The site strongly resembles Mozilla Hubs and has the same functionality: you can pick an experience to load, and invite friends to join you. You can use it on the desktop or in a VR headset. You don’t even need to set up an account first to use it!
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One of the people I follow on Twitter is Ben Lang, who is the co-founder and executive editor of the popular virtual reality news website Road to VR. Yesterday, he posted:
I’m starting to think that VR won’t have its consumer mainstream moment (smartphone levels of adoption) until a comprehensive metaverse emerges that interconnects and makes *all* VR content social to some extent. Stuff like this awesome immersive music video is really freaking cool, but would be 100 times richer if discoverable through something a simple as a ‘VR hyperlink’, as well as easily being able to bring a friend along to experience it. Telling a friend ‘hey there’s this cool new thing, come check it out with me’, and then asking them to download an app and then coordinating a time to get online together to invite each other and then *finally* seeing the thing for 10 mins isn’t tenable for smaller experiences.
Ben is making the point that it shouldn’t be so difficult to share VR experiences such as this with friends. And a seamless, interconnected metaverse would probably give a huge boost to the consumer VR market.
Another Twitter user called Matrixscene responded to Ben, with a link to a two-part report on how a metaverse working group did a field test for traversing disparate virtual worlds to see how they interconnect with each other.
Part 1 of the report gives several examples of links or portals between social VR experiences, for example:
Portal links in JanusVR
Links in Cryptovoxels to other WebVR sites
Part 2 of the report details a “field trip” the author and several other people undertook to see how well they could navigate between various virtual worlds. The places visited included:
Anarchy Arcade (website; I still have to blog about this)
We were communicating over Discord’s voice chat the entire time. Anarchy Arcade served as the most premium base reality we ventured to on this trip for several main reasons: – Shortcuts were easy to launch – Universally compatible – Optimized heavily in the background
How soon do you think it will be until we get a truly seamless VR metaverse? Or do you think it will never happen? As always, you are invited to join the ongoing conversations on this and many other topics on the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, the first cross-worlds discussion group!
Welcome to our new community contest! Once again we’ve joined up with the Mozilla crew to build virtual worlds. This time we’re exploring their new Hubs platform and populating it with new spaces and props.
The theme is ‘Clubhouse’ – this can be anything from a treehouse to a speakeasy, a space station to a super-secret gathering space at the bottom of the ocean. You’ll be challenged to design both the space as well as props for it so that other people can use them on Mozilla Hubs.
About Mozilla Hubs
Hubs is Mozilla’s new social 3D platform. It lets you meet friends, ‘voice talk’ to them, and decorate the space with any kind of content, including YouTube videos, images and, of course, Sketchfab models – just by visiting a link.
Mozilla (the company behind the popular Firefox web browser) has announced a new social VR space today called Hubs. According to an article by VentureBeat:
You begin by visiting the Hubs portal through any browser, then you choose a name for your virtual room, a robotic avatar, and a name for yourself, and you can enter the virtual world. To interact with friends, you can then copy/paste the URL and share a dedicated link with them.
…
…Hubs adheres to web standards, works with any device, supports all the usual headsets/goggles (including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Daydream, and Cardboard), and [is] also open to those with no specialist VR hardware on desktops and mobile phones — an inclusive gesture to ensure everyone can participate, not just those with dedicated VR hardware.
This means that in Firefox or Chrome, for example, you can view and interact with friends using your touchscreen, mouse, and keyboard.
Hubs is based on WebVR, which is an open specification which makes it possible to experience VR in your browser. Mozilla is one of the leading developers of WebVR.
I have tried to use Hubs on two computers with Oculus Rift and Touch VR hardware. On the first computer, it wouldn’t recognize my Rift at all. I could only get into Hubs in desktop mode. But it worked just fine on the second computer. So Mozilla still has a few bugs to iron out!
The fact that anybody with any kind of VR gear, as well as desktop and mobile users, can participate in Mozilla Hubs means that this is a potential game-changer, since a much larger audience can participate. It’s another interesting social VR platform to keep an eye on…
