Tivoli Cloud VR is building an open-source metaverse with Ready Player Me 3D avatars

Interview with Caitlyn Meeks, CEO of Tivoli Cloud VR Inc.

It's been an exciting start to the year for Ready Player Me. We have seen a lot of new apps and games implementing our avatar SDK. One of them is Tivoli Cloud VR. Developed by Caitlyn Meeks (CEO) and Maki Deprez (CTO), Tivoli is a successor to the High Fidelity platform. The main goal of Tivoli is to build a friendly, creative, and inclusive metaverse for everyone. The platform is free to use and open source.

We had a quick chat with Caitlyn about Tivoli Cloud VR and Ready Player Me avatars’ role in it.

Daniel Marcinkowski: What's Tivoli Cloud VR? What's the story behind it?

Caitlyn Meeks: Tivoli Cloud VR is an open-source, multi-user virtual reality platform. It lies somewhere between the confines of imagination and computation. Maki Deprez and I develop it. We met working on the High Fidelity Virtual Reality Platform for Philip Rosedale (Founder of Second Life).

Once High Fidelity stopped working on their codebase, we formed Tivoli Cloud VR and continued developing the platform. We started adding new features, adjacent online services and opened anew under GPL license. Today, Tivoli is a high-end platform with distributed physics, a sophisticated multi-threaded script engine, and collaborative in-world building in fully persistent spaces.

Daniel: Who is Tivoli Cloud VR for?

Caitlyn: The intended audience is an open and diverse community worldwide, especially artists, world-builders, and scripters. We're committed to diversity and inclusivity and endeavor to develop and foster a healthy community. Currently, we see unexpected growth in research and academic users. These folks are teaching university courses in Tivoli online and conducting HCI and AI research on the platform. Our new support for the OpenAI GPT-3 engine is interesting to these customers. We will be adding more support to accommodate them on our platform.

Daniel: Why did you decide to use Ready Player Me 3D avatars?

Caitlyn: They're well-made, fun, appealing to look at. Ready Player Me appears to have a promising future with exciting new content in the pipe. We find this has a certain appeal to our users, making it easier to create custom avatars for their own identities. They don't have to go through the technical process of rigging and uploading their avatars or choosing from a handful that we provide.

Daniel: What was the implementation process like? How long did it take you?

Caitlyn: Since Tivoli is a one-of-a-kind engine written in C++ and OpenGL, we could not take advantage of the Unity SDK. We had to implement Ready Player Me support ourselves. It was not difficult at all. Our platform has Chrome Embedded Framework built-in, and we were able to access and display the avatar configurator in our app.

Once a user creates their avatar, we push it to their individual Tivoli Files folder. This is a service we provide free of charge to all users. It stores their avatar with our proprietary TEA (Tivoli Encrypted Asset) protocol, encrypting the avatar and making it difficult to rip. It automatically appears in the user's avatar shortcuts, and they're able to wear them with a click of a button. We've also taken advantage of the cute avatar image renderer to put next to the bookmarks.

Daniel: What's the community's feedback about the avatars?

Caitlyn: Everybody loves them! We have one user who kept using the default avatar for several months – it wasn't until Ready Player Me arrived that he finally created a custom avatar of his own. We love this.

Daniel: What are you currently working on, and what's the future of Tivoli Cloud VR?

Caitlyn: We're working hard on our OpenAI integration, virtual beings, and serving our growing research user base needs. We are doing our best to strengthen and improve our platform.

Check out Tivoli Cloud VR and use your Ready Player Me avatar.

Are you a developer?

Do you want to join us in the mission of building the metaverse? Become a Ready Player Me partner to integrate our avatars with your app or game.