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.