Jimmy Zhang

Building the Metaverse

The article was put together with the help of Jimmy and posted with permission.

Jimmy also blogs about AltSpace from an unofficial blog.

There’s a new “Teleport Button” in the Altspace “Buttons” Kit. You can use it to teleport people to different locations within the same instance. This is particularly useful when you want to move people or groups of people around the map without them having to awkwardly walk through walls or teleport to get to and from.

Note that this name needs to be unique across all the Objects in the World.

You can spawn a teleport button within your world editor panel under AltSpace > Kits > Buttons.

Next, spawn a Teleport Button (Altspace > Kits > Buttons), you need to fill in the “Teleport Destination Name” and click Confirm.

Click the Teleport Button and you should immediately appear in the new location, in this case, on top of the giant blue coaster.

Demo World

You can try this out right now in my “Teleport Button Demo” World:

https://account.altvr.com/worlds/1046572460192825569/spaces/1815604168933507693

CODE: SMV698

FAQ

  • Are these released yet? Not yet. Very soon.
  • Is there a range limit? Not that I know of but I’ve been told weird things happen at ~100,000 meters from Origin though.
  • How many of these can we have in a World? These are lightweight so I would guess anything under 1000 is fine.
  • Can you be grabbing an object while using this? Yes, but not with the same hand. Go to Menu > Settings > Input > Left Cursor Always On.
  • Can I have two pointed at the same Destination? Yes. It’s a simple teleport function.
  • How can I customize the look of these buttons? One technique is to spawn an object that encapsulates the button, like a sphere and remove the collider. When a user points their cursor toward the sphere they can click it but they’re really clicking the button inside.
  • Can these take you to another World? No, they are “intra-World” meaning just within a single World.
  • Does this mean I can put a bunch of Worlds into one World? Yes, with some extra work, you can create more complex Worlds and have users teleport from one area to another. This gives you better performance because you can use tricks like draw distance and occlusion culling. However, this will not help much in Worlds with many SDK apps for example.