The first date tends to be a pivotal moment for a relationship: the beginning of a love story or an awkward moment that should never be repeated. For app developer Chris Crew, most of his initial dates were dire, although he had met his partner, Aurora Townsend, on Tinder for two years, which is why they both decided to develop an app to soothe that feeling.
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Planet Theta is a virtual reality software developed by FireFlare Games designed to promote encounters between strangers from around the world. Designed to be compatible with Oculus and Steam VR, the footprint is different from existing apps like VRChat, Echo VR, Facebook Venues and AltSpaceVR, because the focus here is on distance dating.
According to Crew, in these applications there are many fake profiles or creation of personas that don’t exist in real life, which becomes a huge obstacle for those who want to find their soul mate. Therefore, the app encourages the user to create avatars similar to how they look in real life and checks if this has been done. “We’re trying to encourage people to look like themselves. We don’t want them to enjoy their date looking like a model and then find out that they really do look like normal people,” Crew said in an interview.
realistic scenarios
At Planet Theta, people can go out to meet in nightclubs, parks, beaches and cafes 100% virtual, with the option to meet only people in the vicinity or elsewhere. The best part is that there is no pandemic on this planet, so everyone can relate freely and get to know their partner well before taking the conversations to the real world.
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The app allows for first meetings of up to five minutes, more than enough time, in the developer’s opinion, to see if that necessary chemistry will happen for the conversation to unfold. That’s a lot less time than you would spend just getting ready for a physical date, which also opens up the possibility of meeting more people.
Although the concept of virtual reality is still unpopular in Brazil, in the US there are around 60 million people who have used VR at least once a month. Planet Theta is in its final stages of development and should be launched in 2022, with the expectation of bringing together between two and five million people interested in finding love.