We are very excited to finally make public our new Alice Player!  This represents the first step in realizing several of our strategic goals we have been working toward for several years.  You can find and download the Alice 3 IDE that supports exporting Alice worlds for use in the player and the Alice Player here!

The Alice Player

The goal of this project was to create an Alice player that will give students more flexibility on how they can share their work and enable people to experience their creations without installing and running the full Alice development environment.  We are excited that this first phase will allow users to load and run Alice worlds in the desktop player application. It will also provide performance improvements when rendering larger worlds, and more. These benefits are just the beginning of new features we are working on for the base player. Other great features that are planned or are in development:

– The ability to host and share projects on the web!
– The ability to download our Unity code and build your own stand alone executable!
– The ability to make use of new rendering options available in Unity such as shadows and other effects!

Alice in VR

The Alice player has also enabled us to bring Alice full circle back to its roots in Virtual Reality (VR).  Alice began as a platform for researching virtual reality as part of Alice founder Randy Pausch’s VR research lab Stage 3.  You can read more about Alice’s history here.  It is super exciting to us to be enabling students to not just experience VR but to author their own experiences. Having students be able to run Alice worlds through desktop VR is a major milestone for us but we already have longer terms plans to:

– Add new events in the Alice IDE to make authoring VR content more intuitive!
– Support more hardware (our initial development is targeting Oculus Rift and Rifts S) including standalone VR via a web application for uploading and sharing content!
– Alice AR support to enable the creation of Alice AR experiences!

Please look for more updates and new features often.  It has been a long journey to build all of the underlying changes needed to get us here and with much of that work done we should now be able to extend this functionality at a faster pace.

Sincerely,

The Alice Team