The head of SideQuest is looking to resurrect AltSpace again.
The well-loved social platform Altspace closed down twice before. First, the startup behind the service was to close in 2017 during the start of modern VR’s first winter. It was rescued, however, in a last-minute buyout from Microsoft. Then Microsoft pulled the plug in 2023 in a sign of what was yet to come for Horizon Worlds and Rec Room.
Now SideQuest CEO Shane Harris is looking to re-launch the service yet again.
“Altspace was kind of like a safe space,” Harris said on the Good VR Podcast. “It was a place where people and organizations, groups, even brands could associate with it because they were, a lot more careful about how they presented it, how the avatars were presented, how the worlds, how their policies and how they worked with the community was always different in there.”
One of the core questions I had for Harris is whether his approach will be built in such a way that users might have some protection for the permanence of their worlds if SideQuest should be unable to continue it sometime in the future. It’s still early days, so there’s no clear answer to that question, but Harris did make it clear he’s thinking about it.
“We are building services behind the scenes to power this new AltSpace that will also be services that we offer out generally to other developers, like live networking, voice and data services, other parts of the platform,” Harris said. “We’ve built browser integrations, we’ve got creation tools and SDKs, we’ve got character systems and avatar systems. And actually what we’ve done is to build all of these out as modular pieces so that we can make those available to other developers as well.”
Harris connected to me from Dubai using the podcast recording platform Riverside and I edited the conversation down to around 45 minutes.
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