Category: Mozilla Hubs

UPDATED: Mozilla Ceases Support for Mozilla Hubs (but the Open-Source Hubs Community Edition Continues)

HOUSEKEEPING NOTICE: Today is the first of twelve successive Mondays which I am taking as research days from my full-time paying job as an academic librarian at the University of Manitoba. During this time, I am finally tackling two long-delayed tasks:

  1. Updating and reorganizing my list of social VR, virtual worlds, and metaverse platforms (to which I add new platforms as I write about them on my blog; and
  2. Updating and reorganizing the more detailed spreadsheet, a comparison chart of social VR platforms (here’s a direct link to a read-only copy of that spreadsheet).

Of these two, I have decided to immediately start on the second project, which I have not worked on since 2019 (but I would like to thank Dr. Fran Babcock, who made some updates to this spreadsheet in 2021).

This task is long overdue, and there are many entries of metaverse platforms which have shut down since the first version of this spreadsheet, among them:

But, to me, the saddest of the shutdowns arrived this month, when Mozilla announced in a blogpost on February 15th, 2024:

On February 13, 2024, Mozilla announced an organization-wide restructuring impacting a number of products housed within the Mozilla Corporation. Unfortunately, Hubs is one of the products impacted and it will be shut down later this year. This will be a multi-month process with three members of the Hubs team overseeing the transition.

We look forward to having more time to reflect on the full history of the Hubs project, where we succeeded, where we came up short, our feelings about it ending, and Hubs’ overall legacy. However, right now our only goal is to support you as you have so lovingly supported us after learning this sad news and over the last six years...

While we hope that Hubs can have a vibrant life outside of Mozilla, there are a number of pieces of Hubs that will end as part of the shutdown. These include the Hubs Demo Server (hubs.mozilla.com) and the Managed Subscription, the two services actively maintained by Mozilla that most of our users rely on.

Last October, Mozilla announced that it had decided to discontinue the Hubs Cloud hosting service, which ran on AWS (Amazon Web Services). In its place, the company announced the Hubs Cloud Community Edition:

Community Edition is designed to help developers deploy the full Hubs stack on any Linux-based infrastructure, including AWS, Google Cloud, and even your own computer. In the same way that Hubs Cloud mimicked how the Hubs team ran the server managed by Mozilla, Community Edition mimics the infrastructure our team uses for the managed subscription service. Community Edition simplifies and automates most of the complex deployment process using Kubernetes, which is a containerized software orchestration system.

The obvious benefit of a solution like Community Edition is that it gives developers more choices for hosting Hubs. The less obvious benefit is that it offers greater flexibility when dealing with significant updates to a hosting platform. In the past, if there was a major update to the AWS platform, Hubs Cloud developers had to wait for our team to release a new version of AWS launch configuration. Community Edition eliminates this limitation.

Unlike Hubs Cloud, Community Edition is designed for developers who are well-versed with the full Hubs stack and comfortable navigating cloud hosting platforms. While we will be providing examples and guidance on how to host Community Edition, we will not designate a primary hosting platform, as we did with AWS for Hubs Cloud. Community Edition users will be responsible for researching, evaluating, and staying informed about the hosting options available to them.

Setting up Community Edition will require more effort than many of our current Hubs Cloud customers may be accustomed to. However, we believe that this direction best empowers our developer community. Many of you have already chosen to bootstrap and self-host the codebase on your own instead of using Hubs Cloud, and we hope that Community Edition will offer a more straight-forward approach for achieving your goals.

In the Feb. 15th announcement, Mozilla stated that the sunset plan and timeline for Hubs Cloud has not been changed. The company has already ceased support for Hubs Cloud on AWS as of January 1st, 2024, however existing Hubs Cloud instances will not be automatically shut off, as the FAQs section of the October 2023 announcement explains:

We will be ceasing to support Hubs Cloud on AWS starting on January 1, 2024. Existing Hubs Cloud instances will not be automatically shut off on January 1. On that date, we will de-list Hubs Cloud from the AWS marketplace to disable new sign-ups. Existing customers will then have a minimum of 90 days to migrate to another Hubs service before their subscriptions to Hubs Cloud come to an end. The earliest date for these subscriptions to cease will be March 30th…

Developers may continue to use their subscription and manually maintain their instances until we fully remove Hubs Cloud from the AWS marketplace (March 30th, 2024 at the earliest). After January 1, it is difficult to predict which AWS platform updates released will impact current Hubs Cloud customers, given the variability in current Hubs Cloud instances. Many customers, whose instances were created years ago, may not have kept their code current with the updates that have been released. However, if you have experience with AWS development, there’s no reason you cannot manually troubleshoot these issues yourself to continue using your existing instance…

We are currently working on tools to automate the data migration process from existing Hubs Cloud instances to Community Edition and Managed Subscription instances. These tools may vary from platform to platform, however expect to see them released in the lead-up to January 1st. Join our Discord server and check out the #community-edition channel to stay tuned!

Here’s the shutdown timeline, provided by Mozilla in its Feb. 2024 blogpost:

  • March 1st, 2024: The creation of new subscriptions will be disabled. Existing subscriptions will be able to continue using their instances until the full shutdown is complete. The demo server will continue to function as normal.
  • April 1st, 2024: A tool to download your data will be released. Demo users and subscribers will be able to begin downloading their data.
  • May 31, 2024: Existing subscription instances and the demo server will be turned off. All Mozilla-run community resources and platforms will also be turned off.

From this timeline, it sounds as though the official Mozilla Hubs Discord server will also be shutting down on May 31st (I have just posted a question in that Discord to confirm that assumption, though, and I will report back). I am also somewhat concerned that all the links to join the Mozilla Hubs Discord server in the Feb. 15th blogpost give me errors, but I have generated a new invite link here (and reported the problem in their Discord):

The invite links in the announcement blogpost all give errors! Here’s a new one.

So, all of this means that Hubs users have some difficult decisions to make over the next few months, as the sunset timeline marches ahead. However, the future looks promising for Hubs to continue as an open-source, community-run initiative. As Mozilla states in their sunset blogpost:

Hubs’ code is open source, which means that it can have a life outside of Mozilla. Since [the February 15th] announcement, many former Hubs team members have returned to the Discord server to remind the community that Hubs was built with life outside of Mozilla in mind. The project’s commitment to open source and focus on self-hosted versions of Hubs mean that no one entity can determine Hubs’ future; only this community can do that.

And (as we have seen with Tivoli Cloud VR, Vircadia, and Overte springing from High Fidelity), there is already precedent in having a metaverse platform move from company-run to community-run (albeit with varying degrees of success!). I wish the team at Mozilla, and the Hubs community, nothing but the best during this transition, and I look forward to participating in Hubs Community Edition.

Mozilla Hubs will be missed!

UPDATE Feb. 27th, 2024: Michael Morran, of the Mozilla Hubs team, has responded to my questions about the Hubs Discord server and the invite link:

Hey Ryan, thanks for the write-up. The broken link is not intentional, so I’ll update that now. As far as what happens to the discord after May 31, we are currently unsure what Mozilla can transfer over to the community, but we hope to get clarity on this soon.

Thanks, Michael! Here’s the updated invite link for the Mozilla Hubs Discord server.

Using Social VR to Teach an Emerging Technologies Class at UNC Chapel Hill

Steven King is an associate professor of multimedia journalism and emerging technologies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, holding a joint appointment with the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and the Kenan-Flagler Business School. In his work, King combines computer science concepts, human-centered design and storytelling to create new ways to present information through emerging technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence and other interactive media forms, such as interactive data-driven graphics.

Steven King uses AltspaceVR to deliver a virtual course (image source)

When the university was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic last year, Steven used both Mozilla Hubs and AltspaceVR to create a virtual classroom for his students:

If you ask a UNC student what their remote classroom experience has consisted of, they will likely tell you about video lectures through Zoom. But for students in Steven King’s class, they are experiencing remote learning differently — through virtual reality.

“I’m always trying to figure out a better way to teach and communicate,” King, a professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, said. “I know virtual reality is an immersive experience.”

King built a virtual 3D version of his classroom, which allows his students to walk around in the classroom and break out into groups. 

He said he has tested out a lot of different platforms for hosting 3D classrooms. The first experience, he said, was through Mozilla Hubs. But King said his class will likely stick to AltspaceVR because of how pleased the students have been with it.

A virtual classroom in AltspaceVR (image source)

The Raleigh News & Observer reported:

“When you’re faced with a crisis, these are times to step up and figure things up and make new discoveries,” King said. “We don’t need to limit ourselves to the tools we have. We need to develop new tools to move us forward.”

King sent Oculus Go Virtual Reality headsets to his 28 students to use at home. King and the students built their own avatars, and they are all attending class together in a virtual world as robots, panda bears, ducks and other characters. King chose the superhero Ironman as his avatar.

The emerging technologies class was tailor-made for this type of experiment, King said. Students had become familiar with the technology throughout the semester while learning about artificial intelligence and augmented reality.

Steven wrote about his experience developing and delivering the course in a four-part series of Medium posts (here’s a link to part one). He described how he acclimated his students to AltspaceVR:

To help the students prepare for class. I gave the students an assignment to be completed before the first class hosted in AltspaceVR. I asked every student to signup for an account, go through the tutorial in their home space, and to go to the InfoZone, which is a tutorial in the form of a social fair about going to events. The final step of the assignment was to send me a friend request. I also recorded a video on how to enter the room/event…

This assignment was critical to the success of the next class. I needed the students to work through any technical issues on their own and to feel confident in another social VR environment. Once I got a friend request, I added them to the group so they could see the private event…

Most students arrived early and were ready to go. I let them spend several minutes interacting and exploring the space. There was lots of personal chatting, like I would see before an in-person class, which has been absent in my Zoom class.

The pandemic provided a golden opportunity which professors like Steven used to good advantage to provide their students with an introduction to social VR used for educational purposes. You can find out more about Steven and his work via his personal website.

The New Ready Player Me Hub: The Ability to Import Your Avatar to Any Supported Platform!

An example of the avatars you can create using the new Ready Player Me Hub (source)

Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me, the customizable avatar system I have written about before here, here, and here, has issued a brand new update! In the email I received yesterday:

The Ready Player Me Hub lets you create one or multiple avatars and use them in all apps that support Ready Player Me. With one click, you can import your existing avatar or create a new one and add it to apps like VRChat, LIV, and Somnium Space.

According to the official blogpost announcing the update (which I recommend you read in full):

Ever since we launched Ready Player Me back in May last year, our goal was to create a cross-game avatar platform for the metaverse – one that gives you a consistent digital identity everywhere you and your avatar go. Think of it as a passport that gives you access to thousands of virtual worlds. Today, we are making the metaverse passport real with the launch of the Ready Player Me Hub…

When you sign in to the Ready Player Me Hub, you can see all your avatars and connect them to your favorite applications in one click. To import your avatar into a partner app that uses Ready Player Me, all you need to do is sign in with your account.

VentureBeat reports:

Wolf3D’s platform allows users to travel between video games, virtual reality experiences, and other apps using a single virtual identity, said cofounder Timmu Tõke in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We’re trying to build a cross-game service to enable a lot of virtual worlds to exist,” Tõke said. “We see more people spending more and more time in virtual worlds. The metaverse is kind of happening around us. But most of it isn’t happening in one world or one app. It’s a network of many different worlds that people visit for work and play and collaboration. And doesn’t really make sense for the end user to create a new avatar identity for each of those experiences. It makes sense to have one portable entity that travels with you across many different games and apps and experiences.”

In fact, 300 games, apps, and social VR/virtual worlds now support the Ready Player Me avatar system, including the following platforms (all links below redirect you to blogposts I have previously written about each platform, which might be somewhat out-of-date, as I am covering so many different platforms on this blog!):

You can peruse the complete list of Ready Player Me partners here.

If you are interested in trying out the Ready Player Me Hub to create an avatar (either from a selfie or from scratch), you can access it here. You have a choice of making either a full-body avatar or a head-and-shoulders avatar:

The Ready Player Me Hub starting screen

When your avatar is ready, simply click Next in the top right corner of the website. You will be redirected to the new Hub interface. To save your avatar, click Claim now and sign in with your email address. You will get a one-time login code that you need to type in the Hub. You can use the Hub to connect your avatars to available apps in the Discover Apps tab. To import your avatar into a new app, all you need to do is click Connect avatar (some applications may require a few extra steps).

We are getting ever closer to the dream of having a consistent avatar which you can use in multiple social VR platforms! Be sure to give the Ready Player Me Hub a try.

Wolf3D’s Ready Player Me Creates a 3D Avatar for Mozilla Hubs from a Selfie

Some examples of avatars created using Ready Player Me

Wolf3D, a company that specializes in making personal 3D avatars for games and virtual worlds, has released a new browser-based program called Ready Player Me. Ready Player Me allows you to create a personalized 3D avatar for use in Mozilla Hubs, using as your starting point a single selfie from your cellphone or webcam!

(You might remember Wolf3D as the creators of a mobile app called Virtual You, which High Fidelity released to create a 3D avatar for use on the now-closed social VR platform. This app was withdrawn from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store when HiFi essentially ceased operations on Jan. 15th, 2020.)

Using Ready Player Me could not be easier. Simply visit the website, click on the blue Create Avatar button to get started, and take (or upload) a selfie. You are then given an array of options to change your skin, hair, eye and eyebrow colour, and hairstyle, facial hair, shirt and eyeglasses. After only a few minutes, here is what I was able to come up with:

Once you are satisfied, just click the checkmark in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and it saves the avatar, giving you a URL which you should bookmark somewhere for later use and re-use.

To use your newly-created avatar in Mozilla Hubs, open a world, click on the three-bars menu in the upper left-hand corner, and click on Set Name & Avatar:

On the Name & Avatar screen, click on Browse Avatars:

On the Browse Avatars screen, click on Avatar GLB URL in the upper right-hand corner of your screen:

Enter the URL you received from Ready Player Me, and click Accept:

That’s it! Here’s what my customized avatar looks like in Mozilla Hubs:

I am hoping that we will see Wolf3D-made avatars pop up in other social VR and virtual worlds! It’s such an easy way for somebody to create a personalized avatar.

P.S. Starting with this blogpost, I have created a new category called Mozilla Hubs, since I find myself writing about this platform more often. I will try to go back and add my older blogposts about Mozilla Hubs to this category, but that is going to take a little time, so please bear with me!