
Supercraft: Create and Publish WebVR Sites in VR - ArtWomb
https://supermedium.com/supercraft/
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ngokevin
Thanks for sharing! We're Supermedium from YC W18. We built Supercraft to
easily allow people to intuitively build their own worlds with their hands in
VR that can be shared with just a URL.

It also allows WebVR and A-Frame developers to easily create good looking,
consistent 3D assets that are performant and really low file size,
particularly for A-Frame. Here's an example making a simple shooter game in a
few lines of HTML with Supercraft assets:
[https://github.com/supermedium/supercraft-
shooter](https://github.com/supermedium/supercraft-shooter)

~~~
fijal
Hi

Excellent job! We have been working quite a bit in UI/UX of VR editing. You
might be keen to look at what we've done here:
[https://vrsketch.eu](https://vrsketch.eu) (it's a tool for architects, but
shares a lot of problems)

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feiss
Hi, another Supercraft dev here. Yeah, lots of struggling about how to edit
things in VR in a simple but versatile and intuitive way. I see you made a
wonderful job in VRSketch, lots of interesting ideas and explorations, thanks
for sharing!

~~~
fijal
Hi!

Thanks! Feel free to hit me up if you want to chat, some parts of the UI are
or can be OS. Email in profile.

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peterlk
I hadn't looked into this for a while, but the idea of a browser backed by
standards (webvr) and open source (A-frame) is REALLY exciting. I don't want
to get overly enthusiastic, but this feels geo-cities-ish. I love the idea of
hand-crafted VR "websites", mostly because it forces the "hand-crafted"
(literally, I suppose) part, which leads to the wonderful diversity that made
geocities fun.

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mncharity
> I don't want to get overly enthusiastic

Ok, we can help with that. :)

Windows only. VR in general is still Windows-centric, followed by Android, and
bit of Mac. The WebVR spec, even for W3C, was... notable. Example: to get new
data, pass an _immutable_ object to the api... which then updates it. But
perhaps WebXR is now better? Very not "Just Works" \- sensitive to hardware
and firmware, and still crashy. A community that's better at posting "yay! it
works!", than at describing just what definitions of "it" and "works" were
needed for that to be sort of true, and at clearly characterizing state of
play.

Remember Angular 1? How its PR was full of red flags, "you'd be nuts to invest
in this now rather than waiting" red flags? And that the authors didn't
realize what they were waving, was yet another big red flag? A-Frame, at least
early A-Frame, reminded me a lot of that.

VR/AR will be awesome. But it's still rather a mess. And there's a line of
bodies of people who burned time struggling with ephemeral problems. There are
many explorable opportunities, including ARKit. But it seems we've a ways to
go before something like a VR geocites becomes possible. Though skimming WebVR
outreach might leave that non-obvious.

On a more upbeat note, with most everyone focusing on "immersive" video games,
there isn't yet much awareness of how bizarrely psychedelic non-novice/expert
UIs in VR can be. Imagine stumbling into someone else's customized environment
- sort of like dvorak "huh?", plus vi macros "what did I touch?! what did it
do?!", plus blender "what? where? how?", plus geocites "bling! shazam!
awesome." :)

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ngokevin
As one of the creators of A-Frame (and Supercraft above), and there with WebVR
near the beginning. I agree, it's still a mess, early, and people love to hype
and shout how awesome things are with cool images, GIFs, and videos, when the
reality is it's still a ways away

Honestly, I've been using A-Frame all day for the last couple years, and
really enjoy its development process. And have developed applications like
Supercraft that I think have some value. I do need to make it easier with
documentation and stuff. But going to spend the next few years making A-Frame
and WebVR worthy for developers and users.

Not even to mention the mess with standards around the lower level APIs and
the WebVR/XR specs themselves :) It'll get there though.

~~~
mncharity
> A-Frame [...] really enjoy its development process [...] Supercraft

Nifty. If I update my Web?R-like browser-as-compositor stack for linux, that's
an incentive to push through to A-Frame compatibility. Thanks.

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AnsisMalins
Does WebVR work yet? Last time I tried it in Firefox, it showed a stereoscopic
image on the screen, but nothing in my Rift.

~~~
ngokevin
Yeah. If you have a laptop, you might have to configure NVIDIA settings to use
high performance for Firefox.

Supermedium (our browser purely for VR apps) configures that automatically and
has made WebVR easily available on Steam and Oculus. Also DK2 and below is not
supported, Rift CV1 is the minimum.

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vsviridov
VRML is making a resurgence :D

