V-Sekai / blog
On August 14th, the virtual doors to Virtual Market 6 opened. It's probably the biggest virtual convention in the world, with previous versions of the event having welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors. This year, like previous years, the main event was held on VRChat—a massive, proprietary social VR platform. Though the name suggests a focus on selling, Virtual Market also features exhibitions for many open-source projects and free works.
Our community, V-Sekai, decided to apply for a booth in one of their exhibition halls, and our application was accepted. But, two days after opening, our booth was removed for allegedly violating VRChat, Inc.’s terms of service. We believe this spotlights the danger of the walled gardens that currently make up the social VR space, and showcases the need for open solutions in this field.
V-Sekai is a multi-disciplinary community of developers, working to build the technology necessary to support open-source VR platforms. Our main focus is building on the Godot Engine, the leading open source game engine on GitHub, where we work on both the core engine and many external modules. Through this, we hope to provide new opportunities not just for the social VR space, but also for the wider development community, by removing the ties to proprietary engines, like Unity and Unreal.
