
Mozilla, Virtual Reality, and the Dawn of the Metaverse? - cpeterso
http://wemo.io/mozilla-virtual-reality-and-the-dawn-of-the-metaverse-511
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Animats
We have the Metaverse. It's called Second Life. It works reasonably well.
Second Life already supports the Oculus Rift. See
"[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWE91IB9QMI"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWE91IB9QMI").
They still seem to be struggling with the control side of the user interface,
but somebody will think of something. Maybe a Wii controller. (Basic problem
of virtual reality: looking around, moving, and shooting work great.
Everything else is hard.)

From Mozilla, we have "Now imagine a Minecraft that under the hood was HTML,
CSS, and JavaScript". Ugh. There was a previous idea like this. It was called
Web3D, and it's VRML 97 in XML syntax. "A spinning logo in 40 characters" was
claimed. Anybody remember Web3D? Anybody? Hello? Also, putting on headgear to
browse the web seems a bit much. You can build it, but will they come? The web
is going in the other direction, towards small mobile devices.

(Mozilla's video won't play in Firefox 33 on Ubuntu Linux. Their Javascript
video player crashed with a type error at line 1790 of "vjs.js". And those
guys think using Javascript will make things better. The annoying thing about
the Mozilla Foundation is that their core product keeps getting worse. Firefox
crashes more now than it did three years ago. The number of unfixed bugs
increases over time. Mozilla has a huge technical debt; the code base goes
back to the Netscape days, and it shows.)

~~~
moron4hire
And Second Life is owned by a single, proprietary interest. And that's great,
but that's not the Web. The beauty of the Web is that nobody owns it all and
yet it still all works together. Even one of Linden Lab's former founders is
trying to help open VR up on the Web:
[https://highfidelity.io/](https://highfidelity.io/)

I tend to think the problem with VRML was less to do with markup and more to
do with 1997. Did anything 3D look great in 1997? Not really, and even then it
still impressed us. But we have the power today to make--while not the most
cutting edge graphics--certainly anything better than was available in, say,
2010, and we can make it cross-platform, open, and on the Web.

Doesn't that sound like something we should at least try to do? Just once?

~~~
serf
> And Second Life is owned by a single, proprietary interest.

Linden Lab's/Phillip Rosedale's stated goal was world economy creation. Second
Life is to be thought of as a web protocol that is undergoing standardization,
and is stated to become fully open-source when that standard is finalized.

>And that's great, but that's not the Web.

Well, 'There', the predecessor to Second Life which created most of the
control scheme concepts and user content creation schemas that were employed
in Second Life was actually a technology demonstration between a collaboration
of Forterra Systems and the US Army for private training simulation and remote
work.

If a system which was co-created by a defense group eventually becoming
standardized for public use isn't 'the Web', I don't know what is.

------
mentos
DK1&2 owner here, I really don't see how the metaverse is better than our
current metaphor of browsers/webpages when it comes to sharing information? We
already exist in the 3D world and we invented the web browser to make
information sharing more efficient. Having to negotiate a 3D world instead of
scrolling with my mouse wheel seems like the less efficient metaphor.

~~~
sp332
Web browsers were invented to load "pages", or text in discrete documents. And
until recently, that's pretty much all it could do without plugins. Now that
we have good WebGL implementations, near-native javascript performance,
websockets, etc. we can start moving beyond static, flat, rectangular,
discrete pieces of content.

~~~
mentos
>> we can start moving beyond static, flat, rectangular, discrete pieces of
content

to what? I've tried myself to imagine what that could be but then I realized I
was trying to find a problem for the technology than the other way around..

------
mubhij
Only useful for browser games, tv and adult entertainment but that is pretty
much it.

~~~
deelowe
When I see statements like this, I'm always reminded of this gem: "No
wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

------
_random_
What does sticking HTML and JS into every hole have to do with the Metaverse?
It's about Web, not legacy languages.

~~~
moron4hire
It's what we have. It's filtered out that HTML5 is an application platform. It
succeeds where Java tried and fell almost completely on its face: write once,
run (mostly) anywhere. It started with ubiquitous and came to functional,
rather than the other way around with other cross-platform development
systems. Take that for what it's worth. But that's all it is.

------
moron4hire
I'm excited for VR on the Web (i.e. using the Web as a deployment platform for
VR). It necessitates finally pulling through on the promise of HTML5.
Remember, back when the iPhone was first released, there was no app store for
3rd party apps. It was supposed to be all HTML5 apps. But at the time, HTML5
couldn't do enough to make it worthwhile. Today, there are very few things I
can't do in the browser that I can do as a "native" app.

As for the Web on VR (using VR to render Web content), I think it's unlikely
that we're going to be reading HN in an Oculus Rift anytime soon. Again, I go
back to the example of the smartphone. Most of the activity has been around
making new classes of apps that work best in the form factor. No shit,
Sherlock. We're not going to see any serious effort to adapt our current
understanding of the Web to VR, and I'm completely fine with that. We will,
however, see new designs on the Web that can upgrade or degrade as needed
between VR and 2D displays. People poo-poo'd the mobile web, disbelieving we'd
ever fit a site designed for the desktop on such a tiny screen. And then we
invented responsive design. The Web on VR will have it's own responsive design
patterns.

This stuff about "markup languages for Minecraft" is... I think kind of
lacking in vision, because you don't need VR to make that happen, nor is it
even a thing that anyone actually wants. Markup is text, text is 2D, and 2D
and 3D mesh poorly. I think it's why 3D desktop metaphors never worked:
because they were all mapped to 2D user interaction devices. And there is a
reason you don't program on your smartphone (in general, actually I manage it
on occasion, tweaks to my site in an emergency), because there isn't a
keyboard worth doing it. VR is going to make keyboarding too difficult for
most people. A certain class of VR form factors (the smartphone-based ones)
are going to make it impossible. And that's actually a good thing, because
they open up new possibilities in free-roaming, augmented reality in the
process.

Carpenter gets into one of my biggest problems with the development community
with regards to VR right now, "95Hz is what the baseline is for presence." No
it isn't. That's Oculus Rift marketing material to get everyone thinking of
Oculus Rift as the Porsche of VR hardware. Currently, they are, but they're
trying to establish a brand expectation. I am seeing a lot of people
completely avoid VR because "it's not 95Hz yet" or "the latency, the latency,
THE LATENCY!", like it's going to hurt them. Yeah, things are a little rough
right now, but it's mostly on the developers now to make good looking
graphics. The hardware is mostly there. We used to say "60Hz is the baseline
for smooth video in gaming" and then went right on playing at 30-45Hz, as much
as our machines would handle. If you wait for the hardware to get the rest of
the way there (and it will, it doesn't have far to go), then you'll miss the
boat.

Yes, faster framerates and lower latency are always better. Don't come at me
quoting some study you were not involved with at all talking about experiences
you never had. There is a difference between virtual reality--where we talk
about nebulous concepts like "presence"\--and stereoscopic view apps--where
you're still looking at a display. If you want to talk about VR, there is a
hell of a lot more to it than just frame rate and latency, and a lot of people
are completely ignoring that there is still a lot of work to do in simple
things like matching the right field of view for any given user, satisfying
body awareness, motion sensing, working with 3D ambient-audio, or even just
plain making an app that is interesting and fun to use, regardless of whether
or not it's VR.

And even if you don't go for full VR, there is still a lot to do with
stereoscopic view apps. I think most people who will end up developing apps
for stereo-displays will end up making stereoscopic view apps rather than VR
apps, just because it's so much easier, especially right now with the state of
the art in interaction devices and development tools for VR being so thin. A
traditional, mouse-and-keyboard- or gamepad-oriented FPS-style game with
cartoony graphics and a stereo view is not VR but it's still a lot of fun. You
don't need 95hz for that.

