Above: The virtual lobby of Antillea.

Originally published in Newsday Businessday on January 28, 2021.

The team at Caesar’s Army might not have intended it, but the surreal transition from the tidy beige office on Gallus Street in Woodbrook into the rendered world of Antillea was everything that a sci-fi buff might have hoped for.

While the Oculus headset was being adjusted by Renata Sankar, the company’s Events Production Manager, everything shifted into a ghostly gray, the walls disappearing in a fog-like haze of noisy desaturated white, my hands hovering like ghostly appendages on an old black and white TV.

As it turns out, I was in a kind of digital netherworld, the wait screen before the Altspace virtual reality app loaded and before I appeared in the equally beige, but far more expansive digital lobby of the Hub, the Antillea project receiving area.

The room seems much larger than it needs to be, given that it’s a way-station for new arrivals before they disappear through the two doors that teleport their avatars to either Antillea West or Antillea East, renderings by night and day, respectively, of an undulating beach scene built based on the topography of Maracas Bay.

The geography isn’t something that you notice right away, because this rendering is impossibly idyllic, with nobody hustling you to buy a beach chair and no lines of people waiting for bake and shark.
This is a beach party scene abstracted, cabanas, lifeguard stations, burning tiki torches scattered about with a massive stage featuring a large screen dominating each space.

It’s here that performances will be beamed into the space, to drive virtual parties hosted by Caesar’s Army that the company hopes will capture some of the enthusiasm that’s been missing from a Carnival season without in-person gatherings.

Antillea West is Maracas at night, a massive bonfire at its centre under an indigo sky.
Antillea East is the bay by day, crunchy sand under your feet and brilliant sunshine everywhere.

The two spaces are built by local firm Dingole on the Altspace VR social platform acquired by Microsoft in 2017.
While the experience of visiting the space is optimal while wearing a VR headset, it’s possible to visit the space using a PC.

“We needed a platform that people could on-board with very easily, using either a headset or laptop,” said Hasani Wattley, Chief Operating Officer of Caesar’s Army.
“This is something for all; it shouldn’t be for an elite few.”

“The idea came out of an idea competition among the staff, a kind of Shark Tank for concepts, over the course of a month and this was voted the top concept and Renata Sankar was the leader of the team that proposed it.”
“We approached the idea just like we would an event, first creating a wish list of what we wanted it to be, then we figured out what we could do with the budget we had.”

“When we looked at the Altspace platform there was no other Caribbean space, so after we created the island, we built the beach first.”

Caesar’s Army CEO Jules Sobion came up with the name, a conceptual uniting of the Greater and Lesser Antilles and the idea was tested with the organisation’s committee both locally and internationally over six months.
“It’s a continuous, iterative process,” Wattley said.

The project launched on Friday with the first of a four part series of events featuring DJ’s livestreamed into the world and possible appearances by soca artists leading up to Carnival Friday with sponsorship by White Oak and Pizza Hut.

“It’s a free Carnival series to get people engaged with the world,” Wattley said.
“We are open to renting out the space, you can bring the content and set up the ticketing through Eventbrite.”
“If you wanted to have a board meeting, you could have it here.”

Inside Altspace

On January 22, I attended my very first virtual soca party.
After some hiccups navigating the system to select the event – it’s embarrasingly obvious once you get the hang of it – I was in The Hub, a virtual lobby that acts as a kind of orientation room for navigating virtual space before entering either of the Antillea rooms.

I paused for a moment in front of a virtual mirror to double check the look I’d chosen for my avatar. I didn’t like the spectacle frames, which came from a rather limited selection, but my body shape, red polo, jeans and clean-shaven head offered up a decent facsimile of my meatworld self, though the disembodied, floating hands created by the system never stopped being weird.

Altspace VR isn’t Call of Duty detailed, not even Fortnite.
Legs and arms are missing for one thing, and the environment makes dramatic sacrifices in polygon count and detail to allow many avatars to interact in virtual space, putting an emphasis on proximity realities like audio fading realistically with distance and smooth movement.

There’s an app available for the Mac, but it doesn’t work particularly well. The Hub environment is fine, but once you enter the party worlds, the landscape is rendered a flat pink with some faint texturing.
I explored all the settings on two different systems with no luck. Objects and people look fine, but everything else is an electric pink wash.

Altspace describes the app as experimental, but offers no timeline for more complete compatibility.
Because I’d visited the empty space in a demo the day before, the glitch didn’t matter that much to me and Hello Kitty colours aside, it was easy to imagine the space as a vibrant collective.

Each world is limited to 50 avatars before it clones itself. So like a real Carnival fete, you could find yourself a virtual world apart from someone you arrived with.

Unlike a real world jam, you can call up a friends list and locate your lost buddy/date and teleport to their instance of Antillea, though that may not be so great for them.

As I meandered through the space last Friday I had an oddly familiar moment, being within earshot of friends having an animated conversation, the distant pulse of soca music layered over the buzz of laughter and chatter and the crack of exploding fireworks.

Somewhere in the distance someone was yelling my name, but I could neither tell whether they meant me nor where they were relative to my position.

Avatars with familiar names approached me with labels declaring them open to friendship, hovering in front of me and then moving off after getting no useful or engaging response.

In this small crowd of animated, human-driven pixels, I found myself feeling almost completely out of place, without a single useful thing to say or do.

Caesar’s Army had managed to almost perfectly replicate my real world experience with Carnival parties.