I've recently been getting into VRChat and I think something really special is happening there. VRChat has made it possible for users to create their own avatars and worlds (like Mozilla Hubs), including scripting and shaders. I'm absolutely _floored_ by the creativity and talent I've seen in abundance there. It reminds me of the early internet, where people are creating things for the only purpose of connecting with others. Similarly I feel lucky to experience this period in VR because I don't think it can last this way forever. It's also as addictive as we were led to believe in science fiction! Numerous people I've met there have clocked _thousands_ of hours in VR, so I'm fully sold that social VR is going to be a major part of the future
*If you read this and decide to try it yourself, heads up: you have to do some searching to find the gems – the demographic skews quite young and male so you may find jumping into a random world is chaotic to say the least! It's also far from a polished experience. I like to spend time in quieter spaces like the sign-language practise world (it's amazing to be able to practise any time with real people!) and drawing worlds
A world I came across recently that you might enjoy is "ShaderFes 2019" – it's a shader museum! [0][1]
I'm less convinced more serious social VR will do so well initially as I suspect the surrealism and unconstrained creative-weirdness that VRChat makes possible goes a long way to diffuse the uncanny valley and awkwardness inherent with the current state of the technology
The Virus involved isn't exactly Sumerian NLP hacks and Uber Eats isn't quite Cosa Nostra Pizza yet, but yeah, it feels increasingly accurate in more ways than expected. These days a lot of dystopian fiction seems to
do that.
According to steam I'm several thousand hours into my VR usage if I add up a few of my favorite 'games'.
I completely agree with you that it reminds me of the very early internet. Like the late 90s, when bbs's and prodigy and compuserve and aol and "the internet" were all a jumbled mix.
If you haven't yet make sure to check out Rec Room. Its in a very similar space to VRChat and FBHorizon, but their gimmick is they've invested heavily in "maker" tools so that users can build their own "rooms" (levels) including customized 'game' logic. Its really a VR IDE they just don't call it that.
I tried Rec Room and everyone sounded 11 years old. There was one guy standing there talking about killing himself. Was that atypical of what you find on there?
To be fair, I did play basketball and ping pong with a few of them before I left. It felt like I was politely entertaining someone who was depressed and needed a friend.
Not really, I remember usenet and other young technologies being populated by older people.
I literally mean they sounded 11 or younger. Voices not yet having gone through puberty, by a decent margin of years. Several remarked that I was using a voice mod to make my voice deeper. I left feeling uncomfortable.
It's quite new so I think your best bet is exploring it in Unity to see what nodes are available there and watching youtube tutorials by other users who have explored it
I‘d prefer if mozilla would have finished Firefox’ transition to Rust/Servo to make their core product dramatically better and start regaining browser share.
Seems that accumulating expensive C-suits, firing a chunk of their best engineers and building this instead was sexier.
This is the classic problem described in The Mythical Man-Month. Recruiting more programmers to accelerate shipping your dev version just makes it later.
edit: also it's not clear how accelerating Rust use (meaning rewrites) would help market share in the short or medium term. it seems more like a necessary investment for the long term survivability and has to be paced wisely, like it has so far.
This is really cool imho - and can have many different use cases.
I poked around and considering diving into this more.
Curious about the self hosted version, and I'd like more info about "You will need to provide a database" - type of database needed? link to some articles on connecting DB from one server to another perhaps?
Quick scrolling for terms of use - not seen... I have not read all the docs, but did a search for the words porn and sex and did not find results
- I hate to assume things - but at the moment I am assuming it's up to the individual room creators as to what kind of discussions can be had.. and if we self hosted, having some that got into adults only discussions would be fine?
Having tried this, I think it's super impressive. I used it to set up social events to welcome new people to our group, and it went quite well. Honestly not sure why it is not more known, it's miles ahead of stuff like online.town and anything else I've seen.
Please continue your work on this. It's one of the lowest-cost, highest-leveraged points of counterbalance against Facebook's continued attempts to dominate the platforms of the future. In addition, there are numerous monetization opportunities that naturally arise from this effort, so if you stick with it, other Mozilla efforts will be buoyed by its success.
No, this is silly, it's like Second Life or something else, it's only ever going to be used by Extremely Online people who will never pay a cent for the infra needed to run it or for the coders, and it will sap away at the important part of what Mozilla is doing.
> there are numerous monetization opportunities that naturally arise from this effort
if you want an internet which consists of poorly rendered VRML-looking crap that bothers you for micropayments continuously, ok, sure, but most of us really want something that keeps the big FAANG types honest, and Firefox is one of the keystones of that effort.
From a product perspective, I do think this is an important one in the longer term. VR and AR are going to be big, and Facebook is making a play to own the social space and tie it to their hardware with Horizon.
There's literally no one competing with their Quest platform, so they'll be in a market position to turn Horizon into the dominant social environment for a whole lot of VR users.
Without cross-platform social systems like this, you end up in a world where your grandma has an Oculus headset and if you want to virtually visit them you need to be on a Quest as well.
> When I announced a beta version of @BigscreenVR
in 2015/2016, Facebook reached out. They told me to join them, because they were going to build the same thing and crush us.
> I have many stories like this. I can share a long list of VR devs who have been trampled by Facebook.
Maybe there's a way that Hubs can make money? "Virtual office service" seems like the obvious answer in this growing remote work situation (see also: Immersed VR), but with Facebook's lower level hardware access they may be poised to eat that space too.
Hardware-agnostic seems like a big selling point for Mozilla's service vs FB. Unless my company is going to go all-in and buy everyone a 'work headset' like how we have work laptops, they'll want it to be cross platform compatible so users have a choice.
I think the social side of it will be a big part of this. It lets you get together with someone who's hours away from you and have experiences together in a shared space. The avatars actually convey a pretty convincing sense of "this is another person next to me that I'm talking to" in a way that video calls don't. You trade facial expressions for a sense of physical proximity.
Or comparing to normal first person video games, you can see your friends' character as a fully detailed model, you know they're controlling what direction it turns, when it moves, whether it jumps. But the character fundamentally isn't them, it's a character that they're controlling.
And that's the weird thing about people's avatars in VR, it might be a low resolution floating torso and hands, but being in VR where the physical motion of their head and hands is directly translated to avatar movements makes it feel like the avatar is a low-detailed person instead of a high-detailed puppet.
The games and other experiences are obviously part of the selling point too. Being able to deflect blaster bolts with a lightsaber, throw droids off the top of a building with the force, shoot hordes of zombies, fly a jetpack, become a wizard, solve puzzles by working together with giant and tiny copies of yourself, have your friends talk you through defusing a bomb, and so many other things that we haven't thought of yet.
Smaller market, but I can see a lot of promise for virtual training simulations as well. Less sophisticated than flight simulator cockpits for pilots, but dramatically more accessible.
ILMxLAB has another project in the works, I think in the setting from the Galaxy's Edge stuff at Disney's parks, which I'm not personally familiar with. But I'll get to try the VR experience, since my headset is a lot more convenient than a trip to Florida or California.
Missed the edit window but another cool thing to note here is that Vader Immortal is inherently ambidextrous. That's a pretty common setup in VR software.
I learned to mouse right handed because that's always where the mice were (and often specifically shaped for right hands). Other peripherals like joysticks and throttles tend to be set up that way as well. First person shooters always have all their characters holding items in their right hand, even if that doesn't affect gameplay.
But in VR the two controllers are often equals - they're your hands, and you can use whichever one of them you like. There's a ping pong paddle or a lightsaber or a laser gun, and the game doesn't care what hand you pick it up with. The lightsaber dojo clip I posted has me using the sabre with my left hand the whole time, but you can even pass it from one to the other mid-game if you want to.
Probably not exciting for all you righties, but I enjoy it.
I own an Index and I love VR, but I have the feeling that if VR was going to be huge it would be a lot bigger than it is already. In my opinion it's more likely that in the future it will remain a niche, but never become really a hit in the general population. A bit like flight sticks or wheels are mostly for people who like to play simulators and have a small but very dedicated public.
There's still some room for growth as better products come out for better prices, but I don't see everybody adopting it, it's too much of a hastle.
The quest is really not a hassle. You put it on, trace a safe area out on the floor, and you're in another world within 30 seconds.
I think their biggest challenge for growth is that you really have to experience it to get it. People understand what "new Xbox" is all about, it's the same as the last one except improved in easily quantifiable ways, and they'll go spend $500 on it.
VR is still a new thing that people don't understand. But I think it'll get there.
I think it will be big among the population of people who play video games (i.e. young people who aren't strapped for time and energy). As a relatively young adult (30s no kids), I can't imagine fitting anything like this into my day. Wake up at 6am, exercise, work for 8-10hours, eat dinner, then trace an area out on my floor and enter another world while my wife sits on the couch alone? I think the tech is cool, but can't practically fit into my life of real-world responsibilities.
Or you and your wife and her extended family across five states in three time zones all get together for a game of mini-golf, a round of bowling, a hoverbike race, or a match of zero-g ender's game quidditch.
There are cool single-player experiences, sure, but that's not all it's good for. And with standalone hardware that doesn't require an external sensor setup and powerful gaming computer, they're really quite accessible.
Dude, you’re clearly not married. The last thing most married people I know want is more time with the in-laws. I didn’t dislike my in-laws but something like that would never have been in my list of “top 50 things to do after work”.
I know you were just reaching for an example, I’m just saying it’s a pretty bad one. A better one would be “the kids can spend time with grandparents far away”, that’s an actually-desirable outcome for most people.
I guess I was thinking “wife’s siblings and nieces and nephews” more than “wife’s parents,” which in my experience have gotten along with well, but the point is it could be her activity that you're joining in with just as much as it could be your thing.
For older family members, Echo VR and Void Racer are probably not the games you’d want, but mini golf and bowling you could.
And you always have the “Oh no! My battery’s dying! Nice seeing you!” escape hatch ;)
Most of what I hear about the new one is how incredible the pixel density is, but Facebook account I agree with you on.
Just got a Horizon beta invite today but I'd presumably need to merge my Facebook/Oculus accounts to use it. Instead, I'm thinking about nuking my Facebook account (dating back to 2005) and having to create a fresh one for Oculus useage only when they force me to for the Quest 1 to keep working.
I guess it's now or never, since once the account merge is required I'll have a bunch of real money purchases tied to my Facebook account and can't just up and delete it anymore.
I'm concerned about it as well, but I've read about people getting their accounts banned for getting flagged as fake when set up freshly and solely for the Quest. Facebook is supposedly working on that. I'd like to create a separate account for oculus, but do I want to risk losing my purchases if they flag me? Even if I can get an appeal, all of this feels like a hassle. I've got a quest 2 arriving in a week, so I gotta decide.
I love the Quest 1. What I read about the 2 is that the headband is flimsier and harder to fit, with other purely mechanical corners being cut like the controllers being fatter and less accurate.
I did read that review, but it's got to be the single most negative take on the Quest 2 that exists. Most people love it.
The standard head strap is cheaper, with upgrade options available if it bugs you (obviously that kills the $300 price point, but for most people I think it's fine). The controllers feel and perform the same as before, except now there's a thumb rest that isn't "Oops I pushed the Oculus button."
For certain IPDs between the 3 positions, the new lens setup doesn't work well, but the software apparently does understand more IPD steps and will position the displays properly if you carefully balance the lens position slide in between its spots where it locks.
The worst thing about it might be losing a sliver of peripheral vision at the sides, but from what I understand this only happens if you use it at the wide IPD setting and don't use the glasses spacer. And even if you're one of the people affected by that, the screen is still a good trade-off for the higher resolution and framerate.
EDIT - I should say that's the worst thing about the hardware. The actual worst thing is the Facebook account.
I've experienced VR with a good setup as few times and I'm meh to it. There's a bias where people who love something assume everyone will love it just as much if they only experienced it the right way.
Or VR could have been being relegated to a niche because of expensive computing requirements, difficulty to setup, lack of portability, and expensive headsets.
The direction the Oculus/Facebook have taken with the Quest line addresses many of these issues (sacrificing quality of the graphics). VR is possibly going to have its breakout moment.
Interesting to note that Carmack was talking about this untethered dream of android-powered VR back in 2013, which practically feels like the stone age for this modern generation of VR devices.
The first generation of Rift dev kits came out in 2012, and the consumer version didn't ship until 2016.
> "The way I believe it's going to play out is you will eventually have a head-mounted display that probably runs Android as a standalone system, that has a system-on-a-chip that's basically like what you have in mobile phones," Carmack said during an interview with Engadget. At least for right now, the VR device relies on its host PC to assist with its immersive functionality.
> "Maybe that means you can only do Quake 3 or something inside there," said Carmack, the man who himself helped build franchises like Doom and Quake at Id software before joining Oculus. But he also predicts a "best of all worlds" scenario where such a headset would still be able to connect to powerful PCs for higher-end games. But an untethered experience offers many benefits, he said. "It does make a big difference not having a wire dragging off your shoulder. It's significant."
> I own an Index and I love VR, but I have the feeling that if VR was going to be huge it would be a lot bigger it is already. In my opinion it's more likely that in the future it will remain a niche, but never become really a hit in the general population.
Historically (that is, from the point that VR first became a buzzword in the '90s), the importance of low latency and other ergonomic issues has been consistently underestimated. Improvements in hardware were usually eaten up by greater rendering fidelity and scene complexity, keeping latency right on the edge of acceptability, which unfortunately means that about 10% of the population experiences loss of orientation or motion sickness. A similar effect occurs on standard desktop setups, but affects a much smaller group (something about the difference between moving the scene in response to head vs. hand movements).
As long as developers (of both platforms and games) keep trying to push more polygons at faster refresh rates without addressing latency, 1-in-10 people are going to reject it outright, and rather more forcefully than in a "eh, not for me" sense.
Keep in mind that the reason disagreement between the inner ear and visual field causes nausea is to get you to vomit harmful psychoactive substances, so it's a pretty deeply rooted response that doesn't respond much to desensitization through exposure (ie. If it's a problem for you, you may not be able to "get used to it").-
that's my take once the patent expire then we will get decent mass market adoption for average consummers.
E-ink is in the same boat to many patent held by people unwilling to license them for a reasonable price, in 15-20 years most will expire and we will get e-ink everywhere
> Without cross-platform social systems like this...
Perhaps I missed this in Mozilla's hub, spoke, and developer documentation but I'm not seeing how this would be cross-platform. I'm not saying that you're wrong, but maybe i missed this. Or, or, or...maybe I'm conflating cross-platform with federated...like this would be good concept if operated over established federation protocols like ActivityPub, though of course higher up the chain to incorporate the neat VR elements...? Don't get me wrong: if Mozilla's foray into this space can displace FB even a little, and empower users with more freedom, independence and decentralization, then I'm in favor!
It's cross platform in that it works in the browser with WebXR, so any VR device with a web browser can use it.
For the time being, when Oculus launches Horizon, maybe anyone with an Facebook account can still download it and run in on their Valve Index using Revive, but if competing standalone android-based headsets come out I think workarounds like that become less likely. If you want Horizon, you buy a Quest. But any of those other headsets could use Hubs regardless of where their friend-group is.
It's the iMessage group text problem but on a system that's probably going to be a lot less easy to just substitute with WhatsApp. It remains to be seen if we'll have a functionally equal option that isn't platform locked.
Or maybe they'll just port it everywhere, own the main social space, and squeeze all the advertizing tracking they can out of that. Either way, I don't love it.
I don't think Mozilla are playing the long game here, VR in it's current form is not going to get "big". Headsets and three dimensional experiences on 2D planes is not virtual reality, as such I don't think innovation here is well placed. There's no point competing with Oculus, I hate how tied in the FB ecosystem is with Oculus, but Mozilla in it's current form isn't suited to exploring novel ideas to compete with Oculus.
As an engineers passion project, I'm all for it but this will inevitably get dropped.
Mozilla ditched FirefoxOS for throw away projects (there is no other way to call these), FirefoxOS now KaiOS that has received more than $50 Millions in investment and is deployed on 100M cell phones, basically the 3rd OS in popularity after Android and IOS... I question Mozilla's management judgement...
IMO Mozilla should allocate 40% of their funding from Google every year into a sustainability fund. Keep it invested in very safe bonds or something. In 5 years Mozilla will be financially independent. Then they can do all this fancy stuff.
I don't really care for all of Mozilla's posturing and non-Firefox projects. If they're not going to improve Firefox, ideally by putting Servo into it, then I don't see a reason to use it over un-Google'd Chromium.
This is a really cool gimmick, but meanwhile... I've been using Firefox exclusively for 20 years but recently I had no choice but to switch to Chrome for work meetings because the microphone would get randomly disconnected in Firefox.
I really hope Mozilla wake up and switch their focus back to trying to make the best browser possible and not wasting time with spin-offs like this one or I'm afraid soon there will be nothing left but Chrome.
I wish they would fix Firefox Mobile. Their recent redesign has largely destroyed the usability in terms of UI while also removing key features like the ability to install arbitrary addons. This is by far the most poorly thought out change that I have ever seen an established piece of software make.
Firefox Nightly for Android now has a debug setting to allow installing any add-on from addons.mozilla.org, not just the (growing) list of add-ons blessed by Mozilla QA:
What's broken besides being able to install unapproved add-ons? The new redesign made it usable on my old phone, the old Firefox mobile was too slow for it and would frequently run out of memory. And the new UI with tabs on bottom made it usable on my new phone that has a big screen.
- The New Tab Page isn't an actual page that lives in a tab anymore. Instead, it's a sort of "launcher" that lives outside the tabs. This creates all sort of bizarre UX issues, like if you click on a top-site, click back, and click on another top-site, you now have two tabs open.
- The tab switcher has been replaced with a janky spring-loaded pop-tart that appears to have been lifted directly from the Google Maps search results screen without any understanding of why it works in that context.
- Several important areas of the UI are now dedicated to "Collections", a feature that's just like bookmark folders (which are still present), except for weird subtle differences like not syncing properly.
- You can no longer display your bookmarks on the New Tab Page.
- You can no longer use themes other than the included "light" or "dark".
- You can't navigate to data URIs anymore -- you get a generic something-bad-happened error instead.
- A thousand little UI papercuts. Why do half the animations do weird-looking double fades? Why is the New Tab Page scrollable even when there's no additional content to reveal by scrolling? Why are the contents of the hamburger menu slightly different when you're on the New Tab Page?
Firefox Nightly for Android now has a debug setting to allow installing any add-on from addons.mozilla.org, not just the (growing) list of add-ons blessed by Mozilla QA:
To add to what was said, the "X" button is hard to reach and doesn't seem to interrupt js anymore. I have trouble distinguishing private and non-private windows, saved logins got burried in the settings again, the tab list always scroll at the bottom where my old tabs are, etc.
Midori recently got a mobile port, it runs quite well and I do not think it's a chromium reskin.
-Searching with a particular search engine through the URL bar, used to take one touch gesture. Now you need to press "Search engine", scroll down to your selection (e.g. wikipedia isn't visible by default), press it, and then select among a weird collection of recommended search alternatives.
And, as op said, you don't even have the option to use keywords and be done with this nonsense.
Ooh, nearly forgot: you know how Firefox is supposed to be the ethical, privacy-respecting browser? They ship an on-by-default advertising data-collection SDK now!
I switched to brave after this latest round on the Mozilla merry-go round.
My theory is that the money from Google comes with strings attached to pester the power users that rely on Firefox with disruptions and anti-features. To avoid Firefox from actually getting market share, but keep it as a paper tiger for anti-trust purposes.
As crazy as it sounds, they should probably switch to a Chromium "back-end" so they can innovate on top of it - like Brave and the new Edge. Firefox has no chance at competing with these multi-billion-dollar juggernauts on the browser engine itself.
They should build a brand as the privacy-focused flavor of Chromium.
This makes no sense and if they did this their users would leave in droves. Their non-Chromium browser engine is one of the biggest reasons people use Firefox.
The "focus" feature in Hubs is terrible. There needs to be a way to focus (aka view in full screen) on something without having to hold down the f key. If screen sharing was as good as it is in Zoom, Hubs could actually be a Zoom replacement for online classes. But not being able to share your screen in a way that the others can view full screen makes Hubs unusable.
this is technically impressive, and slightly fun initially, due to its novelty. But I have no idea what Mozilla thinks is going to happen with this that is relevant (let alone strategically important) to Mozilla.
I saw from people related to Mozilla on Twitter that when they had their most recent major layoff, they canned the entire research department except for the Hubs team, and that Mozilla was planning on turning Hubs into a revenue stream. So you might say they have pivoted to this, or have dropped everything else in pursuit of this.
First I've heard someone call Mozilla Moz. I was mildly annoyed when seomoz rebranded to Moz but had to admit that I didn't think it was confusing at all.
*If you read this and decide to try it yourself, heads up: you have to do some searching to find the gems – the demographic skews quite young and male so you may find jumping into a random world is chaotic to say the least! It's also far from a polished experience. I like to spend time in quieter spaces like the sign-language practise world (it's amazing to be able to practise any time with real people!) and drawing worlds
A world I came across recently that you might enjoy is "ShaderFes 2019" – it's a shader museum! [0][1]
I'm less convinced more serious social VR will do so well initially as I suspect the surrealism and unconstrained creative-weirdness that VRChat makes possible goes a long way to diffuse the uncanny valley and awkwardness inherent with the current state of the technology
[0] https://youtu.be/Em4JYyKu2d8?t=479
[1] https://www.vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_f5a298f6-83e...