by 0x8b257b97c0e07e527b073b6513ba8ea659279b61 (Morph)
Vehicles & Seating - two highly requested features of the open metaverse.
With smart items and emotes these realities are becoming closer - but while developers can build complex systems to enable these on their DCL land/wearables, it is important to ask:
How can Decentraland one day support these features as upgrades - natively and interoperably.
I believe it would be beneficial for either the DCL foundations developers, or DCL DAO protocol developers to join OMI (https://omigroup.org/) in discussions to understand the current space, working on what is needed in future specs or reviewing the viability of OMI standards for DCL implementations.
The current spec for extensions on these features (and others) can be found here:
The OMI group itself has many talented Godot developers who are working on upgrading not only the OMI spec, but on communication with other metaverse developers throughout Web2 & Web3 to define and integrate varying implementations.
At the very least, I believe connecting our systems & Godot experts within the DAO or foundation with OMI (even for a brief technical chat) would be a great benefit to enable further interop of DCL as a metaverse engine & platform.
This grant is not intended to be actionable immediately, or to force the hands of future development, but to gather whether community sentiment is strong and if the idea is sound - I hope that the builders of DCLs engine and platform will also appreciate and find these standards valuable, while we the community can try find ways to incentivize the alignment of future metaverse development & interoperability via grants and creator support.
For further reading on OMI and the goals of these standards - here is an M3 breakdown:
Hello! I’m the one who initiated this discussion, thanks to Morph for opening this proposal.
To add some more information, the OMI vehicle specs are still a work-in-progress, so now is a great time for Decentraland to help shape how that data is going to look. We want to make a general-purpose vehicle standard that can be used for any type of vehicle and used on any game engine or metaverse platform. We will have an OMI_vehicle_body extension that can be specified on the root of the vehicle with parameters for how the vehicle is controlled and what the pilot seat node is (using the already completed OMI_seat extension). Then to make it a car, you would add wheels by giving the vehicle child nodes with the OMI_vehicle_wheel extension. A future extension could expand upon this by adding more extensions for airplane wings, spaceship thrusters, etc. Aside from vehicles and seats, there are other standards OMI is working on that Decentraland may be interested in.
I think it’s likely that we can discuss these things and end up with agreement on the standards. But in the event that there is disagreement, note that Decentraland could still import the OMI data to the closest equivalent. If the features Decentraland wishes to offer for vehicles are a superset of OMI, then Decentraland can allow customizing after import, or add on another extension with more data. If the features Decentraland wishes to offer are a subset, then just that specific part of the data can be ignored with most of the vehicle functional.
About me: I work at a company called The Mirror, which is building a real-time game development platform (think like Roblox and Garry’s Mod put together). It’s built on the open source Godot engine and uses open standards where possible so that content creators can bring content in and out without artificial barriers. I am a contributor to Godot, and have been for over 5 years.
If you want to discuss more, feel free to join the OMI group Discord. We have weekly meetings on Wednesday mornings (for the whole group) and Thursday evenings (for glTF specifically). I can be reached on Discord “aaronfranke”, and here is my GitHub https://github.com/aaronfranke/, and I was told to share my Twitter here https://twitter.com/aaronfranke7