RealVR.ai is unveiling Villa, an immersive collaboration platform where professionals, content creators, gamers, consumers, and organizations, can rapidly build immersive Metaverse environments using intuitive and powerful tools. At the touch of a button, users engage with others in these Metaverses without real-world physical limitations.
Villa now has 500,000 active users. The platform continuously ranks in the opening 30 Most Popular and Top Selling Apps on Meta Quest – where there are hundreds of options from gaming to productivity and exercise apps, and can be installed directly from the Quest Store. Additional headset brands are supported at scale.
Villa empowers users to quickly create and publish their own Metaverses in virtual reality, with user-friendly design and requiring zero coding skills. The Metaverses can be used for meetings, experiences, gaming, social events, and enterprise work like standups and conferences in stupendous places around the world.
During onboarding, users choose between the free pre-account Ghost mode, or Superhuman mode which requires a subscription starting at $8/month, giving users instant access to superpowers and Metaverse creation tools. The tools include switching through unlimited fullbody avatars, fashion, and thrilling meeting places with up to 100 simultaneous users per space in thousands of parallel instances. Users can enjoy directional 3D surround sound just like IRL, and a multiplayer paradise where they play, work, fly, race, and co-create their own Metaverses by spawning from hundreds of thousands of 3D models, art, images, presentations, NFTs, and over 35,000 3D soundtracks.
Users can also drag/drop their own images, objects, and music to their web account, then go inside in VR. Imagination is the single limitation as users spawn oceans, clouds, birds, mountains, cities, cars, jets, yachts, planets, and of course, villas. 3D music and environmental sounds can be made directional. Metaverses can be published for public access or kept private for organizations who use it internally as they would Discord or Teams, with admin and moderator settings to address both consumer and enterprise uses. Users are essentially magicians as they mold their Metaverse in a way that thrills them and their guests.
In addition to productivity and communications tools, Villa provides various experiences, from an in-app virtual land development game where users buy to own virtual land, build it, then use it for meetings, play, or to exhibit, or sell to earn coins which can be redeemed for more land, subscriptions, and experiences.
In Villa’s Proptech section users can conduct actual HQ and real estate walkthroughs. In the Business Travel section users fly around the world, or hone-in on Jerusalem, Israel, and five other 3D cities and regions around the world using Villa’s unique digital twin flythrough technology, which gives users thousands of miles of real terrain to explore in multiplayer 3D. All environments can be populated with additional objects. Users can ride a hot air balloon in Denver, Colorado, or go jet skiing in Tel Aviv, Israel, for example.
Ofer Baharav, Israeli serial entrepreneur and CEO of RealVR.ai, producer of Villa: “Next up are 3D performances, conferences, and other mass immersive multiplayer experiences for enterprise and consumer use cases. We already offer the highest number of simultaneous users in low compute standalone VR devices like Meta Quest. However, we’re working to expand these so tens of thousands can participate in the same 3D performance or conference panel simultaneously”.
Baharav explains: “Meta Quest represents over 75% of global VR headsets with around 20 million units sold, thereby leading all-in-one mobile VR headsets to the masses, with subsidized prices. Our team specializes in building for compute constrained standalone mobile headsets such as Quest 2, which can handle a lot less compute than a modern PCVR system for example. Still, mobile VR devices are the clear winners because they pack phenomenal value at $400 per unit, are mobile, and can do pretty much everything that high-end PCVR headsets can – at a fraction of the cost, without cables, external sensors, or the need for a PC.”
Due to the pandemic, a shift occurred in the VR market where personal mobile VR headsets are used by consumers and enterprises, much like the smartphone. Early adopters have jumped on the bargain to enjoy games, exercise, meditation, and now the creative process of building in 3D and meeting in the Metaverse. “One of my inspirations to build Villa is a futurist I esteem, Prof. David Passig, who demonstrated in his research that interacting in VR can increase cognition by up to 20%. After thousands of hours in Villa for both work and play, we experienced how this medium truly pushes boundaries of what it means to be superhuman. It is our mission, captured in our motto, to help everyone realize their inalienable right to their superpowers,” comments Baharav.
According to Baharav, while consumer adoption is well underway for VR, the next frontier to exploit the wonders of the Metaverse is the enterprise. Already about 10% of Villa’s users are enterprises of all sizes, some with thousands of employees who use Villa for standups, happy hours, and conferences.
“What’s next for Villa? Expect increasing use of AI for everything from help building Metaverses, games, companionship, to ensuring professional conduct in public areas,” he says.
According to Baharav, the last couple of years taught us that productivity is increased by cutting waste associated with knowledge workers commuting to meetings and spend their days in wasteful ‘physical twins’, often shuttling globally for meetings. In most cases today, people no longer value commuting for work, making travel more of a personal pastime or choice.
“At the same time what’s missing in Zoom meetings is presence,” shares Baharav. “We’re 3D creatures that adapted to a 2D world, but the Metaverse returns us to our 3D roots, with superpowers. Now users can switch between thrilling environments in a snap or partake in presentations where they aren’t mere observers, but active actors. Being active focuses attention, while eliminating distractions. We’re like ‘Discord meets Westworld in 3D’: each Villa acts as a channel where you can meet people for agreed purposes in your organization. We also built Villa with inspiration from Westworld, so professionals, creators, and gamers can build the worlds that get them, their hosts (coming soon!) and their guests thrilled, just like the founders Robert and Arnold intended. On Villa, you are the founder of your Metaverse.”
Villa client, Laura Bergheim, CEO of Wordsmithie, Inc. testifies: “We have a distributed agency, so maintaining a sense of connectedness is tough. But with Villa, we meet in gorgeous spaces and have fun with ‘superpowers’ like flying. Villa inspires a whole new level of creative collaboration.”
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