Firefox Reality is a version of Firefox targeted at VR headsets. You can install it from the store of the Oculus Quest (the headset I own, I imagine others are supported). It's not meant to run on a regular workstation.
The interesting feature of this browser is navigating VR ready websites that provide an immersive experience (aka. webvr). You can also browse the regular web from your headsets, of course, but that's not particularly exciting.
It is very odd how vague their product description page is. Naming a product Firefox Reality seems like good marketing: what could be a better brand than all of Reality? However in reality, their site doesn’t say exactly what parent says: Firefox Reality is a browser built for (standalone) XR devices.
Thanks! We also find that a lot of our users really like watching 360 or even 2D videos, taking advantage of the ability to resize the screen to get their own personal theater.
Right now, we only have Firefox Reality available for standalone VR headsets, but we're bringing the experience to desktop VR and a variety of standalone AR headsets in the second half of this year.
"Enter a New Dimension"... of what? I didn't advance beyond the opening screen. Is this going to educate me (mmm), seduce me (eww), stimulate me (eww/mmm?), or just going to advertise to me?
The problem with all of these virtual-X or augmented-X is that they don't provide enough value to me -- as a consumer -- they're just "grand ideas" without any real value.
I'm sure the gimmick effect has some value in and of itself, but c'mon.
I also didn't quite understand the landing page. Enter a new dimension can be applied to anything. Scrolling further we find some VR brands, but the title made that clear already. Then your eyes are drawn to the moving game covers. So are they making an app store? Scrolling further, we find "Designed from the Virtual Ground Up". Ha-ha I see what they did there. And then comes the footer.
Only now that I go back through it more slowly to write it up, I find this small text just before the end: "designed to tackle all of the new opportunities (and challenges) that come with browsing in VR". Oh it's a browser! Only after typing the comment about how I scrolled through the whole page and didn't find a meaningful statement, I noticed a line of text hidden between headlines and moving pictures that should have been the title.
Not sure what the situation is for tabbed browsing in this.
"Viewing multiple pages concurrently" issue repeatedly mentions tabs as something that needs to be designed https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/issues/635, in May saying "Will keep this issue open for designing Tabs. Feel free to make changes to track the design + engineering."
But then in June it's "Closing this in favor of new meta bug #1319"
Maybe tabs have been implicitly bundled into "multiwindow" when they're talking about that? Can't check myself because the Quest version doesn't have any multiwindow support, it looks like they're working on a crash issue for it.
I tried a dev build sideloaded last week on the Quest and being in a single-window no-tab environment where you can only have one page open at a time is very limiting. But as soon as that's worked out, I'll be switching to this as the main browser.
I wonder if it will be possible for someone to patch Oculus Home so that the Browser button opens this instead.
Hi! As we mentioned in the recent Quest release blog post, https://blog.mozvr.com/firefox-reality-for-oculus-quest/, we have some designs for multi-window support and synchronization of content between platforms. We're still working on options around tabs / additional content beyond the number of windows you have open, alongside our really awesome Seattle-based design partners, Podipo: http://podipo.com/
Once we have some concrete designs, we'll have issues open and on our public roadmap for comment and we often have early builds available in our releases page for sideloading if people are interested in testing and giving feedback.
Mozilla has really gone off the rails. They have deprioritized html 5 compliance and keep chasing spectres like VR and mobile. I really wish they'd just stick to making sure there's a solid, viable alternative to chrome, instead of getting distracted like this.
I noticed a few months back that the Servo engine (upon which I was building a play/experimental browser) development had shifted significantly in the direction of Mixed Reality (it shifted more than a few months back, but I was not paying that close of attention). At that point I gave up on my browser project.
Some execs at Mozilla think MR is the wave of the future. I think it's mostly a party trick with a very niche market and will always only be a niche market, and wasting top talent on MR seriously detracts from a project that is a hundred-fold more important. But maybe that's just me.
> MR seriously detracts from a project that is a hundred-fold more important
I have mixed feeling about this. I’m inclined to agree with you however if it did take off it could mean the difference between Firefox dying and becoming the market leader.
I don't know if mobile counts as a spectre in 2019. Unless you mean in the sense that gaining significant market share on mobile is a tall order in a way that it isn't on desktop?
I don't think mobile is a mistake, as long as Chrome mobile doesn't have as blocking there's at least one very good reason to use Firefox, also the reader viewer is a life saver.
VR seems like a huge waste of resources though. Yes I think it will take off in the next 10 years, but are people really going to be using VR to browse the web? And can you really make good VR apps in JavaScript? I doubt it.
People still don't use WebGL/WASM for traditional 3D games which are less demanding.
> VR seems like a huge waste of resources though. Yes I think it will take off in the next 10 years, but are people really going to be using VR to browse the web?
You could've asked something similar 12 years ago: sure, smartphones will probably take off, but are people really going to be using those small devices to browse the web?
Mozilla missed that boat; they can't afford to miss this one if it's going to take off. Weighing that against investing resources now, at a time when they're financially healthy, makes it a pretty sane direction in my view.
I don't think the comparison is meaningful. Twelve years ago, it was obvious to most people that the web on smartphones would be important. Mozilla understood that but they were presumptuous: instead of trying to create the best Android web browser, they tried to make an OS that could rival Android. FirefoxOS/Boot2Gecko failed, and their mobile build suffered from all this.
I don't think that VR sets have the exponential growth that smartphones had on their first years. So this new target of Mozilla may never expand outside a niche market. And I'm afraid their flagship browser could suffer from the side-effects of this focus.
Is there any particular reason they can't offer a damn .exe so I can try this out with my Index? I'm sure the copy on Viveport would work, but I don't want to install Viveport. :(
Thanks! We don't currently have a build of Firefox Reality available for desktop devices, but that work is currently underway. We announced it as part of our deal with HTC and are excited to show it off soon:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/01/08/mozilla-announces-d...
Firefox IOS uses the safari browser because Apple's walled garden is off limits for browsers that are not based on that. So, that makes shipping a VR browser without the Firefox internals impossible/impractical. In this case, it's not only a browser but a content store that is not iTunes, which complicates things further.
Absolutely. When I was a kid I did not have any internet access, and most of the software was from CDs from magazines. One of them had a VRML world+editor that I still remember fondly.
I should try to see if the CD is still readable...
You should check on cd.textfiles.com. They have the content of a bunch of those old CDs that would come with magazines. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit download content from textfiles.com and reminiscing of the pre-ubiquitous-internet world :)
Yes and yes, mostly. Some libraries (like three.js) still support loading "Classic VRML" as a scene format, but I don't think it's a popular target these days.
On a similar nostalgia train, does anyone else remember Cycore Cult3D? It was a sort-of-WebGL-ish browser plugin targeted at rendering 3D parts and product views in the browser.
My problem with the whole VR world, Firefox Reality included, is that it requires me to use stores, open accounts, and do all kind of stuff that seems to me unnecessary.
Firefox Reality includes support for WebVR, so you can use web based VR applications through the browser.
Part of the reason you might choose to install Firefox Reality on your VR headset is because it's important to you that developers of VR apps always have an option to use the web to share their apps, which will avoid forcing their users in the way you mention.
We've built a social VR application called Hubs (hubs.mozilla.com) to showcase the potential of web based VR applications.
Seems a little bit weird to call this "Reality" - the word "Virtual" is not incidental the meaning of the phrase "Virtual Reality", taking it away completely reverses the meaning. It's almost like this is an April Fool's joke.
Branding doesn't need to be literal, just evocative. The word reality is often mentioned in trippy or philosophical contexts, which is the connotation that the term "virtual reality" is trying to evoke. The brand strategy didn't work for you, but I don't think it's a particularly unreasonable one, and I think plenty of people will tap into the connotations they were going for.
I've noticed it's very common for VR marketing material to show young children using the devices. Is stuffing a headset onto your kid going to be the new 'give them a tablet to shut them up' in the future? going to have some very interesting repercussions.
Advertising always shows an exaggerated presence of young children. People like things that are cute and associate positive attitudes with them. I've seen real estate stock photos of offices with people holding toddlers and sometimes businesses like local insurance companies will advertise with just a giant picture of a baby's face; it's the kind of thing you see on bus benches and billboards.
Having (and loving) kids counts as default and when you don’t, you’re at least strange or your social integrity can be denied. Sadly, people went a long road to accept all sorts of sexualities, race equality, et cetera (minorities never were a trigger for me from the start), but still put ‘defaultness’ on pedestal. One with no kids can more likely get fired, their desires sacrificed, and so on in otherwise equal conditions. It feels like people did not just erase the border, but drew yet another which now encompasses a slightly bigger circle. We are still outside and this is barely going to change, since those who have kids seem to change on a psychological level and cannot think the other way.
Well, you can just not have kids. Then you don't flip into parenting mode. That was largely intentional for me. Although a couple wives were pretty persuasive. And I've been propositioned for sperm a few times. By women who liked my style, but could see that I'd make a shitty parent.
> In my experience kids younger than 7 don't do well in VR.
I know anecdote is not data but my 4yr old loves feeding his dinosaur in Oculus Quest 'Bogo' game. I limit his VR time to about 15-20 mins/week but he would love to do more if I allowed. I only use the base Quest headset straps/controller - no custom setup. He can easily press the different buttons on the controllers and move around as well as my 60yr old mom.
I had heard that there are concerns about children using VR and how it could affect their development. The Oculus Health and Safety Guide says:
> This product should not be used by children under the age of 13. Adults should monitor children (age 13 and older) who are using or have used the Headset for any of the symptoms described below, and should limit the time children spend using the Headset and ensure they take breaks during use. Prolonged use should be avoided, as this could negatively impact hand-eye coordination, balance, and multi-tasking ability. Adults should monitor children closely during and after use of the headset for any decrease in these abilities.
There is nothing shown about this (who would approve that controlled study?), just lots of suspicions (as usual). Screen time in general is bad for kids’ developing eyes, however.
Nothing can be proven like that. They can’t even run studies, so without any further information, usage among kids will grow anyways (because kids think it’s fun and lots of parents will ignore suspicions).
I’m not going to nit pick on what “proven” means, and studies on this kind of thing certainly can be run, they just haven’t yet. That’s why caution is being applied.
A controlled study on the effects of VR on children would involve running experiments on lots of children. Try getting that by your clinical ethics board....
How much of this fatigue for you is with your eyes? How much is it with your head/neck?
I just wonder, because even when they "set" the focus of these HMDs to "infinity", your eyes are still technically only looking at a screen at a fixed distance, mere inches away. Everything I have read about so-called "simulator sickness" and other maladies in HMDs have said that eye fatigue results from this "fixed focus" issue. It doesn't cause as much issue for pilots training in simulators, because the actual screen being projected on is several feet away from their eyes, allowing them to become more naturally focused toward "infinity" (parallel).
I also wonder about the head and neck areas and fatigue. Most of the HMDs - while lightweight compared to systems of the 1990s - still seem like they have a lot of "nose weight", and aren't balanced on the head. Proper balance (fore/aft and laterally) is crucial to long-term use with lower fatigue, even with a light weight HMD. Also, the more weight that rests on the bridge of the nose, the worse the amount of fatigue.
Much of this knowledge is based on research that was done in the 1990s and earlier, both with those early HMD systems, and other earlier simulator systems. I'm continually surprised that current commercial offerings seems to either be unaware of such research, or that they ignore it for the sake of marketing (distributing the weight on the head results in a more "helmet like" HMD, which probably isn't as saleable to the public; ultimately, the public probably would like to see something as lightweight and wearable like a pair of sunglasses, but current display and optics technology isn't there yet - if it ever will be).
Cannot speak for OP, but for me, personally, it is the type of things I use VR for that exhausts me. I mostly use it for games, which requires standing and moving around (depending on the game, it can be quite a bit). So I mostly get physically exhausted and sweaty, which prompts me to take the headset off. No motion sickness or eye strain on my end. In fact, my eyes feel way more strained after looking at a computer monitor than after VR.
I don't really consider that to be "simulator sickness" fatigue - it's just exercise and fatigue in general due to the course of the simulation, not because of technical flaws in the implementation of the hardware.
Though I can understand where you're coming from; I recall really "playing" Dactyl Nightmare in the mall (most people would just stand around and stare in the game - it was kinda stupid), and I would walk away fairly sweaty from the "workout" of playing the game (crouching, moving, shooting, aiming, etc).
I always thought that was one of the best aspects of VR gaming - that I could actually be in the game, and not just viewing it through a window semi-passively.
Yep, that's it, I fully agree with you. I was trying to relay that the exhaustion i get from the VR is just inherent to the physical activities I perform while in VR, nothing to do with VR itself. You phrased it much better than I did, so thanks for clarifying to others reading :)
I wish there were more good VR experiences I could do from the couch. When I’m tired and want to relax, it turns out sitting and putting my feet up is a pretty important part of what I’m looking for.
Agreed. Even just for straight up standing experiences, a lot of them involve way too much movement for someone living in a cramped apt. Playing Superhot VR recently, my friend accidentally broke my drinking glasses on the counter :(
It would be nice to be able to just sit down and relax in VR while playing a game.
You can find some more pictures and stuff with google - the company no longer exists, and I don't know if any of the prototypes or such are still around; if they are, they are probably "unobtainium".
But anyhow, part of the system was a particular style of "zero gravity" posture chair, as you can see from the pictures and such. So playing Elite Dangerous in an HMD from a similar chair might be an interesting experience...
For me, I personally feel enclosed and slightly seasick. I don't think it's a weight issue, but something to do with the inherencies of the system. I can stand a hololens longer than a Vive, for instance.
Interesting - are you prone to claustrophobia? It sounds like what you experienced is similar to that, from what little I know about the condition.
Do you have the same response when wearing other kinds of goggles or face shield (say something like welder's goggles, or lab goggles, or a scuba mask, or a welder's hood - things like that)?
I don't think I've ever heard of this being reported, but it doesn't surprise me as a possibility, either. It may even be mentioned in the literature out there (while I have an extensive collection of literature and research papers on VR, I'm certain I don't have anywhere near all of it).
Ugh, still not seeing it. If I go to mixedreality.mozilla.org, that image doesn’t appear at all. I even tried requesting the desktop website and it still isn’t showing.
If you think sci-fi is not a good predictor for the near future, just post it as a statement, not a rhetorical question. I agree with you, though, that RPO is not meant to be realistic in any way and a bad example, but the way you generalized it to all of sci-fi makes it also not very helpful. Try The Martian from Andy Weir, or some of Daniel Suarez' books like Kill Decision. There is some scary realistic sci-fi out there.
I haven't read Kill Decision, but I have read The Martian, so I'll answer in that vein.
I don't think The Martian is realistic, or even a good predictor of anything. Now, there may be an expedition to Mars in future, but AFAICT there's really no good reasoning for it. What's your argument for an expedition to Mars?
EDIT: I just wanted to add: You and I -- humans that we are -- only remember the hits, i.e. the predictions that turned out to be true. There are a lot or predictions (sci fi novels, etc.) that turn out to not be true and are thus forgotten. QED
You seem to have missed the point of my comment completely. Your takeaway from my saying "just post it as a statement, not a rhetorical question" and "the way you generalized it to all of sci-fi makes it also not very helpful" (for which the books were supporting examples) is to ask what makes me think humanity should go to Mars? The book doesn't even argue we should or shouldn't go to Mars, but it contains a ton of research into how these missions could work and may actually (contrary to your generalization) be a realistic representation.
As for survivorship bias, sure, I can think of a million sci-fi books that are unrealistic. I never made the argument all sci-fi is good or that their authors have done research or that they are good predictors. But that most don't even try to be predictive doesn't mean some might not be a realistic enough example to relate it to the choices we make and how it might play out. RPO just isn't one of them.
Ok, so this is a dense comment, so I'm going to try again.
AFAICT, your nested quotations contained a quote (by you!), which said "it contains a ton of research into how these missions could work and may actually [...]"
Ok, so a "ton of research". By whom? An author... of sci-fi?
Look, I'm not per se against imagination or exploration, but I am very much for realism.
"They" don't want you to know how and why they are brainwashing your kid. When you take it off him/her to check, it will revert to some "safe" default show.
I'm curious if Firefox has considered a GSuite competitor. Their IOT/home-router offering looks great, and a similarly privacy-first GSuite might get a lot of cross sell.
Web Libreoffice plus a decent integrated webmail implementation seems like it would do well. Several companies are charging $5+/month/user for less, and are doing well, right now.
Yes! There's an active Servo Layout 2.0 project going on right now, which is a revamp of layout to make it production-quality. Anthony developed some Rust iterator magic to allow us to write sequential-looking code that actually runs in parallel, which is a major improvement in maintainability over what we had before.
Java added fairly seamless parallel iterators via streams but there is a huge amount of overhead there and often it is slower than normal iterators, depending on the work being done at each iteration. Hopefully Rust is able to avoid that sort of downside.
Not by default yet, but you can enable it for testing. Requires a recompile with a properties file to make the option appear.
>Experimental Servo support
>To compile with Servo support, create a file called user.properties in the top-level project directory and add enableServo=1. Then to enable Servo in Firefox Reality, go the Developer Options panel in the Settings, and toggle the Servo option. Then a new button will be added to the navigation bar. Clicking that button will reload the current page with Servo.
Sad that the daydream version on a Moto Z in Google Play gives me a "Your device isn't compatible with this version" for me even though I can run Daydream and other daydream apps
Unfortunately, we don't currently support phone-based Daydream or Gear VR devices. There's both a bunch of extra work to support all of the phone in/out/notification lifecycle scenarios and we have a pretty small engineering team and the long tail of phone/chipset-specific bugs is pretty substantial. We might evaluate support for it or Cardboard in the future, but for right now we're mainly focused on standalone headsets.
For Oculus Go and Google Daydream, you have a tiny controller with a couple of buttons like the one at the bottom of this page: https://www.oculus.com/go/accessories/ Instead of moving it physically "onto" a button in 3D space, you just "point" at the button using the controller, and then click.
"Easy" to aim and click may be a stretch... I have only ever tried the Vive's implementation before but it felt a lot like holding a laser pointer - basically impossible to get any precision because your hand vibrates so much in ways you don't realize.
> Doing it with your eyes may be preferable long-term
On the contrary, gaze control was forced upon us when phone-based VR had no access to a controller. It's actually rather unnatural. We look at many things without wanting to activate them so you have to have a secondary cue for "clicking". Usually a timer: "stare at this for x seconds" which means every interaction is an exercise in patience.
Gesture control is probably the most natural if done well but when done badly it's fairly awful. I still can't master clicking on a v1 Hololens and I avoid using the thing without a clicker.
Simple unobtrusive controllers are going to be the best bet for a fair while I suspect.
I have a hard time believing browsing the Internet will ever be in a form like this unless we find an easier way to input information than typing on a keyboard. It's just too much energy.
I took a quick look at the codebase for the browser (https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality), and it isn't what I was expecting (once you dive to app/src) - definitions for the main three supported systems are each at this root level, and I didn't see any kind of "template" or "empty" definition file or anything to guide someone wanting to make one themselves - but maybe that's not possible.
It appears that these files are wrappers around the APIs used for those other products (?). So your only hope would be to base your wrapper on these existing ones, which while feasible (working with the API docs too), isn't what I would call "ideal". Plus, there doesn't seem to be a separation of concerns when it comes to input vs output.
I mean, what if I wanted to use my hacked powerglove with my Rift HMD? Or what if I wanted to use my Vive controllers with my Virtuality Pro?
I understand that the supported systems are nominally "all-in-one" solutions, but the parts (HMDs, controllers, tracking) are available separately (at least in some of the cases) - so mixing and matching might be something someone would want to do. It would definitely be that case for those implementing their own "mixed setup", where they might have an old VPL datasuit and glove, plus some other old pro-level HMD that they like to play with.
As it is, it seems like each setup would have to be a custom "all-in-one" for that setup, so if you had two different systems that used two different HMDs and tracking, but both used the same Powerglove Minelli interface - the code couldn't be "shared" in a reasonable manner (yes, I know with the right symlinking and other buggery it could be accomplished within the current structure, but it isn't ideal).
I was hoping the structure would be more like /plugins, with /input /output, and under those /controller /glove /wand and /hmd /motionplatform /cave, then under each /occulus /vive /google /example
Or something like that. Am I wrong here?
---
Ok - I know this is likely open source and thus can be changed, but I honestly wish that things like this offered (and marketed) a means - via plugins or something (and maybe this does - hence, marketed) - the ability to expand on what i/o devices are allowed.
Sure - should the "main players" be featured? Of course. But what about those of us who might like to - oh, I don't know - throw on an old Forte VFX-1 and a Powerglove and go at it? Maybe we want to recreate the experience of using REND386?
Or what if you have access to a Polhemus or Ascension magnetic tracking system (or any number of other "pro-level" tracking)? Or HMDs? Or other input devices? Or motion platforms?
Maybe you're a developer of something completely new, and want to play in this same environment and make it compatible...
Again - I haven't dug into the code, and maybe it's designed to accommodate these kinds of use cases. I'd just love to see that availability, if it exists, to be advertised more. I guess its because I get the same feeling around software released for my OS of choice, where Windows and Mac are prominently advertised, and Linux is at best, if it's offered at all, the classic step-child stuffed in a closet.
As an aside, I never can figure out the argument that "we don't offer support for Linux because the market is so small, it isn't worth it for us" - well, if everyone keeps saying and doing that, what do you think will ultimately occur? Do you think that market will grow, stay the same, or shrink?
I think your design taste is sound. But there are some constraints.
The VR/AR vendor market has largely collapsed into a few big players with vertical-integration ecosystem-capture dreams, so high-investment opaque monoliths is what's available. Valve's OpenVR apis being the biggest multi-vendor exception. And they're immature, in a complex and still-evolving design space, making it harder to abstract commonality. And gaming VR imposes strict performance constraints, so some paths may have little slack with which to pay some abstraction costs. So having vendor-specific monoliths, joined only at the top, could be the right choice. Any failure to have their javascript-level joining be flexibly mixable... seems regrettably traditional for browser apis, and I don't know the cultural background for that.
I've mixed Vive lighthouse and custom optical tracking, Vive and WMR and now drone HMDs, on linux. I took a custom browser-as-compositor stack. (But there's also the Vrui VR Toolkit.)
Man I remember seeing those in copies of PC Gamer as a kid. You can find modern reviews online. They had a lot of issues; mostly due to low resolution leading to motion sickness.
There were attempts at 3D web standards in the past. Who remembers VRML?!
Which I don't think do them real justice; it's like people growing up with modern cars doing a review of a Model T - a fair review you have to try to replicate everything around what is being reviewed, or at least have that mindset. A good review would use an old Pentium running Duke Nukem 3D with the patches meant for the VFX-1 (for the head tracking and "puck" usage).
> They had a lot of issues; mostly due to low resolution leading to motion sickness.
Most consumer HMDs of the time had low resolution, low field of view, contrast issues, etc. If they had any kind of tracking, coupled with the PC hardware and software of the era, the frame lag to changes would also cause simulator sickness issues.
One thing though - if you look at research papers from the era - there was discussion of what was termed a "looking past the pixels" effect.
That is - if you didn't focus in on the pixels themselves, the screen-door effects (terrible at those low resolutions, especially if the FOV was made large - which in most cases, it wasn't), and the small FOV - that psychologically (maybe neurologically too) some people would report seeing things at a better resolution and FOV.
It wasn't investigated too much - but what was thought was that for those participants, the mind would fill in the "gaps" using it's mental model - so long as they weren't focusing on those gaps. There are many other experiments that have been done that proves the mind does this in the "real world" - so in theory, that effect could be real. I suspect it is, but only if the imagery being displayed in the HMD matches some imagery the mind has seen before. For instance, my memory of playing Duke Nukem 3D in a VFX-1 setup seems far better than I am sure it was, but then, I had played the game a lot on a regular monitor at a higher resolution, so I had a "model" of it in my mind. It might be a different experience today, since I haven't played it in a long while - or if I played another game in that HMD that I hadn't played before.
> There were attempts at 3D web standards in the past. Who remembers VRML?!
Mark Pesce was behind that - among other pioneers:
These earlier attempts have led to and informed newer frameworks being played with today. VRML had its good and bad points; the main concept was to make VR as accessible to normal people as the Web was via HTML. But it really was a technology that was too early for the hardware that people had available (unless they had access to some high-end SGI machinery). That kinda gave it an unfair reputation, and was a part of the reason it never caught on well.
Today we have a range of other options, some more "standard" than others, but most things "VR" still seem to be cobbled together from "scratch", or at best layered on top of WebGL - while things like Three.js have made WebGL easier for people to use, it still isn't anything like typing in simple VRML.
Another note: One thing I liked about the VFX-1 that I haven't yet seen in current HMDs was the "flip up" design. It was meant so you could easily "enter and exit" a virtual world as you designed it. Today, it may not really be needed as much as resolutions and FOV increase in HMDs - instead, we're slowing seeing the concept of "recreate the monitor inside the HMD" kind of approach. But I still thought the concept was interesting, and I was kinda surprised that Oculus didn't do something similar, since Palmer Luckey hacked the VFX-1 to death on the 3DMTBS forums prior to the kickstarter.
I guess there's a limit on time you can edit your post...
Other comments I have read here indicate that this software is for "standalone" systems - and not, as I presumed, for "component" systems (I'm not sure what else to term them).
Wind power really needs something to level demand—either a battery scheme such as Tesla is selling or pumped storage (where you pump water uphill when the wind is blowing and let it flow downhill when it isn’t) it’s
In my collection of VR documents and software "artifacts" - I have a collection of QuickBasic 4.5 programs (source code) that this French team built (circa late 1990s IIRC) to generate various VRML models and "worlds" using code. I don't recall how abstracted it was, but I thought it unique enough to save it for my archive. I should really go through that collection and release it in some manner - I have tons of interesting stuff, much of which has disappeared from the web. Maybe an upload to archive.org would be in order...
Viveport has been growing since Infinity was launched.
And the software is less awful than when it was first released. To be honest, it's not much more awful than the Steam or Oculus apps neither of which are paragons of quality.
Indeed. Software that barely runs and has a scummy history (supposedly). Last time I tried to find this on Viveport I couldn't, I couldn't find a search feature or otherwise locate this software
Do you have any source for this? I've not heard of any issues with Viveport that'd count as "scummy", just being an inferior app store to Steam. A search for "viveport controversy" finds nothing either.
A little off topic, but what a world we live in when a prominent browser maker is advertising a new browser with a webpage that doesn’t properly display its main tagline on small devices (iPhone SE) https://i.imgur.com/WkqsUEZ_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&f...
If they can’t get it right, what does that say about the state of the web as a platform?
1) I didn’t say broken, I said ‘doesn’t properly display‘.
2) How many other smaller phones exist on the market? It’s disingenuous to say it’s .5%.
This is not some complex item- it should simply not look like this. If the simple stuff is misaligned, what can you expect the rest of the page and more complex items to work like?
Even Apple doesn’t care about the iPhone SE anymore. I installed the iOS 13 beta on my iPhone SE and in several places the built in apps or parts of the operating system don’t properly fit on the screen. It’s a shame
Most websites break around the 300px mark, even when responsive. According to Chrome's dev tools the iPhone SE has a 320px width. Alignment issues are going to be common on that device.
The interesting feature of this browser is navigating VR ready websites that provide an immersive experience (aka. webvr). You can also browse the regular web from your headsets, of course, but that's not particularly exciting.