Saidera
Senior Member
There exists these things called Mesh for Teams, Mozilla Hubs and Sony SAPARi.
How about an Audio Science Review VR World?
This is in relation to a suggestion to use Mozilla Hubs or an equivalent web browser-based VR platform as a way to create a shared space to experiment and interact with the ASR community.
Forums are primarily text-based at the moment and are easily preserved. YouTube videos remain available forever. But interactions in VR are not preserved for future viewers to experience again. There is absolutely no reason to include an ASR-exclusive VR world and yet I am still suggesting it. Allow me to explain why:
So a while back I saw an old VAIO MX desktop computer discussed in a thread here, and in it there was this software called SAPARi (by Sony) which many fans worked to rebuild. They did very deep research. So another thread here introduced the bare essentials of SAPARi.
Now I saw that something called Mesh for Teams would be released next year from Microsoft. I also saw that Facebook would become Meta. As a person whose only deep connection with VR is the extensive infatuation with SAPARi throughout my life, I really was surprised and forced to respond (here). Most researchers and employees of Sony involved in SAPARi (that is, to be precise, the underlying CP architecture that supports it) have a deep and well-founded conviction that such colourful, apparently fun looking VR experiments have relatively little benefit for society, are not all that fun even if interesting people use them (let alone if nobody uses them), and just generally involves hard work to maintain and no viable business model for corporations to really find useful ways to apply them. For decades a variety of VR experiments have been attempted. The ordinary young person on the street might be able to name ‘Second Life’ and ‘VRChat’ these days. People don’t have a need for VR goggles or MR glasses even if they were given away for free. So how is it that a ‘metaverse’ is being pushed out yet again despite the overwhelming success of text, photos, videos and interactive elements in a mostly 2D environment on the Internet? Is there perhaps some use for VR after all? Is there any benefit in being an avatar? Or is this merely another experiment. Perhaps computing power has increased and people are getting unnecessarily excited over nothing again.
It seems that only recently have the technological barriers to experiencing VR been removed with the release of Mozilla Hubs and similar web browser based VR platforms. Those barriers included the need to install a third party VR browser specifically to access the VR platform and the need to conform to various file formats (perhaps proprietary ones). Now though, anyone can visit a VR World via a link to Mozilla Hubs through their web browser (like Firefox) and create content using Blender.
Since I followed the line starting from VRML97 to X3D to WebGL to A-Frame and finally Mozilla Hubs, this has been a very long wait for people. Mozilla Hubs has arrived too late. Perhaps I prefer Hubs because Firefox is related to the old open sourced Netscape Navigator which in turn supported many VRML97 plugins back in the day. It just wasn’t possible to run VR in web browsers until Mozilla Hubs.
Something called Open Cobalt existed but it never got past alpha testing in 2009 and it stalled around 2012-15. It enabled voice communication and the viewing of media within the VR world. It was run in a separate browser and it was ‘open’. It had potential and many features but it stalled anyway. Mozilla Hubs replicates it but in a better way, and no extra browser is needed.
As with anything, the more users and interest that is generated the better the VR experience gets. At present it is rudimentary but don’t let that put you off Hubs. The possibilities remain largely unexplored. So I have simply put this suggestion out there to the community because I am sceptical of VR but my SAPARi history forces me to support it.
How about an Audio Science Review VR World?
This is in relation to a suggestion to use Mozilla Hubs or an equivalent web browser-based VR platform as a way to create a shared space to experiment and interact with the ASR community.
Forums are primarily text-based at the moment and are easily preserved. YouTube videos remain available forever. But interactions in VR are not preserved for future viewers to experience again. There is absolutely no reason to include an ASR-exclusive VR world and yet I am still suggesting it. Allow me to explain why:
So a while back I saw an old VAIO MX desktop computer discussed in a thread here, and in it there was this software called SAPARi (by Sony) which many fans worked to rebuild. They did very deep research. So another thread here introduced the bare essentials of SAPARi.
Now I saw that something called Mesh for Teams would be released next year from Microsoft. I also saw that Facebook would become Meta. As a person whose only deep connection with VR is the extensive infatuation with SAPARi throughout my life, I really was surprised and forced to respond (here). Most researchers and employees of Sony involved in SAPARi (that is, to be precise, the underlying CP architecture that supports it) have a deep and well-founded conviction that such colourful, apparently fun looking VR experiments have relatively little benefit for society, are not all that fun even if interesting people use them (let alone if nobody uses them), and just generally involves hard work to maintain and no viable business model for corporations to really find useful ways to apply them. For decades a variety of VR experiments have been attempted. The ordinary young person on the street might be able to name ‘Second Life’ and ‘VRChat’ these days. People don’t have a need for VR goggles or MR glasses even if they were given away for free. So how is it that a ‘metaverse’ is being pushed out yet again despite the overwhelming success of text, photos, videos and interactive elements in a mostly 2D environment on the Internet? Is there perhaps some use for VR after all? Is there any benefit in being an avatar? Or is this merely another experiment. Perhaps computing power has increased and people are getting unnecessarily excited over nothing again.
It seems that only recently have the technological barriers to experiencing VR been removed with the release of Mozilla Hubs and similar web browser based VR platforms. Those barriers included the need to install a third party VR browser specifically to access the VR platform and the need to conform to various file formats (perhaps proprietary ones). Now though, anyone can visit a VR World via a link to Mozilla Hubs through their web browser (like Firefox) and create content using Blender.
Since I followed the line starting from VRML97 to X3D to WebGL to A-Frame and finally Mozilla Hubs, this has been a very long wait for people. Mozilla Hubs has arrived too late. Perhaps I prefer Hubs because Firefox is related to the old open sourced Netscape Navigator which in turn supported many VRML97 plugins back in the day. It just wasn’t possible to run VR in web browsers until Mozilla Hubs.
Something called Open Cobalt existed but it never got past alpha testing in 2009 and it stalled around 2012-15. It enabled voice communication and the viewing of media within the VR world. It was run in a separate browser and it was ‘open’. It had potential and many features but it stalled anyway. Mozilla Hubs replicates it but in a better way, and no extra browser is needed.
As with anything, the more users and interest that is generated the better the VR experience gets. At present it is rudimentary but don’t let that put you off Hubs. The possibilities remain largely unexplored. So I have simply put this suggestion out there to the community because I am sceptical of VR but my SAPARi history forces me to support it.