I found myself in a virtual bus, rolling in the dust. My avatar, and a few others, jumped around. Outside, in the sand, there were bikers. These bikers were real people: it was a 360 degree video. They stopped moving at the end of the clip. For a few moments, I felt like I was at Burning Man, a festival I had never attended. I was getting a tour of BRCvr’s Re-Burn 23, a farewell to a virtual space in Microsoft’s AltSpaceVR, which is happening this weekend.
BRCvr is a group that has been creating portals and memories of actual Burning Man moments throughout the pandemic. I have attended his annual virtual burns for the past three years. The free social experiments were some of the highlights of my time indoors with nothing but laptops, game consoles, and VR headsets. But the BRCvr universe, housed in Microsoft’s AltSpaceVR app, is soon to disappear. This is because Microsoft is stop AltSpaceVR and all its worlds permanently in mars, part of thousands of layoffs including many in the company’s VR and AR teams. Burning Man was a common bond between AltSpaceVR founder Gavin Wilhite and former Microsoft AR/VR lead Alex Kipman, and virtual burns have been sources of experimentation for Microsoft’s technology, including a concert live with 3D digitized artists.
BRCvr founders Athena Demos and Doug Jacobson spoke to me on Zoom and also in their builds of new shared spaces over the weekend. The spirit, despite the founders’ exasperation with Microsoft’s lack of support for AltSpaceVR artists, is one of forward-looking celebration. The goal is not to end things, but to look forward to what will be built next and where it will be.
“We found out about it in early December, because we were building for Microsoft in AltSpace – when they told us, we were like, ‘What’s going to happen to all your worlds?'” Demos explains. . “They want to focus all of their efforts on Mesh,” says Demos, referring to Microsoft cross-platform avatar technology that’s still being worked on, while in the meantime the long-running mixed reality and VR/AR teams are being scrapped, along with the worlds they’ve created.
It’s a stark reminder that virtual worlds don’t last forever, and the future of what everyone tries to call “the metaverse” is still in flux. In the meantime, however, BRCvr is hosting one last virtual burn celebration this weekend to remember what happened and reflect on what comes next.
A 360 degree video bubble of the actual Thunder Dome lives inside a VR dome. Enter it, and you can enter the moment.
BRCvr (screenshot by Scott Stein)
A celebration, an end, an evolution
According to Demos, much of BRCvr’s work can be picked up and used elsewhere. But this is not true for all artists. Some who have used AltSpaceVR’s kits to create their work cannot export their creations at all, leaving the art trapped inside AltSpaceVR and destined for destruction. This is a cause of grief for artists and a source of concern: if the social worlds want us all to build lives in these new universes, we must be able to control how we take up our creations and prevent them from being lost to the vagaries of big tech.
Demos is optimistic about the progress to come: “I think all these layoffs are going to create a bunch of small businesses, a bunch of little projects to form, a bunch of new technologies to do. And it’s going to be like a boom – probably in two or three years, all of a sudden it’s gonna be like, “where’s all this shit coming from?” “In the meantime, though, sometimes it’s a scramble to invent solutions to bridge new ideas .
Previous BRCvr extended layouts in AltSpaceVR included a Burning Man playa map that mirrored real space, with portals and experiences embedded throughout. This time the social hub is smaller but leads through portals to virtual spaces where immersive video has been overlaid. For the first time, I now see 360 video bubbles showing me what the real Burning Man festival was like last year. like. I walk into a virtual bar, and suddenly inside I see the real bar and the real people who were there. I walk into a half-dome cage where people are fighting – the Thunder Dome – and for a few moments I forget that I can just walk away.
This open bar now has a video bubble inside. Enter and discover the real version.
BRCvr (screenshot by Scott Stein)
Some exhibits, such as a circular room full of doors, each leading to a particular personal tarot card reading, are recreations of installations from Burning Man. Others are photogrammetry scans, 3D objects with photorealistic detail mapped onto them. Some are 360 degree video bubbles. Already, it seems more full of touching memories than previous BRCvr virtual etchings.
Virtual locations like these act as living memories of events that eventually fade away. But this time, even those memories disappear for the time being. It’s oddly poetic, considering one of the founding principles of Burning Man and BRCvr, “Leave No Trace.” In this case, thanks to the dismantling of AltSpaceVR, it will indeed be the case.
But ultimately, these virtual destinations can and should be mirrors of real-world locations, additions, and extensions. Demos and Jacobson are working to solve this problem, one scan and one video at a time. Maybe eventually these virtual worlds and the real worlds will really feel co-present, on the platforms and software creations to come, and I look forward to being a part of that when that happens.