the recent patch mentioned above for Unity 2021 support. This is noted since AltspaceVR just upgraded from Unity 2019 to 2020 in recent months.
There is also courses available on Unreal Engine for upskilling with the Hololens 2 Mixed Reality.
Closing notes and what does this all could mean
AltspaceVR may be on the chopping block OR we are looking at a massive platform overhaul in a short space of time in the near future. The other possibility is that this platform is kept open until Microsoft Mesh platform makes AltspaceVR unfavourable over other Mesh compatible platforms.
A brand renaming is probably going to happen at the very least and there may be support for migrating content to a social version of Microsoft Mesh for teams. Microsoft would have the incentive to do so to compete with FaceBook but when I look at the AltspaceVR social media profiles I don’t see as many posts especially on their YouTube channel. This is odd when the topic of the Metaverse is trending, one would think they would be updating their Steam store pages to reflect the current existing avatars at the very least.
At least the home page for Mesh at least references AltspaceVR in a tab waaaayyy towards the bottom of the page. It’s not proudly promoted anywhere and the recent staff reassignment may indicate AltspaceVR is simply not a priority unless it helps them advance their platform cause.
On the Mesh Microsoft website, it is promoted you can connect from multiple devices to be linked over the Mesh platform, which leads to the possibility that AltspaceVR may be some sort of fallback service to appear as a hologram elsewhere. This would make it so people who couldn’t afford the hefty price tag for a Hololens that can connect from AltspaceVR as an alternative. This is backed up by today’s 17th December patch updates relating to a fix for Holoportation.
It’s hard to know for certain what the future holds for AltspaceVR, but all that can be certain is Microsoft is rapidly building and getting ready for the Metaverse, and I feel like FaceBook’s Meta announcement caused for progression at great speed to be made in recent weeks. I hope AltspaceVR isn’t left behind.
As much as this post is speculation it would be great to get a future roadmap so we can have clarity and a timeline when we can expect things to happen, for better or for worse.
