Why isn't there a VR client yet for Decentraland or The Sandbox?
The Metaverse and Virtual Reality (VR) go hand in hand in the public’s imagination and platforms including Somnium Space, Crypto Voxels, and Meta’s Horizon Worlds already support the technology.
But despite describing itself as a “decentralized virtual reality platform” on its website, the browser-based 3D metaverse platform Decentraland still lacks VR.
Sean Ong, founder of extended reality specialists XR Dev Studio, sits on a team that has developed an “alpha” version of the VR platform. He explained that while “VR has always been part of Decentraland’s vision,” the Decentraland Foundation has been prioritizing the implementation of core features ahead of VR.
Ong is a member of Decentraland’s DAO and he and his team received grants after submitting a proposal to bring VR to the platform.
However, the funding only allowed them to create an alpha version of the VR client which was merely a "VR port" and thus lacked stability, he said.
Ong told Cointelegraph that the challenges in bringing VR to Decentraland were due to it being “fundamentally incompatible with VR.”
VR porting involves reworking the original code to make it compatible with another platform, and Ong notes that while this means you can save time and effort initially, the developer would need to make changes to the port whenever the main project is updated.
Building a dedicated VR client would take much longer, but this would insulate it from the main project which would make it more resilient in the long run, he explained.
Ong and his team asked for an additional $240,000 in funding via a Dec. 14 proposal to develop a dedicated VR client, however, the vote failed with more than three quarters voting no.
Cointelegraph also reached out to Sébastien Borget, co-founder
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