Focusing on building: What it means for our product

When we incorporated Alloverse a bit over two years ago, we figured that in addition to developing the platform, we would also attempt to rent it out as a virtual meeting platform for businesses as a way to (partly) finance operations. As it turns out, however, there are a lot of virtual collaboration tools out there. Additionally, Alloverse’s unique selling points – the ability to create your own apps and being open source – are not necessarily the most attractive features for corporate clients looking for a way to quickly improve work-from-home collaboration.

Thus, after the summer of 2021, we had to make a shift. The Alloverse founders joined a three-month consulting project to finance another year of development, and our sales-oriented CEO Julie stepped down to make room for our core founder and CTO Nevyn to embrace the role.

With relieved pressure to develop a market-facing product (for now), we could focus 100% on improving Alloverse for the people that already believe in our mission, and so we reached out to our developers, supporters and enthusiasts for advice. During early fall, the feedback we received made it clear that Alloverse needs to return to its core of improving the platform and building a community. In a nutshell, here are are the major points of feedback, along with the actions we took to respond to them over the last six months:

• To this end, we’ve updated our website to be more in line with our mission and our focus on community development.
• Additionally, we’re posting to all our social media channels at least weekly, and started making weekly announcements in Discord.

• Most 3d apps have some 2D UI, and our research showed that building 2D interfaces in Alloverse was more complicated than it probably should. To address this issue, we’ve added some helpful components (like TabView and StackView) to our API which we’ll continuously improve. Additionally, we’re evaluating if we should even build a full-fledged visual editor for laying out AlloUI.
• We’re looking into the possibility to support another language. At the moment, we’re leaning toward something that web developers would be comfortable with, such as TypeScript.

• We’ve created a Discord bot that funnels new members through an onboarding flow with questions, giving them roles based on their responses and recommends related channels & people. You can try out the flow here, if you like.
• We’ve moved all our project tracking to GitHub – even our weekly sprints are now all completely public, and anyone can add issues for consideration in the backlog.

• As a way for us further support potential contributors and spread the word about Alloverse, we’ve recently launched the Alloverse Ambassador Program.

Looking Ahead

Now, six months later, Alloverse is in a better place than ever. The platform is more stable, the Ambassador program is taking off and we’re excited about the future:

• The roadmap for spring & summer has been set, informed by user feedback – in addition to objectives we believe will have an impact in the even longer term, such as
  • Screen sharing to allow us to have all our internal meetings in Alloverse and thus do recurring wine tasting.
  • Collection of certain basic usage statistics in order to find bugs and inform how we develop tutorials.
  • Overall visual improvements for a consistent and more confidence-inspiring Alloverse.
• When fall rolls around, the core team will briefly slow down our engagement with Alloverse in favour of another consulting round to keep our accountant happy.
• In late fall, we believe an XR hype wave is coming. This will coincide with Apple releasing consumer-grade XR goggles and Meta & Microsoft getting further with their respective Metaverse Projects.

If you’re as excited as us about making sure the future of the internet and metaverse is open and inclusive, check out our plans, and come join our community!