[DAO:52806b8] Continued Enhancement of Decentraland VR Clients - Resubmission

by 0x9a739c2e212754c3d8432cb717dc9437e5b3dfae (Sean#dfae)

Should the following Tier 6: up to $240,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Platform Contributor category be approved?

Abstract

In this proposal resubmission, the team behind Decentraland’s VR client is seeking a grant for continued development and expansion of VR support for Decentraland. We submitted a grant proposal on November 8, 2022, which did not meet the voting threshold. We received constructive feedback in the proposal’s forum discussion. Based on the feedback received, the team has resubmitted the grant proposal and incorporated the community requests. Project details are provided in the description and specification sections of this proposal. The team is honored to be considered for a DAO grant for the continued development of Decentraland VR.

Grant size

240,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x6340676C1604186893Ab14521fDFc1C81AF07161

Email address

sean@onginnovations.com

Description

Background

In May 2022, the community voted to approve a Decentraland DAO grant that expanded the scope of the DAO-funded Decentraland VR client. The VR client was ported to run natively on the Meta Quest, a significant technical milestone that made Decentraland’s codebase Android compatible.

The team brought the PCVR and Quest VR clients to parity with the web/desktop versions of Decentraland by bringing all screen UI and pop-ups into VR and made in-game interactions work with the VR controllers.

The VR client team also made stability improvements, implemented a new VR user interface, and made heavy strides towards squashing bugs and incompatibilities related to the Android headset conversion. For the final deliverable of the previous grant, the team published Decentraland VR to the SideQuest store, which can be downloaded at: (Decentraland VR on SideQuest - Oculus Quest Games & Apps including AppLab Games ( Oculus App Lab ))

In this grant proposal, the VR client team seeks to continue maintaining, enhancing features, and improving the performance of the Decentraland VR clients over the next 6 months.

Summary of proposed work

A summary of proposed activities is provided in this section, with additional details in the specification section of this proposal.

  • New Minimum Viable Experience approach: Shout out to Yemel for this item! Our team agrees with community feedback from our previous grant proposal that rearchitecting the current Decentraland VR client may be in the best interest for the long term success and efficiency of the project. Our proposed approach is outlined in the specifications section.
  • Feature enhancements: The team proposes to add several VR enhancements, including hand tracking, more natural avatar movements for VR and VRM avatar support, and enhancements on the VR user interface. VRM support is also in response to this DAO proposal that passed by Morph.
  • Maintenance and Stability: The team will continue to maintain the VR client over the next 6 months, fixing any breaking issues that may occur and keeping the VR client in sync with any changes from the main Decentraland branches. The team is committed to improving the performance and reliability of the VR client. This includes increasing frame rate and reducing crashes and other bugs.
  • Marketing, PR and Social Media, store submissions: Shout out to Gino for this item! Per community feedback received on our previous grant proposal, we’re dedicating a portion of the grant budget towards Marketing and PR for raising awareness of Decentraland VR. We will also push the client to more stores in order to bring Decentraland to a wider audience.

Specification

New Minimum Viable Experience Refactor

The team agrees with the approach proposed by Yemel that we need to start building a dedicated Decentraland VR client from the ground up. This is in contrast to the current approach, which is a VR port of the existing Decentraland client. In order to maintain continuity and keep a version of Decentraland VR available to the community, we propose to work on this MVE refactor in parallel to maintaining and enhancing the current VR client. This is because any work done towards the current VR client such as hand tracking or VRM support (and more) can also be used on the new MVE.

VR Feature Enhancements

The team proposes to add several VR enhancements, including hand tracking, VRM Avatar support, and enhancements on the VR user interface. The VR client will still maintain controller support. The hand-tracking update will not replace controller support, but will be an alternative way to interact within Decentraland VR. We will also look at enhancing the avatar movements to leverage expanded movement in VR. For example, waving hands, limb movements (crouching), and more avatar movements that follows the user’s physical movement. We will expand upon the VR UI implement during the previous grant to make it easier to access quick actions like emotes, mic settings, and teleportation to parcels.

Maintenance and Stability

The team will continue to maintain the Decentraland client for the duration of this grant period (6 months), fixing any breaking issues that may occur and keeping the VR client in sync with any changes from the main Decentraland branches. This includes increasing frame rate and reducing crashes and other bugs.

The largest component of this category will be to convert Decentraland existing asset bundle system (currently only set up for the web client / WebGL) and make it android-compatible for the standalone VR clients. This will result in a major improvement in frame rate, memory usage, and overall stability of the VR client because the asset bundles are more optimized than loading in the GLTF models directly.

We also propose to set up a CI/CD pipeline for the VR client and implement a synchronized release schedule with the primary Decentraland client.
We will seek to automate this process as much as possible to reduce future manual maintenance needs.

Marketing, PR and Social Media, store submissions

Per community feedback received on our previous grant proposal, we’re dedicating a portion of the grant budget towards Marketing and PR for raising awareness of Decentraland VR. This will involve regular social media posting, video and tutorial publications, blog posts, interviews, press releases and other dissemination methods. We will also push the VR client to more stores to reach a wider audience. This includes being published first to Meta’s AppLabs store, and then to its full store which will make Decentraland VR available to an estimated 15-20 million players and vastly lower the technical hurdles to get it installed. We will also look to publish Decentraland VR to the SteamVR store.

High level budget breakdown

Personnel

The items outlined in this grant proposal will be managed and completed by the Ong Innovations team and our associated partners.

The team comprises

Sean Ong (Team technical lead / manager)

Clint Campbell (XR developer)

Paul Gumpert (XR developer)

Clinton Reddie (XR Developer and Ong Innovations development partner)

VeeRuby (Ong Innovations development partner)

AppVolks LLC (Ong Innovations development partner)

Additional information on our company, team members, and partners can be found in the links below

Roadmap and milestones

The team will report progress to the Decentraland community on an ongoing basis and will monitor the project’s forum closely for questions or to provide updates as needed. The team will summarize major activities formally in a monthly report.
The proposed project will be completed within 6 months based on the following milestones and timeline:

Jan-Feb 2023

Begin MVE Refactor. Begin additional store publication. PR and Marketing. Set up CI/CD pipeline, work towards automating syncing between main Decentraland and vr-client branches. Progress on Android-based asset bundles for improved VR client performance. Initial phases of VR client enhancements and hand-tracking support. Continued maintenance of Decentraland VR.

Mar-Apr 2023

Continued work on MVE Refactor. Published on Meta AppLabs Store. Published on SteamVR Store. PR and Marketing. Drafts of VR client hand tracking update for community testing, progress towards enhanced VR UI, and hand-based UI. Continued performance and stability updates. Continued maintenance of Decentraland VR. Work towards VRM Avatar support.

May-June 2023

Efforts to publish to full Meta Store (Meta store is invite only, so no guarantee of publication.) PR, marketing, press releases. Finalize VRM Avatar support. Continued Decentraland community and beta tests. Testing, bug fixes, user feedback collection. Full release of Decentraland VR client with new features. Continued maintenance of Decentraland VR.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

1 Like

I fully support a VR client for DCL and am so excited to see this type of grant. But I have absolutely no expertise in this area so I am waiting to hear from some of our more technically knowledgeable people to chime in with their thoughts on the budget. I would also like to hear from anyone voting against this proposal. What are your objections? Thanks guys.

1 Like

Hey Folks, you already received 460k of grants. I think you need to show results based on previous grants.

1 Like

I would vote for this if you don’t do VRM avatar support (the proposal that passed was just a Poll, not even a Draft or Governance vote).

I love the idea of a VR client, but I’ve a couple of issues:

Meta

This includes being published first to Meta’s AppLabs store, and then to its full store.

My understanding is that is not possible to publish on Meta store, rather Meta may select the app if they find it valuable. You may want to clarify that.

Source: Guide to Publish Your VR App on Oculus App Lab and Oculus Store

Steam

We will also look to publish Decentraland VR to the SteamVR store.

Steam explicitly prohibits the publication of apps using blockchain technology. May be possible to publish a Decentraland client, providing that all interaction with the blockchain is removed. You may want to clarify that also.

Source: Onboarding (Steamworks Documentation)

MVE

I would like to hear a bit more about the specs of the MVE

3 Likes

DECENTRALAND WAS MEANT TO BE IN VR!!! NOT JUST THE DESKTOP OR BROWSER.

As some one who has been apart of the testing and in the VR discord Channel through every update… This is by far, one of the most important grant proposals that DCL has currently. This team has gone above and beyond delivering, assisting and staying open with communication on every update HURDLE and LAND MARK resolved. The VR version is and has been mind blowing and I recommend anyone who has a nay say in this (DO YOU EVEN OWN A VR HEADSET TO TEST DCL VR?) to first plug in your VR headset (OCULUS) and experience what they have already created first hand before you cast your doubts. We should feel privileged to have such a great team thus far develop this for DECENTRALAND. This team has more than delivered on their promises to bring VR to us and has delivered. I would recommend everyone in this DAO to join their Discord channel to keep up and refresh on the Past-Present and future updates they have already provided vs just now tuning in before you vote NO. I also Strongly recommend you state your opinion on why you voted Yes or No when you cast your vote. It is our responsibility to not only vote but to also clarify exactly why you voted as “we” are the DAO.

I think there are some great questions here, asking for specifics on obstacles that may impact publication on In App stores and I commend these questions. My personal opinion is that if you have not been apart of the Channel where the updates have been ongoing that you do so by joining and reading the back log of what has already taken place.

1 Like

Couldn’t have said it better! Spot on! The VR Clients will open the floodgates to new users, customers, Decentraland population, and expansion.

The proposal has my vote.

1 Like

Ask and you shall receive: Discord This is the link that should take you to all the results you need.

Hello, @web3nit @Yannakis I take it you have not been following up on the initial updates and are not in the Discord Channel for this, here you go.

Additionally,


Yet, this team of dedicated individuals has pounded away, to provide the best tech available for our community with the initial proposal grant size.

I voted Yes because you guys used a Waifu as the avatar example.

While I’d love to see VR support for Decentraland.

I voted ‘no’ for the following reasons:

  1. I agree with Eibriel in that currently the 2 largest VR platforms/marketplaces will not support DCL VR for various reasons.

  2. I agree with web3nit and believe if you have already received multiple DAO grants ($460k in total) then you should really be able to show adequate results, and if you can truly present a viable test product then you should have little trouble securing additional funds from investors and therefore should not need additional funding from the limited resources of the DCL DAO. If an adequate result can not had with the initial $460k you have already been approved for, then IMO an additional $240k will not likely produce a viable outcome.

Continued Enhancement of Decentraland VR Clients - Resubmission

This proposal is now in status: REJECTED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes 22% 1,369,797 VP (54 votes)
  • No 78% 4,847,227 VP (22 votes)