The aim for this field trip was to explore each platform, have meaningful discussions, and document our journey to share insight with the wider Metaverse building community.
We were fortunate for the lead developers of Cryptovoxels and Somnium Space to join our field trip. It’s always great when platform developers are able to take a break to explore other projects.
Decentraland’s team is mostly based in Argentina. The founders raised 86,206 ETH or $26,203,082 USD at press time during an ICO that lasted about 30 seconds on August 17th, 2017. The timing was extremely fortunate as the price of Ethereum soared from $300 during the time of ICO to over $1300 in 4 months, boosting the value of their ETH war chest well over $100M at one point.
Their main client is built on the non-free Unity game engine and it uses Typescript for the SDK. DCL has an in-game currency called MANA, an ERC20 token with total supply of 2,197,524,119 and a marketcap of 57M as of the time of writing.
The value of MANA is separate from the Ethereum from the ICO, giving DCL additional funding leverage.
MANA is used to purchase Decentraland NFTs such as LAND, wearables, and names. Developers can monetize their experiences on LAND using the SDK and MANA.
Loading took about a minute from entering the URL to being able to walk around in-game, you can try it out here: https://play.decentraland.org
One of the group members said it would be useful to have more communication about what is happening when things are loading while walking around. Currently we just see transparent greens walls and it was not immediately clear what that meant.
Guests are given a generated user name and randomized avatar. Guest avatars look different per client so we had to go by name to tell who was who. There was one public text channel to communicate on and messages didn’t float about avatars while talking which made it sometimes difficult to tell who was talking.
We used the mouse to look around and WASD keypad to move, pretty standard. Spacebar jumps but the Shift key slows a person down instead of the usual speed up / run.
When walking around Decentraland and things are loading in, there’s a green barrier that will block you until the scene has finished loading.
Decentraland doesn’t support flying globally so walking is the main way to get around town. There are commands for teleporting to different places but it will usually take a minute of loading in between hops.
Cryptovoxels is founded by Ben Nolan who is based in New Zealand. built on Babylonjs, an open source web based rendering game engine developed by Microsoft. Jumping into the world was pretty fast, can try it out for yourself here: https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play
Guest users are given a sprite avatar, but because of a bug right before our event everybody was given a sprite avatar. The sprite avatars look like plain mannequin models in 1 dimension, similar to NPCs in classic Doom.
Movement was used pointerlock mouse and WASD plus shift to run faster. We could teleport instantly to someone else in the chatbox by clicking on their name, which made it easy to group up. There is also the option to click links in the chat.
Walking around Origin City is like a experiencing a fusion of Minecraft and Geocities simultaneously. There is art in every direction, much of it is tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain.
One of the big differences between Cryptovoxels and the other platforms is that in CV the builder and the explorer are part of the same client. Whenever you press tab on a parcel that you own or have collaborator rights on (including sandbox parcels) to edit like a no-code website builder. You can build and hang out with your friends or collaborate together in real-time.
Another feature that comes out of the gate with Cryptovoxels is the ability to link to different parcels or out to external sites on the web. Clicking a link to another parcel within CV will teleport you instantly, while clicking a link to an external website will show a warning to confirm you want to leave.
Somnium Space is single instance persistent virtual world shaped by its users. It’s also made with the non-free Unity game engine. Out of the various blockchain virtual worlds we tested, it is the only platform that has day/night cycles and real-time shadows. We used their native desktop client in 2D and in VR mode, which you can install from steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/875480/Somnium_Space_VR/
One of the big differences from the other blockchain worlds was the lack of text chat in Somnium Space. There was not much UI, but perhaps this may come down the road since the 2D desktop support was brand new.
The island is pretty big as things are spaced about a 6km distance. We had a little trouble figuring out how to open the menu or to go in first person view.
The Somnium Space Builder features a drag n’ drop interface. There’s also a Unity SDK for uploading your own custom avatar although no in-game mirrors yet to view yourself in VR.
The terrain came with a lush interactive soundscape. When you jump in the water, it sounds like you’re swimming in water. Only a couple things would load in simultaneously but things were also spread more apart.
Somnium Space comes with a pretty good VR experience. There’s a tablet in VR mode to interact with a menu.
When we had the field trip, the 2D desktop client was brand new. There is no UI so it was sorta confusing at first to figure out how to change settings.
Somnium Space is PC only so Mac computer users had to follow along on Twitch. It’s unclear if a Webgl client for Somnium Space will come out although it is certainly in the realm of possibilities.
Blockchain Virtual Worlds
tags:
M3Proposal: https://github.com/M3-org/proposals/issues/9
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv9Cl7yt-60
The aim for this field trip was to explore each platform, have meaningful discussions, and document our journey to share insight with the wider Metaverse building community.
We were fortunate for the lead developers of Cryptovoxels and Somnium Space to join our field trip. It’s always great when platform developers are able to take a break to explore other projects.
Route: Decentraland
Cryptovoxels 
Somnium Space
To coordinate, we all hopped into a Discord voice channel to stay connected.
Discussion Questions
Decentraland
Website: https://decentraland.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/decentraland
Github: https://github.com/decentraland
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/decentraland/
Discord: https://dcl.gg/discord
Marketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/decentraland/
Video starts here: https://youtu.be/hv9Cl7yt-60?t=199
Decentraland’s team is mostly based in Argentina. The founders raised 86,206 ETH or $26,203,082 USD at press time during an ICO that lasted about 30 seconds on August 17th, 2017. The timing was extremely fortunate as the price of Ethereum soared from $300 during the time of ICO to over $1300 in 4 months, boosting the value of their ETH war chest well over $100M at one point.
Their main client is built on the non-free Unity game engine and it uses Typescript for the SDK. DCL has an in-game currency called MANA, an ERC20 token with total supply of 2,197,524,119 and a marketcap of 57M as of the time of writing.
The value of MANA is separate from the Ethereum from the ICO, giving DCL additional funding leverage.
MANA is used to purchase Decentraland NFTs such as LAND, wearables, and names. Developers can monetize their experiences on LAND using the SDK and MANA.
Loading took about a minute from entering the URL to being able to walk around in-game, you can try it out here: https://play.decentraland.org
One of the group members said it would be useful to have more communication about what is happening when things are loading while walking around. Currently we just see transparent greens walls and it was not immediately clear what that meant.
Guests are given a generated user name and randomized avatar. Guest avatars look different per client so we had to go by name to tell who was who. There was one public text channel to communicate on and messages didn’t float about avatars while talking which made it sometimes difficult to tell who was talking.
We used the mouse to look around and WASD keypad to move, pretty standard. Spacebar jumps but the Shift key slows a person down instead of the usual speed up / run.
When walking around Decentraland and things are loading in, there’s a green barrier that will block you until the scene has finished loading.
Decentraland doesn’t support flying globally so walking is the main way to get around town. There are commands for teleporting to different places but it will usually take a minute of loading in between hops.
Cryptovoxels
Website: https://cryptovoxels.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cryptovoxels
Github: https://github.com/cryptovoxels
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/cryptovoxels/
Discord: https://discord.gg/22Sb9v7
Marketcap: https://opensea.io/category/cryptovoxels
Video starts here: https://youtu.be/hv9Cl7yt-60?t=1449
Cryptovoxels is founded by Ben Nolan who is based in New Zealand. built on Babylonjs, an open source web based rendering game engine developed by Microsoft. Jumping into the world was pretty fast, can try it out for yourself here: https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play
Guest users are given a sprite avatar, but because of a bug right before our event everybody was given a sprite avatar. The sprite avatars look like plain mannequin models in 1 dimension, similar to NPCs in classic Doom.
Movement was used pointerlock mouse and WASD plus shift to run faster. We could teleport instantly to someone else in the chatbox by clicking on their name, which made it easy to group up. There is also the option to click links in the chat.
Walking around Origin City is like a experiencing a fusion of Minecraft and Geocities simultaneously. There is art in every direction, much of it is tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain.
One of the big differences between Cryptovoxels and the other platforms is that in CV the builder and the explorer are part of the same client. Whenever you press tab on a parcel that you own or have collaborator rights on (including sandbox parcels) to edit like a no-code website builder. You can build and hang out with your friends or collaborate together in real-time.
Another feature that comes out of the gate with Cryptovoxels is the ability to link to different parcels or out to external sites on the web. Clicking a link to another parcel within CV will teleport you instantly, while clicking a link to an external website will show a warning to confirm you want to leave.
Somnium Space
Website: https://somniumspace.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/somniumspace
Github: https://github.com/somniumspace (0 repos)
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SomniumNews/
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/somniumspace
Marketcap: https://opensea.io/assets/somnium-space
Somnium Space is single instance persistent virtual world shaped by its users. It’s also made with the non-free Unity game engine. Out of the various blockchain virtual worlds we tested, it is the only platform that has day/night cycles and real-time shadows. We used their native desktop client in 2D and in VR mode, which you can install from steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/875480/Somnium_Space_VR/
One of the big differences from the other blockchain worlds was the lack of text chat in Somnium Space. There was not much UI, but perhaps this may come down the road since the 2D desktop support was brand new.
The island is pretty big as things are spaced about a 6km distance. We had a little trouble figuring out how to open the menu or to go in first person view.
The Somnium Space Builder features a drag n’ drop interface. There’s also a Unity SDK for uploading your own custom avatar although no in-game mirrors yet to view yourself in VR.
The terrain came with a lush interactive soundscape. When you jump in the water, it sounds like you’re swimming in water. Only a couple things would load in simultaneously but things were also spread more apart.
Somnium Space comes with a pretty good VR experience. There’s a tablet in VR mode to interact with a menu.
When we had the field trip, the 2D desktop client was brand new. There is no UI so it was sorta confusing at first to figure out how to change settings.
Somnium Space is PC only so Mac computer users had to follow along on Twitch. It’s unclear if a Webgl client for Somnium Space will come out although it is certainly in the realm of possibilities.
Data
Supply of LAND (June 2020)
Volume in USD
Average Price of LAND (All-time)
Source: https://nonfungible.com/
Daily Active Users between platforms, May 2020
Google Trends between the blockchain VR platforms
Google Trends comparing the blockchain VR platforms to popular virtual worlds
Comparing how active founders are on their Discord servers
DCLNodes.io: Real-time view of how many users are logged in Decentraland
Data dump of Decentraland and Cryptovoxels during April 2020