Mozilla's VR team blog covering WebVR, A-Frame demos, the Pathfinder font renderer and Firefox Reality browsers.
HN commenters link it for Pathfinder's text rendering and Firefox's Magic Leap browser, and see a browser-based approach to VR and AR content as sensible.
SCTP provides a nice protocol that gets you the best of both worlds in many ways between TCP and UDP. It features:
- hybrid reliable and unreliable, ordered and unordered delivery semantics
- automatic MTU fragmenting, to avoid router fragmentation
- ordered multi-channel multiplexing
Unfortunately SCTP never took off, but it is the data channel protocol for WebRTC, which uniquely positions WebRTC as a nice platform for game networking in the browser. (However, the stack must be implemented in user space since it is SCTP over DTLS over UDP.)
We are working on a WebRTC based game networking server for Social Mixed Reality at Mozilla which uses the Janus WebRTC gateway as the connection manager, our initial work can be found here:
https://blog.mozvr.com/enabling-the-social-3d-web/
Our initial SFU plugin for Janus already out of the box makes it easy to set it up as a dumb game networking server that just relays messages between peers, but our plan is to turn it into a connection manager in front of an OTP service that provides full authoritative game networking services.
Hi, check out Ghost.
https://ghost.org/
- It's a blog engine with support for static pages.
- It's open source (NodeJS)
- It's self-hostable.
- It's beautiful out of the box.
- It's entirely customizable.
- It's markdown-powered with a great WYSIWYG editor.
- There's no data lock in; excellent import/export support.
I could go on. Just give it a shot. "Ghost Pro" (https://ghost.org/pricing/) from the official team is a bit pricy if you're saying you want something cheap, but Digital Ocean has a two-click-setup droplet for a self-hosted version (seriously, I tried it, it's ridiculously simple). Referral link with $100 DO credit if you are interested: https://m.do.co/c/ea4165209ae0
Some examples of small customizations of the default "Casper" theme:
https://articles.hsreplay.net/
https://spreadprivacy.com/
https://blog.mozvr.com/
More of their customers: https://ghost.org/customers/
I went to hubs.mozilla.com and couldn't figure out what it does. I then tried making/joining a Hub but it got stalled at one of the loading steps so I still couldn't figure out what a Hub is.
They seem to be VR meeting spaces: https://blog.mozvr.com/introducing-hubs-a-new-way-to-get-together-online/
The model you describe seems like a good one, similar to what most Linux distributions do. The distro maintainers are trusted and they compile packages and distribute the binaries, but people can run the package generation scripts themselves to get their own package straight from the source. Reproducible builds allow users to confirm that the maintainers aren't doing anything sketchy - that probably isn't a possibility here, but this model is still far better than what FB/WhatsApp and even Signal do.
Probably worth mentioning, Firefox VR is also going targeting Magic Leap: https://blog.mozvr.com/a-new-browser-for-magic-leap/
IMHO the strategy of unlocking a lot of VR and AR content via a browser makes a lot of sense. The ongoing Rustification of Firefox, things like Web GL, WASM, etc. It all makes sense for VR/AR applications to build on that. Solving the empty room problem where there is no meaningful content or where all the interesting content is in somebody else's walled garden is a key challenge.
VR requires a dedicated UX and I can imagine independent hardware vendors are maybe not so eager to e.g. rely on Google for providing them with that UX. Also, Firefox seems to be leading here rather than following.
I wondered what they have meant when they said "Provides especially clear text quality (via our text-specialized rendering methodology)".
Looking at their README [1], it looks to be texture filtering done a little more properly (many implementation cheaps out with bilinear interpolation, I guess). It does get rid of the aliasing artifacts, but it's still very blurry, and the look is a bit underwhelming.
What I really look forward to is getting text and vector rendering done directly in the perspective transformed space, something Pathfinder [2] has demonstrated before.
[1] https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula#text-quality
[2] https://blog.mozvr.com/pathfinder-a-first-look/
Hi! As we mentioned in the recent Quest release blog post, https://blog.mozvr.com/firefox-reality-for-oculus-quest/, we have some designs for multi-window support and synchronization of content between platforms. We're still working on options around tabs / additional content beyond the number of windows you have open, alongside our really awesome Seattle-based design partners, Podipo: http://podipo.com/
Once we have some concrete designs, we'll have issues open and on our public roadmap for comment and we often have early builds available in our releases page for sideloading if people are interested in testing and giving feedback.