Virtual Land Manager: Edit Your Metaverse Experiences in Real-Time!
By Decentraland DAO, , in Community Highlights
Virtual Land Manager (VLM) is a DAO grant-funded scene management tool created by community member, Unknower. Revolutionizing scene management in Decentraland, VLM allows creators to edit, moderate, and coordinate the content of their scenes in real-time without having to redeploy their entire experience. In addition to scene modification, VLM also provides various analytical data, as well as the ability to ban certain users, organize giveaways, manage media dynamically, and much more making it an essential tool for scene creators in Decentraland.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/6j7wVfDqoBA
Streamlining metaverse scene management
With VLM, you can ensure your experience is executed smoothly, as it makes it easy to handle all the aspects of scene—and even event—management without having to exit Decentraland’s virtual world.
Say you’re throwing a live gallery opening in Decentraland. Before the guests arrive, you realize you’d like to rearrange some of the furniture and change out some of the art pieces. Instead of having to leave your virtual gallery to start making changes in another program and then still having to redeploy your entire scene, you can just open up the VLM UI within your scene and start updating your experience.
From the VLM UI you can also arrange giveaways for your guests, manage who can visit your gallery opening, control video feeds in your scene in real time—switching between live streams and pre-recorded footage for example—, and much more. Plus, after your event is over, you can check attendance numbers and many other useful datasets all with VLM.
Virtual Land Manager Key Features:
Make changes in real-time from within your scene: Move, resize, rotate, and enable or disable all of your scene assets.
Control in-scene media dynamically: Automatically switch between live streams and pre-recorded videos to keep your visitors engaged, swap out images easily, and more.
Engage visitors with interactive objects: Attach clickable actions to objects (e.g., open a website, move players within the scene, teleportation, playing sounds)
Manage access to your scene: Restrict access to only allow certain visitors
Organize event giveaways: Include controlled Wearable and Emote drops in your experiences
Utilize analytics to track how people interact with your scene: Collect learnings from data on how visitors engage with your Decentraland space
Create customized controls: Create your own toggles, menus, text fields, sliders, and buttons to trigger custom code within your scene
https://twitter.com/VirtualLandMngr/status/1731315706417889614?s=20
Why creators are praising VLM
VLM creator, Unknower, requested a DAO grant to support the project in June 2023, a full year after development had started. As many in the community had already used an alpha version of the program by this time, the grant received an outpouring of support and was easily passed.
The VLM project plans to use the $120,000 grant to improve its service and give back to the Decentraland community. This includes funding for infrastructure to keep VLM free for Decentraland users over the next 3–5 years, community engagement through Wearable & Emote airdrops, and a retroactive payment to Unknower for a year of VLM development.
At the core of VLM’s mission is a commitment to making the metaverse accessible for all and keeping scene activity quantifiable so creators can make decisions based on facts. It’s also a means to help creators invest their time in what really matters—building outstanding experiences in Decentraland.
Before VLM, creators had to constantly redeploy their scenes just to update simple things like links, banners, and videos. This was a bit tedious, requiring multiple deployments a week. VLM does away with this extra work, allowing creators to funnel more energy towards creativity.
On top of its functionality, VLM is praised for its exceptional response to feedback and community signaling. The developer, Unknower, is known for being responsive and helpful, going the extra mile to adapt VLM to specific needs, like Vroomway’s unique multi-scene setup. This kind of support makes a considerable difference for creators who rely on VLM to manage their Decentraland scenes. It’s also one of the most visible examples of why a community and community signaling matter so much in a budding space like the metaverse.
Other aspects that make the project stand out are a sincere dedication to keeping data open and keeping the code open-source. VLM is committed to making all the code libraries it uses open-source. This means that other developers can examine how things work and even build similar tools. VLM is also serious about tracking performance metrics in detail. This means scanning how the platform is being used and how engaged users are. You can always refer to their GitHub repos to check their code and their stack.
How to install VLM in Decentraland
VLM now supports SDK 7 and the installation process is very simple. To install VLM, follow these steps:
Open your Decentraland SDK 7 project in Visual Studio Code.
Utilize the Decentraland SDK 7 extension.
Click the “+” symbol in the dependencies section.
When prompted for the package name, enter “vlm-dcl@sdk7” and press Enter.
Include your scene ID within your scene.json file using the provided format. You can find your scene ID in the “Settings” tab of your scene created at https://vlm.gg.
Looking ahead: What’s next for VLM
Unknower has released the first alpha version of VLM’s integration with Decentraland’s SDK 7 for testing. This is good news for creators who want to leverage VLM's features in their latest Decentraland projects built with the most up-to-date SDK.
https://twitter.com/VirtualLandMngr/status/1728737905470734751?s=20
Up next, VLM plans to introduce a series of buildings that creators can easily integrate into their own virtual scenes, providing creators with customizable templates to display their projects and initiatives.
VLM is also working to further simplify the deployment process by enabling users to deploy VLM-enabled scenes directly from the web interface, simplifying the creation and management of virtual environments for users of all skill levels.
Unknower is well known for being responsive to community feedback. If you’d like to help VLM keep improving, share your thoughts in the official Virtual Land Manager Discord server. If you enjoy using VLM, don’t forget to share your experience on socials.Together, let’s spread the word that scene management and moderation are now easier than ever in Decentraland!
The metaverse is full of yet unrecognized potential and opportunities. Do you have an idea that could benefit the Decentraland community? Learn more about the DAO’s grants here.
Do you know of a cool Decentraland community project that you think should be next in the Community Highlights series? Contact the Decentraland Foundation team @decentraland on X.
Disclaimer: The service described in this article was not developed or audited by the Decentraland Foundation. Always be careful when engaging in any kind of transaction. Decentraland is not responsible for any loss of funds/assets.