Soon after COVID hit and made our team go fully remote, we quickly got tired of seeing each other’s faces on video and decided to give Mozilla Hubs a try — so we could meet up in the same room, virtually.

Hubs is pretty awesome, but there was one thing about the platform that just didn’t do for a team creating personal avatars: the generic robot-style avatars you have zero similarities or connection with.

Having the right tools at hand, we decided to fix the problem and integrate Ready Player Me avatars with the platform, so we could use our own avatars created on readyplayer.me in Hubs.

We tweeted some people in the Mozilla Hubs community about it and ran a successful Product Hunt campaign.

What happened next was unexpected. More than 30,000 avatars were created for Mozilla Hubs within a month of the launch, peaking at 2,500 avatars in one day. We saw a lot of excitement in social media as people were eager to show off their freshly created avatars or cheer to the progress of the 3D avatar industry.

Personal avatars are an essential part of the future of virtual communication. In contexts imitating reality, such as work meetings or conferences, people can connect with each other better when using avatars that look like themselves. We’re glad the Hubs community agrees.

Mozilla Hubs has already hosted many previously-offline meetups and conferences that moved online due to the pandemic. Ready Player Me avatars have made virtual conferences like WeAreSummit and SIGGRAPH feel more like face-to-face.

Personal avatars also make a perfect profile picture if you want your identity to be recognizable yet anonymous. Just check out Three.js founder @mr.doob’s Twitter pic (definitely one of our proudest moments). 💁‍♀️

How to create your own avatar for Mozilla Hubs?

1. Go to readyplayer.me
2. Take a selfie (or upload a photo)
3. Customize your avatar
4. Export the avatar, copy a link and paste it into Mozilla Hubs

What’s next for Ready Player Me?

We’re currently in the process of integrating Ready Player Me with many other VR apps, virtual events platforms and games. Our eventual goal is to create a universal identity platform that allows you to create your avatar once and use it across the virtual world.

We Added Personal Avatars to Mozilla Hubs And This Is What Happened was originally published in Virtual Worlds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fortnite And Roblox Are Changing Social Media As We Know It

Kids under 13 spend more time in Roblox than on Facebook, YouTube & Netflix combined

Originally published in Hacker Noon.

Games are becoming the way kids communicate with their friends these days. Much like the previous generation used to do at basketball courts and skate parks.

Hanging out on a basketball court was never only about the game. It was about spending time with your friends and socializing. Having an activity to gather around.

In 2019, the same thing happens virtually. The activity is Fortnite, Roblox and a little bit of Minecraft.

The numbers speak for themselves.

Kids under 13 spend more time in Roblox than on YouTube, Netflix and Facebook combined. Let that sink in for a moment.

Fortnite entered the scene and blasted to 250M monthly active users in under two years. It’s become a cultural phenomenon.

It took Roblox longer to reach the scale, but the numbers from 2016 onwards are astounding. The latest reported numbers were 100M active users in Q2 2019.

What makes those games so special?

They are the evolution of the basketball court. A virtual gathering place for kids these days. An activity to form friendships around.

I would argue that neither of them is actually a game. Both Roblox and Fornite are much more like social networks than they are games.

Here are 6 elements from Fortnite and Roblox that make them social.

1. It's a place

Roblox and Fortnite are true virtual worlds. More like physical places to hang out than traditional games.

In a typical shooter, the entire experience is intense, fast-paced and focused on a single goal — kill as many opponents as possible. The maps are small and focused, maximizing contact between teams. In other words — not a good place to hang out with your friends.

Fortnite takes place on a beautiful-looking island. There players can explore and take part in any kinds of virtual experiences they like.

Roblox is a platform and doesn't create any of the games themselves. Games, worlds, and experiences are created by the community itself.

Unlike in traditional shooters, in Roblox and Fortnite there's a lot of idle time between the game. Most of the time is spent on exploring the world, collecting weapons and supplies, etc. This creates plenty of empty space for a casual chat.

When a kid is playing Fortnite you will realize that they are not that concerned about the game at all. The emphasis is on catching up with friends, discussing school and the latest in pop culture.

Those games provide a safe place to hang out, experiment and mess around with your friends. It's a social place. Like a basketball court.

Viewing virtual worlds as a substitute for a physical place and understanding its social value is crucial to realizing how significant the game experience has become.

2. Content creation and content consumption

The best social platforms find a good balance between content creation and content consumption. As with Fortnite, you start off playing the game — creating content. When you die you default into watching the rest of the battle — consuming content. In most cases you’re playing with friends so watching their gameplay is as compelling as playing yourself.

In addition to playing the game, Fortnite is also an awesome game to watch. It's the most watched game on Twitch, counting 275M hours watched in the last 90 days.

Sharing content and watching others play helps the community keep its culture. Helping people play the game better and teaching how to be cool in Fortnite.

Content creation and consumption have helped Epic with selling players on a digital dream. Exactly like plenty of social networks before. Even if you’re a nobody from nowhere, you have a tangible path to becoming the next Ninja.

If you’re good enough at Instagram, you can become an influencer. If your videos are popular enough on YouTube, you can make a living as a YouTuber. If you kill it (ha) at Fortnite, you can find yourself hanging online with A-listers like Drake. All you need is enough determination.

In Roblox, you can become one of the star creators of Roblox games and worlds, making millions even before graduating high school. In 2019 Roblox is paying out more than $100M to its 2 million creators. Most of them are under 18.

3. Community-driven

Both of the communities are driven by their vibrant communities of players and creators. In Roblox, all of the games, worlds, and experiences are created by the community itself. The players are the creators and vice versa.

Traditional gaming companies have a huge “hit or miss” risk with every title. And even then, over time almost all major games lose their popularity. Roblox is an organically evolving social platform, not a single hit gaming title. It's driven by the community and much less likely to go through the typical rise and demise cycle of a popular game. Who would know the communities' needs better than the community itself?

Epic Games is aiming in the same direction. Although Fortnite started with a “fixed” world, they have recently introduced the Creative Mode. It allows players to create their own maps, collaborate with others while building the environments. Eventually, sharing the new games and worlds with other people in the community.

They've created a persistent virtual world that’s always under construction by the community itself. It’s like Instagram or Twitter that you’re constantly refreshing because there’s always something new to see.

Fortnite helps people create meaningful relationships inside and outside of the game. Fan events and official “/Fortnite/Friendlies” which are special events where all the people in the same physical space get matched into the same game together are a great way to connect with the community offline.

4. Gets better with more users

Playing Fortnite and Roblox alone is a compelling experience. Much like scrolling Instagram or Twitter — discovering content from celebrities and influencers without having yet connected with any of your friends.

Multiplayer is even better. Winning a 100 person Battle Royale is hard. That’s why it’s better to team up with friends to form a squad. It’s more fun and your chances of ending up #1 are bigger.

Like other social networks, those games benefit from network effects and get better with more users. If all of your friends are playing, it becomes a default place to spend time and hang out. Both Fortnite and Roblox have achieved this by being cross-platform and free to play for everyone — much like a social network. This makes it more difficult for other similar platforms to come up and compete.

5. Influences pop culture

The Fortnite culture is spilling over into the real world.

Fornite's biggest early star Ninja playing a live match with Drake and achieving 627k live stream viewers. Marshmallow virtual concert with 10.7 million attendees in Fortnite. Kanye West taking inspiration for his “I Love It” music video from Roblox. These are just some examples of how ingrained the games are already in Western pop culture.

All of this creates excitement in players even when not in the game. It's become a cultural phenomenon that kids feel they have to be a part of. Me too, actually.

6. Status mechanisms

Both of the games have made avatar customization one of the primary monetization methods.

Player’s looks in the game is a status symbol. People want to customize their avatars to differentiate from others and have the coolest items. Walking around with a rare skin in the game is similar to uploading a cool post to Instagram and getting tons of likes.

The skins, in-game accessories and customization options have to be unlocked through gameplay or bought with in-game currency acquired with real money.

There's even a new form of cyberbullying that has emerged — the default skin. Players with default customizations are looked down upon in the game. It's usually a sign of a low skilled player — a noob.

The social nature of the games makes people spend time and money on acquiring cosmetic items that give no extra benefits in the actual gameplay. I guess you really don't want to be the default skin dude that nobody wants to play with.

The connections between players and their avatars will be increased further as the characters become more personal. Representing their owners' real-life appearances more accurately. This is the stuff that we are working on at Wolf3D — creating personal 3D avatars.

What's next?

Both Roblox and Fortnite say they are “bigger than games”.

It's difficult to see kids “graduating” from Fortnite and Roblox and moving on to traditional social media. A 2D scrollable feed of Instagram doesn't sound so exciting after having grown up in a 3D virtual world.

“There is something missing in conventional social media right now. We have social networks like Facebook, KakaoTalk, Twitter and Naver for communication. But they’re all based on text, pictures and movies. I think the next step is going to be having social experiences where you can get together with your friends in a virtual world, wherever you are,” — Tim Sweeny, Founder of Epic Games (Fortnite)

I think this is one of the biggest opportunities in consumer internet today. Building the virtual worlds and related tech people will use for everyday online communication in the future.

Fortnite And Roblox Are Changing Social Media As we Know It was originally published in Virtual Worlds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Set yourself goals and measure your progress in achieving them.

Create a system to look back and find out things you can do better.

Book a time in your calendar just for this purpose.

Weekly, monthly, quarterly. Whatever works for you.

• What are my goals?
• Are my actions aligned with my goals?
• What major mistakes have I done the past?
• Am I learning fast enough?
• Am I making progress?
• What can I do better?

Ask help from people close to you in life, they might know better.

What's your system?

Last week Facebook held an annual developers conference focused exclusively on VR — Oculus Connect. Many new developments around their platform were announced, some very important for Wolfprint 3D.

Social VR is developing

Mark Zuckerberg came on the stage first, demonstrating the new social VR platform that Facebook has been working on. You can play games like chess or cards, sword fight with pre-made or DIY-drawn swords, or watch a giant TV screen together with your friends in VR. You can even take a phone call inside Facebook Messenger, or take a VR selfie and instantly share it to Facebook.

“Enjoying VR together with the people you care about is one of the most meaningful experiences that VR can offer.” — Lauren Vegter, Product Manager in Oculus

Facebook knows how powerful social VR can be. We are happy to see they have made another big step towards bringing that technology to the consumer market.

Oculus avatars

The most exciting announcement for was the Oculus Avatars.

“We’ve talked a lot in Oculus over the years how we believe social is going to be one of the primary platform pillars of VR. And avatars are a really important part of that vision.” — Nate Mitchell, Head of product in Oculus

Oculus launched an avatar platform where users can choose between pre-made hairstyles, face types and clothing to create a virtual representation of themselves.

The Avatar system will go live in December, and it looks like you’ll be able to use the Avatar in a few different games and apps. One of those apps is Oculus Rooms, which is essentially a virtual hangout space for you and your friends.

Creating a virtual representation for yourself for virtual reality experiences is going to be very important part of making VR truly social. We know it, Facebook knows it. We are happy to see Facebook going to the direction we always thought it will.

“Avatars are going to form the foundation of your identity in VR, enabling you to represent yourself in social interactions” — Lauren Vegter, Product Manager is Oculus

What does it mean for Wolfprint 3D?

While the Facebook’s new avatar system leaves room for some personalization, their avatars are still very far from being an accurate representation of a real person. For creating authentic connections, a better solution is needed. The only way to create realistic life-like 3D avatars is by using high-quality 3D scanning technology. Wolfprint 3D is in a good position to solve that problem.

“I believe developing virtual humans is going to be the single most important factor in making VR a part of our everyday lives thanks to the social interaction it will enable.” — Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist in Facebook

Learn more about Wolfprint 3D

References:

Social VR Demo | Avatars demo | Keynote highlights | Full Keynote

Oculus Avatars — Why does it matter? was originally published in Virtual Worlds on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.