FrameVR: Showing their cards

 

LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo

For quite some tie, I've been wondering what cards FrameVR.io (hereafter called Frame) had to play in the AI-in-XR space. They were flirting with the concept right around the time of the Mozilla Hubs announced shutdown, but despite witnessing the entire XR industry contract around them, they kept claiming "We're all in on AI".  They seemed to mean more than just AI characters in XR space. I just didn't know how.

With Gabe Baker's "AI In Meetings: Treading on Sacred Human Space" LinkedIn article of January 23, 2025, I got a much clearer vision.  And I'm disturbed.

This post, therefore, is a response. I write it with a pang of regret, but here goes.

A Brief History of FrameVR, from Heather's perspective

I have the date when Frame arrived on my radar: March 27, 2020. I was exploring easy-to-access XR platforms and spent some time exploring Frame with the great Scot Daniel Livingstone.

Exploring Daniel's 360 photosphere in Frame

Frames are essentially web rooms in 3D. As Frame's website says, "Frame is a beta product from Virbela. Frame makes it easy to communicate and collaborate in 3D environments, right from the web browser."  Frame was one of several no-download required (hence WebXR) platforms that included Mozilla Hubs, Janus, rumii, and Cryptovoxels. Similar competitors had native apps that needed to be downloaded including ENGAGE, Second Life, and Somnium Space.

Awkwardly, the landing page for Frame used to drop a visitor directly INTO a Frame, which while demonstrating what it was immediately, was unnerving for the unready.  I'm glad to see now that they redirect into a more traditional webpage now that has a bit more of "who we are, what you get, and how much this costs" layout.

After that first exploration, I'd go back into Frame on and off for years, mostly for events, meetings, and conferences. To give Frame some credit, they were and still are marketed towards business or professional use, that is meetings and events. From the default spaces available to the business attire avatars, they bend to the professional market.

As of today, Frame's top 6 use cases listed on their website are professional: team meetings, recruitment, vendor showcase, meetings, campus twins, and networking.  This is not to say that they didn't cater to the education market - they did! It's just that most education uses were from the same list: meetings, recruitment, campus classrooms, etc. I see one "soccer strategy" use in the use cases-- that's interesting. But most the education uses are just the same as business uses. I'm going to guess that if there's an educational use that is completely unique (Hmm...underwater basket weaving?), that's either proprietary and therefore NOT shared by Frame or those Frames relay entirely on clients bringing their own 3D builds with them and not having Frame provide them.  Either way, it looks like overall "creative" use is limited to creatively using what they already offer.

Disclosure

It's time to veer off and talk a bit about Virbela and I have to throw out TONS of disclosures now.
I owned a Virbela Virtual Campus (VC) in my role as Chief Operating Officer of the Immersive Learning Resource Network (iLRN).  iLRN's deal with Virbela was:

iLRN had unlimited capacity campus for free for spin-ups. We could generate new rooms, new building floors, new buildings, and entire new islands at our demand. (That was actually wicked fun.) In return, we paid Virbela 50% of the rent we collected on contracts that we signed into our Campus. So iLRN was a subletter.

My COO responsibility was that Campus, account management, and finances. I also conducted tours, did training, and provided tech support. We hosted some lovely events, but meetings were basically all we did.  There were a few random boat rides as well.

However, as anyone that knows me could guess, I tangled horns with Virbela.

 
Here are two specific times:

Sales

When I came on board as COO, I was soon contacted by a Virbela employee to set up a daily meeting to 'talk about my pipeline'.  She wanted to talk about sales leads. Virbela could always see a Google doc where I kept all leads. She spent her time encouraging me to frame (haha) my conversations with future clients with Virbela essentially answering their (whatever) needed use case. Said another way, sales; I was being treated like I was a salesperson, learning the ropes.

Bear in mind that Virbela had a right to see the future as grand and rosy. 🤩🌹 I had heard informally that the home Virbela Virtual Campus had leaped from a paltry 30 visitors a day to over 300 visitors a day during the pandemic. So much traffic had increased that they staffed a concierge desk with 1 or 2 salespersons standing by for many hours each day, ready to break off, give tours, and assist in collecting specs for contracts.  They saw no end to the possible companies and schools that would want to walk in and book a contract for fully made and ready to go VR space.

This request to meet everyday to discuss sales struck me very badly.  

1. My job was not pushy sales. I've never loved sales. Yuck.
   
2. My ethics as a instructional designer forbids me from recommending an educational product that does NOT meet a clients' needs. If it doesn't fit, you don't recommend it. 

   

   Capture from a meeting inside of the VC with a client where the VC did not fit their needs; they had users mostly with smartphone technology.  VC was a native app that needs a computer. I voted against offering a contract. Fortunately, the client didn't take one either.
   

   
   
   
3. We were a non-profit, so beating the bushes for money was not our style. Later, iLRN would get chided by Virbela for offering rental prices 5x lower that other Virbela campuses, to which we were stymied and replied with "You, Virbela, told us our prices."  Talk about greedy.

So one day I had a chance to fill in a "how are we doing?" Virbela survey which I thought was large and somewhat anonymous. I said "I don't need daily watching over my sales lead pipeline."  Virbela sat me down in a following meeting and said "Sorry, I guess you don't need daily meetings."  To which, I was more perplexed that my feedback had been directly identified with me.  Oops. Either way, sales lady backed off.

Avatars

iLRN had booked in a major speaker into an event, but we also knew that this speaker would prefer to wear a hijab.  We had no hijabs in our avatar collection. We checked. We checked because we knew it was important to be as ready as possible in advance for a speaker. I think we also asked Virbela if we could have hijabs on our VC. I don't remember a response.

Our speaker arrived, worked on their avatar, and settled on a hat/hair combo that was the same color, which visually was close to a hijab.  But as we thought they might, they blasted Virbela on social media, pointing out that hijabs were not available.

Before you could say spit spot, Virbela socials responded right back, "Oh but we do have hijabs! You must have missed them!"

I call bullshit. OUR VERSION of Virbela did not have them. We checked, in advance, remember? My conspiracy theory is that Virbela loaded them into our version just after the speaker complained publicly.

Total freaking bullshit, to claim that we had them. I really didn't like the way Virbela treated the speaker OR us as their subletters.

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After I left iLRN, I've used FrameVR as a contractor to host a fun student trivia game; the ability to turn audio zones on and off was fun.

In all of my dealings with Gabe up to this point, I found him to be a kind, dedicated, upbeat, and friendly 'would do anything to help you' person in the WebXR world. It's funny that I had a friend that also knew Gabe but confusingly (to me), he did NOT get along with Gabe at all. I eventually broke off that friendship but I joked that "In the divorce, I got Gabe." 😁

The horizon darkens

When Mozilla announced that they were no longer be supporting their Hubs WebXR product, Gabe wrote a lovely tribute initially on LinkedIn.  I thought it was a classy move, given that FrameVR and Hubs had been up to that point been direct competitors.  I was hoping that Gabe would hold Frame above the fray that was about to happen over at Hubs...but alas, in reply to one comment on his post, he pitched Frame to a listless Hubs user. 

Oh. Those warm fuzzies were nice while they lasted. 🤦 But, abrupt end.

Seeing XR companies contracting and closing (AltspaceVR closed in March 2023, Mozilla Hubs closed in May 2024), I wondered how Gabe was seeing Frame go forward. He kept sending out the "Frame's going all in for AI"-type message.

From the title of Gabe's January 23, 2025 article AI In Meetings Treading on Sacred Human Space, I was a bit hopeful thinking, "OK, an acknowledgement that humans have such a thing as sacred space...and it means something."  Initially, Gabe does a good job acknowledging the tasks that AI does well and not well in meeting space (because remember Virbela/Frame is all about meetings). It really sounds like Gabe has had a year+ of AI attending meetings and he's got his finger on the pulse of what works and what does not. Still, most of his examples are stale & predictable.

He seems to claim that when teams are talking about something, "seeing it" in 3D is the next and better step to take:

"When people come together to meet, I think there should be as little friction as possible when this question comes up: “I wonder what that would look like?”"

 

Yet many meetings don't need 3D or a visualization at all (i.e. working on accounting on a spreadsheet or writing for a webpage).

Red flag

In as much as I want to give Gabe all kinds of doubt, with this, my spidey-sense meter went to 100:

"As someone who has seen how helpful AI can be across many domains, I desperately want AI to be present and accessible during meetings. When people see the results of our vision, they will want it too. In fact, I think it will seem silly not to have it!

Those who don’t want it will be the people who really want to seem like the smartest person in the room at all times. But those who are interested in results and not ego will be happy to have AI-powered teammates at their meetings."

Wait, what?

People who don't want AI in a meeting room 'want to seem like the smartest person in the room'? 

What about people who don't want AI in the room stealing the peoples' creativity and sharing it to who knows who or selling it to who knows who? Or what if AI just plain summarizes it wrong? Or AI gets it wrong? It's been known to happen. (Schools Using AI Emulation of Anne Frank That Urges Kids Not to Blame Anyone for Holocaust)

Gabe made it seem as through if you are anti-AI, you are anti-Google, anti-learning, and much worse, egotistical!  I guess privacy got checked at the door? For the record, I'm very pro-Google and pro-internet use during meetings or classes.

This specific statement is a red flag because it is an emotionally laden argument popping right out of the middle of this discussion. It is as if Gabe ran out of patience and burst out "If you don't want AI, you're an ego monster!" 😠

When a calm reasonable discussion suddenly goes emotional, something is wrong. Gabe lost his shit for a moment there. As Spock would say "Reverting to name-calling suggests that you are defensive and therefore find my opinion valid."  So, he's probably getting pushback on this AI thing.

I hoped he didn't really mean it so I read on.

Nope, he doubled down...I mean tripled down. He wants AI agents in every meeting, in the name of eliminating duplicated work across companies. (So much for visualization?) He wants AI inserting itself fully into conversations, setting up follow up meetings etc.

Is anyone else getting a creepy feeling here?  This is way beyond "all meetings will be recorded" --which would make me make tracks outta there anyways. The invasion of freedom of speech (because some folks will NOT say things if they knew they were going to be hyper-on-the-record) during work meetings will be staggering.  Stymied talk equals failing organizations and failing people. This is going to end badly.

OK, so here's the $64,000 question: Would I, as a consultant, recommend Frame for educational contexts in the future?

My answer: I've agonized over this, but I probably could not recommend it.  I cannot in good faith recommend using a platform that might record children or learners without their expressed consent and use those recordings, summaries, or derivatives for a future plethora of uses not being disclosed now.  It's not worth it to "visualize" a solution or have an AI set a future meeting. I can do those on my own, thanks.

For the moment, I find that sacred human space IS being treaded upon. I can't in good faith say that's a direction that education needs to go.


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#InstructionalDesign #edtech #XR #VR #AIInXR #AI #Frame #Virbela