Visit the Principality of Monaco in VR with DWorld!

When some weeks ago I wrote in the newsletter I was being very busy, many people asked me what I was working on, and today finally I can unveil it to you: we of New Technology Walkers were working on an interesting project of a startup called DWorld, that aims at making you visit virtually the cities of the world! The alpha of the experience has been officially unveiled two days ago, so I can talk with you about this application that aims at mixing virtual tourism and e-commerce in a pretty interesting way.

What is DWorld?

DWorld is a startup aimed at letting people visit all the most beautiful cities of the world, in their possible green evolution. Without the need of taking the plane, you can just don a VR headset, and find yourself in another city, maybe distant from you, together with your friends, walking in the streets, chatting, and enjoying the activities that you can find there (for instance, going shopping). It’s a project that unites virtual tourism, v-commerce, and green economy.

The first city that you will be able to visit is the Principality of Monaco, but the idea is expanding soon to all the most famous cities of the world.

How have we collaborated on the project?

If you are curious about how the collaboration started, let me tell you: we of New Technology Walkers got in touch with DWorld CEO Manila Di Giovanni and CTO John Gwinner. Talking with them, we found their project very visionary and also important in a period like this, where people would love to travel and connect with other people, but they can’t because of the pandemic. We so decided to collaborate with them, even if the time to develop the solution was not short, but mission-impossible short. All together we did a miracle, and so the public alpha is already officially available. It makes me happy when we manage to deliver something in an impossible time frame (as we did with the first Jean-Michel Jarre concert), but sometimes I would like to sleep a bit more during the projects 🙂

[Little disclaimer: I have worked on the project, but I have not been paid to write this post. I am writing it just because I thought you could find it interesting to know about this experience and because I like to support startups with passionate founders]

What you can do inside DWorld?

This current alpha is a nice appetizer to let you understand the grand vision of Manila and her team. At the moment you can enter a part of Monaco Ville, which is the historical block of the Principality of Monaco, meet other people, and visit a few interesting places. Let me talk to you briefly about all the possible activities.

Avatar customization

Digital identity is overly important, and that’s why in this public world you can customize your (full-body) avatar so that you feel represented by it. When you enter the application for the first time, you can perform a fast setup (gender, skin tone, hair, eyes) and enter the soonest possible inside the virtual world. Later on, you can decide to re-inter the avatar customization menu and perform a more detailed customization, that lets you also change your clothes, and add some accessories. Some of the clothing options are not available from the beginning, and you will have to buy them in the shop.

Walking in Monaco

When your avatar is ready, you can enter the streets of Monaco Ville. The Principality of Monaco is one of the smallest countries in the world, but it is also one of the most fascinating: it hosts the classic Formula 1 GP, there are many VIPs having parties on their yachts, and there is the famous royal family (Prince Albert is Grace Kelly’s son). You can wander inside the city all in virtual reality, and admire some of its historical buildings.

Inside the city, you can find other visitors that are enjoying it, exactly as it happens in the real world when you meet other tourists when you travel abroad. The company calls all the visitors of the virtual city “Worlders”. The idea is that you can not only go traveling with your friends, but also meeting there new people from all over the world. Isn’t this the superpower of social VR?

The Monaco Ville block has been reproduced very faithfully and optimized for VR. You could check all the buildings that you see there and verify that they are identical to what you see inside Google StreetView. But the power of virtual reality is to give you something that is impossible in real life, so instead of just proposing you the same city that you could see in Google Earth VR, DWorld tries to imagine how it could become in some years, when the green economy will bring it to have more green spaces, to exploit more solar energy, to have more electrical cars, and so on. This way it is not just a standard journey, but a special one that you can live only inside this application.

Luxury Boutique

While wandering inside the city, you arrive in front of the window of a shop, and “clicking” on it, you can teleport yourself inside a luxury boutique (we poor people have “shops”, while rich people have “luxury boutiques”, that basically are the same thing, but whose name sounds better 😀 😀 😀 ).

You can enter this apparel shop with your friends, point at the pieces of clothes that are on the mannequins, and try them on your avatar, to see if you like them. Thanks to the magic of networking, while you try them on, all the people there with you can see you changing clothes, and so like in a real shopping session, you can discuss together what are the coolest things to buy.

When finished shopping, you can perform the checkout. And here there is one of the coolest things about DWorld’s vision: you will be able to check out that piece of clothes both in the real and the digital world. That is, you can not only buy that dress for your avatar so that you can wear it in the avatar customization room, but also buy it for the real world, so that piece of clothing arrives in your inbox for real.

This is amazing because one of the missing things of virtual traveling experiences is the ability to buy souvenirs, while with DWorld you will be able to buy in the virtual cities whatever you would like and then actually receive it at home, as a way to remember the virtual travel that you had. A bridge between the real and the virtual world that personally I like a lot.

Yachting and Real Estate

You have also the possibility to visit a yacht and a cozy luxury flat in Monaco, to imagine for a moment how it is living there among all the VIPs. Especially to dream for a moment to have all that money to afford these things :D. The vision is to offer even here the possibility of evaluating the purchase of a house or a big yacht by visiting them virtually, without having to move from home. But don’t worry: DWorld is not going to charge you €100M to buy a big yacht if you press a button by chance. But if you have €100M that you want to spend, feel free to contact me and we can talk about this together :D.

Oceanographic Museum

One of the places that I love the most inside DWorld is the Oceanographic Museums: you find yourself underwater surrounded by many different kinds of fishes, and this in VR is so fascinating, it looks astonishing and relaxing. Look at the GIF above and see how much life there is inside it!

In the museum, you can also start a little experience where you can throw fishes to some penguins in Antarctica so that to promote the safeguard of these cute chubby birds.

Assistant

In wherever place you will go, there is a robotic assistant that flies next to you and give you hints on how you can interact with that environment. It is good to onboard the users that so are never confused about what they should do.

Limitations of this alpha version

DWorld is currently in a first alpha version, and you are limited to visit only a little part of Monaco Ville. There are also very hard limitations for the number of people that can inhabit the same instance of the world, limited customizations of the avatar, unoptimized graphics, and you may also experience some glitches here and there. It is an alpha to give a glimpse to the VR communities about the marvels of virtual traveling, and if it will be successful, it will evolve into a full-fledged application that can host many people that wants to visit the whole city of Monaco.

The currently supported headsets are only the Oculus ones on PC: Rift S or Quest + Link. It is recommended an RTX graphics card not to experience too much lag.

Future vision

DWorld’s vision is to expand the experience at first to the whole city of Monaco, and then to other important cities of the world. The idea is to improve and optimize the full experience, and also add:

• A more complete avatar customization session, that is fully inclusive (like Facebook Avatars);
• Many more activities to perform inside the city of Monaco, alone or with the people that you love. These activities will try always to bridge the real and the virtual world, so that you will be able to influence your real life by doing activities in the virtual world. V-commerce will be an important feature of this application, letting you buy items virtually as you would do that during a real vacation;
• Support of many more people inside the virtual world, so that the cities appear completely alive, and you can meet many new friends inside them;
• … and many other things I can’t tell you now 🙂

Risks

I love traveling, and I miss so much jumping on a plane and go to a new place and discover new cultures. This is why I personally like a lot the concept of virtual traveling: even if it can’t be the same as a real travel, at least it can be a nice surrogate experience.

To not only mention only the positive sides of DWorld, otherwise this post would seem a commercial, I would like also to highlight the risks and problems of an experience like the one provided here:

• With the end of COVID, people could decide for a while that they have enough of virtual experiences, and only go for real travels;
• The experience may be too expensive to develop for every city, and have difficulties in scaling up. Every city is different from the others, every activity is different from the others, and recreate them all virtually may be expensive for the company. Business viability has to be analyzed;
• There are many technical hurdles this project has to go through (like the support of the big space of a city shared in multiplayer by thousands of users);
• Creating a traveling experience inside a whole big city that feels organic and enjoyable for a long time may be hard.

I wish good luck to DWorld: I hope they will manage to solve all these possible issues.

How to try DWorld?

You can head to DWorld website and create an account there, registering for the alpha program. Every once in a while, the company will admit more people inside the alpha and you will be able to try it! If you do it, don’t forget to share your feedback with the company so that the application can be improved following the suggestions of the community!

Have fun feeling rich inside the virtual Principality of Monaco 🙂

(Header image by DWorld)