The Street 1

tags: `devlog`

Exokit Web Proposal

District guidelines

Parcel size is X16 by Y16, for some X / Y. Infinite height.
Auto-enters WebVR or WebXR
Load everthing in ~5 seconds, on a fast 100 gigabit connection
Run at 90FPS on Nvidia GTX 1080 + HTC Vive
No pornography

The Street

Inspired by The Street in the book Snow Crash which is inspired by The Strip in Las Vegas.

Stephenson's Metaverse appears to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single hundred-meter-wide road, the Street, that runs the entire 65536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet.

“Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development…In order to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit”

Street Ideas

100 meters wide is super wide but as the Metaverse populates we'll need to expand into an information superhighway.

The problem with the design below is that there might not be space in between for paths or alleyways to access content beyond main street. Some might want to have a back entrance that is also connected to the street.

One idea to solve this is to add 4m wide alleys in between parcels to allow for passage.

However it might look odd if there were no buildings behind those connected to the street. People from the street would see a void in between parcels which would break immersion from a bustling virtual city.

Another method might be that there be a number of roadside parcels that are owned by a central authority to ensure guaranteed passage past the street.

Street + Meta Hood

Squarish / rectangle houses (exteriors)
Custom signage for popular webxr apps (neon signs 3D shortcut icon)
- a-painter
- cryptovoxels
- hubs
- moonrider
- a-blast
- supercraft
- vesta
- hackerspace
Doors (hinge, garage)
Modular pieces (house, lawn, tree, mailbox, streetlamp, driveway, signs)

Design Objectives

Will the street world simply be made in Janus/Vesta?
Duration / completion date.
Exact number of lots to fill on the street.
Number of high detail lots vs number of low detail lots.
Name of apps who's portals are to be housed at the doors of the buildings in each lot.
Theme of the block. (All western buildings? All modern? Different for each lot?)
Restrictions on door portal? (Does it have to be on the edge of the parcel? What happens to our exterior building after the user walks through the portal? Is the stuff from Exoland only rendered when looking back through the door, or is it visible still in any direction?)

Questions

Do the portals auto-open upon entering the Exokit guardian?
Do the buildings have to be perfectly 16x16 to execute?
Instead of making 6 half baked builds, what if special focus were placed on 1 building like making the cryptovoxels building really awesome?

Monorail

There’s a high speed monorail running down the street. There’s no teleportation because it’s explained it would break immersion.

Within the Metaverse, individual users appear as avatars of any form, with the sole restriction of height, "to prevent people from walking around a mile high". Transport within the Metaverse is limited to analogs of reality by foot or vehicle, such as the monorail that runs the entire length of the Street, stopping at 256 Express Ports, located evenly at 256 km intervals, and Local Ports, one kilometer apart.

Here's an example real life entrance ramp to the monorail station from street level.

Parts of a monorail system can be blocked out to visualize what design will look good on The Street during construction. Here's an screenshot of an older street design with rail.

Wild West

Crypto and VR is the wild west right now and what better way to illustrate it than to design a wild west themed district. The previous concept of The Street can even start here, as like the great western cities of America did.

Here are some screenshots from a previously designed Western Town made by FireFoxg. http://demos.janusvr.com.s3.amazonaws.com/firefox/WesternTown/WesternTown.html

The combination of photogrammetry and 3D modeling offers quality and performance.

Each building can have their own guardian space. The issue is sizing each to be 16x16.

Potential Assets

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/western-town-960be53215364b52b4b0995a7393a80c

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/western-town-516f96e7434f4d91a9ff25133b3c3b78

Shipping Containers pack

Tents

https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/exterior/exterior-public/tent-house-collection

Meta-Cryptovoxels

Write-up: https://hackmd.io/@XR/grid2

This district idea explores the possibilities of extending established grids like Origin or Genesis City with another layer. This opens up the opportunity to study how communities that already own parcels will react to Exokit's technology.

Another beenfit is the ability to leverage existing projects to help explain new tech concepts such as reality tabs or XR-iframes, furthering an audience down the rabbit hole.

Layer 1

Cryptovoxels reality tab

Layer 2

Spread JanusWeb layer atleast 1000km x 1000km for atmosphere.

Layer 3

Ideas to explore:

Add portals and MSF / glTF objects to some parcels
Place Home Space into spot
Flying whale in the sky, giant objects, red markers (mockup AR in VR)
Trace buildings with "pen", animate with shader/texture: See examples

Meta-Town

Layer 1

Acquire 3D scans of an indoor physical place and the outside of it
Convert into glTF / JanusWeb scenes
Use this as the base layer of exokit web

Layer 2

Add weather effects
Advertising experiments with particles or flying blimps.

Layer 3

Detailed focus on one area to make into a portal hub. https://i.imgur.com/KC5LhHF.jpg

Meta-Hood

These botique neighborhoods are designed to be low-poly with a polished look. Careful consideration will go into designing these zones to fit the 16x16 per parcel guidelines.

Examples

Meta_Hood is an OC map by SM Sith Lord that's currently deployed in Anarchy Arcade.

The design below can be found here and is described as an industrial warehouse hacker arts district with an arcade in the center. The streets can be procedural generated also.

Metacade is the oldest neighborhood in JanusWeb: https://hackmd.io/@xr/metacade