I do a bit of virtual-realty dabbling. Nothing fancy!
My primary avatar is crudely based off what I looked like in my mid-20's:
Note: The Hexaplex Isolate can be found in the Places app (bottom utility bar in the Overte Interface program). I am just starting to build it, so for now it is mostly simple blocky generic place-holder objects that will be replaced with more detailed objects over the coming years.
This virtual world that serves as my personal virtual space, primarily for testing ideas and self-training. It is resource-light and I normally restrict it to no more than 6 simultaneous visitors (plus reserved slots for myself and two specific friends) as it is running on a fairly light-weight server. Expect instability and frequent breakage! (from me fiddling with the content: Overte itself is stable enough). Also, even with a careful eye on data sizes, it can be a little slow to load - I'm in Australia, with its notoriously less-than-ideal international link speeds, so if you are accessing from elsewhere in the world, be patient while the initial models load.
Please note that my world is not necessarily representative of Overte's visual capabilities. Due to self-imposed resource constraints, as well as a personal aesthetic preference, my worlds tend to be a little angular and blocky, use somewhat low-resolution textures, and not a lot of visual effects. Overte can do a lot more! And more!
The Hexaplex is a small high-density futuristic city, aiming for the gritty style of classic 70's CyberPunk literature. It is not in any way related to the 2020's game Cyberpunk 2020 which - while a perfectly good game (at least since the 2.0 patches) - is not really in line with my own CyberPunk aesthetic or the narrative themes I wish to explore.
As the name hints, the city is based on a hexagonal street layout, and hexagons feature in other ways too.
Remember: Hexagons are the Bestagons! ... serously, the way they break into triangles can make for really efficient and decent-looking 3D meshes, particularly terrain! They are also very efficient for actual city-street layout, even though we rarely use them in the real world, mostly for historical/cultural reasons.
The Hexaplex is not a vibrant hub of humanity! It is severely degraded and mostly abandoned: a place of disturbing liminal spaces and inconclusive hints of a past catastrophe of indeterminate nature. I am hoping to add in a good bit of environmental story-telling over the coming years around this theme.
Overte gives you up to around 16km3 of usable volume in a world. You can go far beyond this, but the foibles of floating-point maths start to intefere with graphics beyond the 8km-from-origin range. My world, so far, only uses a tiny fraction of this, opting for a denser layout in the very middle (my previous practice VR world, The Endless Desert went quite the other way. I might integrate some of it back in, beyond the city limits, one day).
Below is my initial work in images and some scratch-plans in descriptive text. I will add more images as I get bits at least to initial block-fill-in in-world. Expect arbitrary changes!
World-coordinates 0,0,0, so where you arrive by default. This is also the place where my three initial hexagons (and the roads at their edges) meet, forming a Y intersection and a logical place to start from.
This is currently my primary focus of creation, and consists of a tall cylindrical tower with retail spaces on the ground floor and residential apartments above. Most are canonically empty and abandoned, but a few may contain squatters.
An automated fast-food franchise.
Signage created by hand in Inkscape and GIMP, using WebSearched real neon burger-joint signs as visual reference (and the physical one on the actual burger-shop on the commercial level of my real-life apartment tower)
Seating was modeled from basic 3D-shapes (mostly cylinders) in Blender.
Yes, this one features an autogenerated-slop mural. That was deliberate, this being a dystopian hell-scape and all. Autogeneration has its uses (though I had to touch this one up by hand anyway, because even the intentional slop was just a bit too sloppy! I added some stains with a GIMP filter while I was at it.
Some other ideas for businesses I might put in:
I'll probably also put up a few more of these towers, but as locked-off solid blocks, about the place to crowd out spare space.
A truncated pyramid, quite inspired by the Tyrell Corporation building in Blade Runner, though mine will be based on a hexagonal pyramid to fit the city street-grid.
A tall tri-based concrete monolith inspired by the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea. The bulk of the building is a hotel complex, with a revolving (and probably revolting) restaurant at the peak.
Off to one side is a container-shipping dockyard, overlooking a stagnant bay.
Under the city streets are a generous drainage-sewer system. Branching off these main pipes are a less-welcoming maze of sub-conduits servicing the internal spaces of the various city blocks.
Below the city is a large cavernous space. It is not a place that is good to be! There are hints that this isn't the first, and possibly not even second, city built on this site. Off this space are further smaller hidden places, both modern and ancient, each more foreboding and disturbing than the last.
I am also toying with the idea of using my personal constructed language (which I am developing for use in an unrelated project) here too, so some signage may end up translated into that. In which case, I probably need some kind of hand-held auto-translator device for visitors! The language has both Greek-alphabet-like and Korean-character-inspired writing modes, so I should be able to get a decent mixed-Euro-Asian fusion look with it, even.
I primarily use the following software (all is open-source and multi-platform):
Overte: a general-purpose VR platform. You can just run the client to interact with other people's worlds, using a headset or a flat screen. No crypto or NFT junk ripping you off with expensive artificial-scarcity - you can have as many VR-worlds (of up to 16km3 each) as you want to supply your own server-capacity for, using any cloud-provider (or in-company) server for bigger, always-available worlds, or even running a smaller world from your home laptop/desktop computer for free (the limit will more likely be your home network bandwidth than the power of your computer).
Right now, Overte works well on MS-Windows and Linux. Code trees for MacOS and Android are present but in a non-functional state. If any MacOS or Android OSS developers, particularly with C++ and Qt experience, want to tackle either of those, you will be more than welcome! The core developers are presently transitioning the 3D-engine from OpenGL to Vulcan, which is expected to make MacOS support a lot easier once that is done, too.
Blender: a very featureful 2D/3D modeling animation package. I use about 1/8th of its capabilities, mostly static modeling for insertion into my Overte worlds (and for 3D print, but that is another story!). It is a bit daunting in its complexity, but there are extensive (and usually good, even!) tutorials all over the place for beginners (do the donut!).
GIMP: an open-source image-editing staple which I mostly use for generating my image-based textures.
Current Server: I presently run on a cheap shared single-core Linode server at Akami. This is plenty for my low-use server, to which I support 6 simultaneous visitors (plus a reserved slot for myself), and a relatively simple world mostly for self-learning purposes.
Until quite recently, I was running my Overte server from a 14yo junk PC in my laundry. It worked perfectly well for my own uses. I mainly moved up to Akami Linode because I started hosting this web site there, and adding a Overte VR server along side the existing Web server was not much additional work, and no extra expense. Having done it all before on my junker PC at home certainly helped smooth the process (as it did for the Apache web server, which I also ran as a test instance of on that same junker first to get my head around how to do it).
Possible Alternate Home-Servers (additional to using a junk PC) include using a small power-sipping SBC (Single-Board-Computer). A Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 actually has fairly decent CPU performance, for very low power usage, though less-than-ideal I/O performance for this kind of usage (not a criticism - this isn't the usage either the devices, or the chips in them, were intended for).
There are alternate SBC options available which have their own pros and cons vs the Pi devices (generally stronger I/O, but weaker CPU cores), and nothing beats the support of the Raspberry Pi community. For a resource-light world limited to only half-a-dozen simultaneous visitors, a Pi5 or equivalent is plenty of processing power for the server-side.
If you want to host a world that can cater to hundreds of simultaneous visitors (yes, Overte can handle that), you will likely saturate your home broadband long before you run out of processing power, so would have to switch to cloud-based hosting for that anyway.
Client: I presently run on an intel NUC micro-PC with an i7 CPU, 64GiB RAM and a high-end integrated graphics processor. This is actually massive overkill for a modern GNU/Linux system, and I only have it because it was cheaper to get that pre-assembled than a less-capable bespoke version in that form-factor. The client runs easily, especially for the kinds of low-detail content I tend to prefer.
Headset: I have a few old headsets, donated to me by former users who got bored with them. One even still works! Well, actually all still work from a hardware perspective, but the manufacturers got bored with them too and effectively-bricked them through ending the web services they seem to need just to power-on. When Overte switches from using SteamVR as a (really clunky) intermediary to direct OpenXR drive, one or both of the 'non-working' ones might even come back to life! I also have a gifted VivePro (origional) which works quite well under SteamVR.
I might buy my own some day! I am very unlikely to ever get anything by Meta as I probably can't get the needed Meta account to use one (my online presence is a bit too-well shielded from routine commercial identity-tracking, and if you don't show up on their advertising servers you are a non-person as far as they are concerned! And I am not really interested in sending them my photo-ID just to prove I exist enough to buy their products. I'm sure they won't miss my non-monitisable eyeballs at all!).
I have briefly played with a Meta Quest 2 at my former workplace and it is very impressive hardware and worked very well for 3D games. Just a shame about the corporate lock-in!
Apple's VisionOS offering may be the first properly-usable-for-doing-actual-work headset, for a rather premium price, but I have similar lock-in issues with Apple's ecosystem.
Valve has a better reputation for providing decently-open hardware, so their just-announced Frame device may well end up being the first VR headset I actually buy myself. We'll see.
Finally, because I spend more time building in VR than just looking about, I tend to work on a large flat screen more than in a headset anyway - Overte will let you build in VR fine, but - like all contemporary VR - it can be a bit of a chore with the game-centric controls for all but simple object-positioning/sizing/rotating. It is much the same as with mobile-phone application development where the target device is great for content consumption but not practically usable for all but the simplest content creation. I usually build on a flat-screen and test in a headset. A headset is definitely far more immersive but a flat screen is often easier, and Overte supports both as first-class interfaces.
Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)! I wish! And not one from Elon, Mark, or any of the rest of the GooMyFaceYouTwit* crowd! Such a thing would definitely have to be a fully and properly open platform completely in my control, before I even considered plugging it into my mushy-grey-bits!
* Thanks to The Register for coining that lovey portmanteau. Note that the 'My' in that refers to Myspace: They used to be a big deal, just like Twitter... um X?... used to be! Ho hum, the tech-world rolls on.... 😆