[DAO:dba1365] Continued Enhancement of Decentraland VR Clients

Governance
1

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

The team behind Decentraland’s VR client is seeking a grant for continued development of VR support for Decentraland. We propose to add several VR features, including hand tracking and hand-based menus, better avatar handling for VR, and enhancements on the VR user interface. We will continue improving the performance and reliability while also maintaining the VR client. We propose to set up a CI/CD pipeline for the VR client. The team is honored to be considered for a DAO grant for the continued development of Decentraland VR. We are excited to be part of Decentraland’s journey toward making the metaverse a fun, immersive and vibrant economy that increases accessibility to Decentraland citizens all over the world!

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. 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.

  • Feature enhancements: The team proposes to add several VR enhancements, including hand tracking, more natural avatar movements for VR, and enhancements on the VR user interface. Additional details on this is provided in the specification section.

  • Improving performance and reliability: 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. Additional details on this is provided in the specification section.

  • Maintenance: 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. Additional details on this is provided in the specification section.

Final Remarks

The team proposes to build upon previous VR client efforts by submitting the current grant proposal, which is fully dedicated to the Decentraland VR client. The team is honored to be considered for a DAO grant for the continued development of Decentraland VR. We are excited and grateful to be part of Decentraland’s journey toward making the metaverse a fun, immersive and vibrant economy that increases accessibility and financial opportunities to Decentraland citizens all over the world!

Specification

VR Feature Enhancements

The team proposes to add several VR enhancements, including hand tracking, more natural avatar movements for VR, and enhancements on the VR user interface.

Using hand tracking (instead of controllers) is a more natural way of interacting in the metaverse. A hands-based experience will require some engineering to include items like palm-based menus, selection interactions, teleporting/movement, and other interactions that would otherwise require controller buttons/joysticks. 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 also investigate VRM avatar support.

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.

Improving Performance and Reliability

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.

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 requires close coordination with the Decentraland foundation team and will result in a major improvement in frame rate, memory usage, and overall stability of the VR client. This is because the asset bundles are more optimized than loading in the GLTF models directly.

The team will also work closely with key Decentraland areas and community members such as the Museum District to ensure that content is VR-friendly and performant.

Maintenance

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.

As part of this process, we seek 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.

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:

December 2022-January 2023

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.

February-March 2023

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.

April-May 2023

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

2 Likes
2

Voting Yes, you’ve been consistently delivering during the previous grant. I’ve experienced DCL trough your standalone VR client, and I think a VR client adds value to Decentraland.

Something I’m looking forward is to have the app published on SideQuest and the equivalent for PCVR (I’m assuming that Steam is not an option).

1 Like
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As a user of the VR client, that loves experiencing new builds of DCL in the in VR, I’m stoked to see this proposal. And holy shi*t, the hand tracking feature, blew my mind reading. This will be a game changer for the VR client, because it’ll feel so much more natural to interact with, and take the awkwardness out of the controllers (for me).

Def a big supporter of the team, they are super approachable and responsive to feedback. And I think VR will help DCL progress into the future, so we should continue the amazing work done so far by the team already.

1 Like
4

This team is doing great work! Add much value to DCL, I def need to vote yes. But I think during the next grant year, I hope the team can start to think of some business model, to make this project more economically sustainable, and I do believe this is sth quite important to the community and also for the team. At last, appreciate your hard works, and trust you will make the project and DCL better!

1 Like
5

isn’t too much $700k ?

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Hi @mr0ng, great seeing this proposal live. I’d love to see an overview of the proposed budget for this work iteration. I feel that as we are getting closer to a more stable final release, money spent on marketing, social, PR, and that kind of stuff would be very much needed. Are you considering any of that in your current proposal?

7

I’m torn about this project.

On the positive side, it’s great to see the efforts on the VR front, which is a key component to Decentraland’s vision, and also, it’s an effort coming from an independent team funded by the DAO, which is also a key component of Decentraland’s vision.

On the negative side, I believe this development approach is too risky. We have already invested a huge amount of money and we didn’t see a deliverable shipped to any VR store yet. And based on the results demonstrated by the team, the performance and overall experience is very poor at the moment. I don’t believe we could achieve a user-ready version any time soon.

The core of this concern is the team is working on a fork of Decentraland Explorer, which is a code base maintained by a third party team and designed with other platform requirements in mind. This is a recipe for headaches, delays and ineffective work.

I would recommend a different approach. An iterative approach based on a new and clean code base. An open source project that creates the a Minimum Viable Experience of Decentraland in VR. Something that the team can ship fast and put in the VR marketplaces, and after that we continue iterating it.

What would be a Minimum Viable Experience of Decentraland in VR? In my opinion, we should start with the process of creating and customizing your avatar (making available the wearables in the marketpalce). You as a player should be able see your hands and move the rig with your body.

Once that part is published and working well, we could move on to releasing an improved version of the experience. Maybe adding a loggin and the possiblity to jump into a call with a friend.

Finally, the team could tackle a way to run a runtime of Decentraland scenes. Hopefully with the SDK7 this process can be ported in a native way under this new app.

I have to vote NO in this one and hope we can agree in a strategy to approach this project. Otherwise I believe we are spending money in a too ambitious project and most probably deliver poor and very expensive results.

5 Likes
8

Hello, thank you for your proposal and it sounds like the team has done some really great work in the past. In my opinion one of the most important things to know is how are the funds being allocated?

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Hi @ginoct thank you! I’ve attached a high level overview of the budget here, let me know if you’re unable to see it. I do agree that marketing and dissemination will be an important piece during the next phase to raise awareness of the VR client, including working closely with the foundation team to get it on the Decentraland download list. Those activities are currently included with the publishing milestone. Any questions or clarifications, let me know.

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1 Like
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Hi @DedHeadJ thanks for your kind words! I’ve included the funds allocation in this reply here: [DAO:dba1365] Continued Enhancement of Decentraland VR Clients - #9 by mr0ng
Any questions, let us know. Thank you!

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Thank you for your kind words!

1 Like
12

Hmm lots of good points here. What’s stopping the current iteration from being shipped to stores? Maybe a smaller grant to focus on getting that shipped, and then improvement grants from there?

13

@yemel Thanks for the thorough and thoughtful response. I do respect your position on this. The store publication is one of our milestone for the active grant, which our team is in the progress of completing this month. We intend to publish to SideQuest for the Quest VR client.

Regarding the poor performance and experience, we welcome any feedback and we intend to continue improving upon the experience based on suggestions from the community. Porting to the Quest was a big technical undertaking because the Quest is an Android-based device and while we’ve spent a lot of time continuing to squash compatibility related bugs and issues over the last few months, I believe we are getting close as performance and stability are improving with every iteration we release.

Regarding the comments on the fork of the code base, we’ve recently migrated the code to the Decentraland hosted repository (fully open source), which you can find here: GitHub - decentraland/vr-client at chore/port_vr_client
So this will no longer be a fork, but the vr-client has its own repository. That said, I agree with your evaluation that the current architecture (based on the unity-renderer repo) results in some inefficiencies and needs constant manual updating from the unity-renderer repo. During the proposed grant, we will be converting the current code architecture to be more in line with how Decentraland does the desktop-client architecture - you can see budget for this item in the third line item here: [DAO:dba1365] Continued Enhancement of Decentraland VR Clients - #9 by mr0ng
This will allow updates to become more automated, reduce risks of breaking changes from upstream, and allow the VR clients to better keep in sync with other Decentraland clients. This effort is planned to be completed as part of the overall maintenance and CI/CD + release sync work category.

I believe that our team shares your same sentiment that we do want to deliver a high quality VR experience for all Decentraland users, and we do not want to settle for a poor experience. Much time and effort has been spent getting us to this point, and it is due to the immense technical hurdles involved in getting a VR client working, first with PCVR and then with the Android headset (Quest) port. That said, our team is confident that a more polished and performant VR client for Decentraland will be achieved during the proposed grant phase, and we intend to continue addressing VR client user feedback to make this an exceptional immersive experience.

Thanks again so much for your previous support and current consideration. We do respect your decision, whichever way it may lean, as I know you will ultimately vote in the DAO’s best interest, and in the interest of Decentraland overall. I’m happy to answer any questions or clarify any work item/direction. Thank you Yemel!

14

Voting no due to the reason that @web3nit pointed out. On the previous grants roadmap you promised a full release of Decentraland VR and custom VR UI by this month.

1 Like
15

Thank you for participating in the vote, we certainly respect whichever way you vote. The custom VR UI has been implemented and has been tested by the community over the last couple months. The full release is on target to be approved this month. We’re excited to get the VR client out and visible to more users! The proposed grant intends to build upon the previous grant to continue to maintain, improve, and enhance the VR client. The VR client is ready for prime time, but hasn’t had the same time on the market as the web and desktop clients, so is not as mature as those clients. But we are committed to its continued development and refinement. To try out the current VR client experiences, do follow our channel on the Decentraland DAO discord here: Discord
After this information, if you feel that a change in your vote is possible, we certainly express our appreciation but do respect your decision either way. Thanks again for voting!

16

Hi Everyone - on the Decentraland DAO discord channel there was a conversation around the sustainability of the VR client project. I replied on the DAO discord, but wanted to also reply here for added visibility and transparency.

Regarding the sustainability of the VR client project - our team has been developing it as a platform contribution to Decentraland. It’s an open source project that is hosted on Decentraland’s own repository. We’ve not built in any advertising and we have no plans monetize it because we feel that the VR client should be an entry point similar to the other (Web and Desktop) Decentraland clients and owned by the Decentraland community and not our team. If the DAO community feels that the VR client needs to be monetized so that it’s self sustaining, we are certainly open to hearing thoughts regarding that.
I imagine there are many Decentraland employees working on the current Decentraland web and desktop clients on an ongoing basis, and as with any software solution on the market today, I imagine the VR client will also require ongoing support.

My belief is that the VR client will increase engagement with Decentraland and make it more immersive and compelling, driving more people to the platform, and increasing value for everyone. This increase in economic activity will eventually allow the DAO to earn more revenue. Although it’s not direct revenue from the VR Client, we hope that the VR client adds enough value to the overall ecosystem and will result in a stronger Decentraland economy overall.

1 Like
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How much downloads and active users is there in the VR client? Because if we are spending 700k for 30 users, it might not be worth it.

1 Like
18

The active users of the VR client are really not a good example of the potential size of this market. For example I work with a VR advertising group now where we do about 250k unique monthly users and about 600k monthly sdk loads right now. If the VR browser for Decentraland were to work properly, we could potentially drive those users directly into Decentraland as our users are already in the headset. Currently we support advertising in metaverses like Decentraland in addition to VR browser games, but there has always been a disconnect on driving users across these experiences due to the headset gap. A polished VR application which was always on the DCL roadmap would open this gap.

I agree in your technical assessment that we should be mindful of dev costs, but this should be supported due to the lack of development on the foundations part. A proper VR client needs to continue to be worked on so we have a functioning product by the 2023 holiday season.

1 Like
19

Hi Everyone - a quick update that our team has published Decentraland VR to SideQuest. As with any software product, it doesn’t mean there’s no more development to be done - as there will always be improvements too make. But this is a major internal milestone for the current active grant, and we’re happy to see it approved and live. Feel free to check it out here: Decentraland VR on SideQuest - Oculus Quest Games & Apps including AppLab Games ( Oculus App Lab )

20

Hi all, still around and happy to discuss .VRM capabilities for new client, I think this would be exactly what is needed to achieve the full avatar support outlined above in a relatively fast manner.

Very excited for full user movement, as this is critical to VR, however I do not see a process outlined above for multiplayer or user networking. This is by far the greatest difficulty in achieving a VR metaverse comparable to something like VRChat, I think this would need to be a core goal in order to raise more support, and would like to see some kind of concept demo that shows the user movement is viable in real time (low latency) across the metaverse.

The end goal for a MVP should be users can go to DCL, visibly interact with each other and other non-VR dcl users, and ideally we would test with the more interactive elements like DG’s poker tables.

If we can hit all of the above for MVP then my vote is a resounding yes, if we are able to prove the networking concept prior to funding, I would be happy to vote yes on a higher funding amount.