There is maybe a use case for VR to add immersion for games (like space sims or racing games), but why would I want to have a device on my head to look at a 2D canvas?
I mean it's a nice tech demo, but it seems like the 2000ish hype around these 3D-cube window managers that ... looked cool, but otherwise don't add anything to your workflow. Do people really want to work (e.g. develop) with a VR in a 3D environment?
The advantage of this particular app is that it works on standalone VR headsets, which otherwise don't have access to a decent web browser. Also integrates with Web VR content so you can find and play web-based VR games and videos without taking off the headset. Other than that though I agree with you; apart from a few niche use-cases, right now this isn't really much better than just using the browser on your phone.
Longer-term though, VR (and eventually AR) have the potential to offer a number of significant productivity advantages over desktop displays. Unlimited screen real-estate, the ability to organize your workspace spatially, better interaction with 3D models and data.
It's also possible that there's a whole new set of UI paradigms that we haven't discovered yet which will be enabled by VR/AR interfaces. If we were designing user interfaces from scratch with the ability to project images anywhere in 3D space, what would those interfaces ultimately look like? Are 2D interfaces really the most efficient? Or did we just arrive at that solution as the result of the limitations of current technology?
I don’t think unlimited screen estate is really a thing; you can get yourself multiple 4K 50+ TVs for less than the price of a top line iPhone, but such an environment is not ergonomic at all. It’s much easier to switch desktops than to move your head and body around. I think planar screens will rule productivity for the foreseeable future.
The advantage of having lots of monitors is that it lets you organize your workspace spatially, rather than having to constantly deal with the cognitive load of manual window management. Tilting my head a few degrees to look at my email client which is _always_ in the same place on my right monitor is significantly faster and more intuitive than having to grab my mouse and click the email icon on the taskbar, or Alt+Tab through a stack of recent programs until I find my email client among them.
There are practical limits, sure. Most people are not going to want to turn their entire body around 180-degrees just to look at another window. Within those limits though I find that more space is generally better.
Compared to tilting my head to the second monitor, it is measurably faster to type ^3 (Control + 3) to switch to the space/virtual-desktop where my email window is open (~1.5sec vs ~0.7sec).
If one has to Alt+Tab or Command+Tab through programs, yes, that would suck the life out of productivity.
The only real benefit larger screen spaces (larger than a ~30 inch monitor) provide me with, are when I need about 4-6 open windows (maximized vertically) to switch between when dealing with large merges/patches. I haven't experienced any practical benefits beyond two ~30inch monitors.
FWIW, I can easily shift my gaze from the upper left corner of my left monitor to the lower right corner of my right monitor in significantly less than half a second on my triple monitor setup (my measurements ranged from 0.2s-0.5s), so I'd dispute that part of your comment.
I also maintain that this is significantly more intuitive than having to memorize keyboard shortcuts for each of my more frequently used programs.
I suppose everyone's workflow is different though. If you're comfortable with just one monitor then good for you. I for one will be a lot happier once I can arrange my workspace into a neat grid of windows arrayed across my desk.
I have dual 28" 4K monitors on my desk and can look to any corner just by moving my eyeballs. I would reorient my head when focusing on a window for an extended period, but not for quick checks to read notifications or bits of text scrolling by in a shell or chat window.
I use a side by side in landscape orientation, so a 7680x2160 desktop. I think this is about ideal width and dot-pitch for me. Higher resolution in the same field of view would be wasteful as the pixels are already too small to see individually unless they are high contrast. I still prefer mild RGB sub-pixel anti-aliasing on fonts in this setting. A wider field of view would also be useless for desktop tasks since I would not be able to comfortably scan it all. While I wouldn't mind a taller field of view, I don't have the budget nor tolerance to stack monitors vertically nor to switch to an array of portrait orientation monitors.
VR will not give me any screen "real estate" unless it has incredibly high resolution and wide field of view or has solved eye-tracking and zero-latency foveal rendering. I am not interested in turning my head constantly to shift a high resolution porthole around a blurry overview or (worse) a blinkered black void.
Because of the gap between monitors, I sit slightly offset and favor the right half of the left monitor for transient tasks. I keep chat and email windows open on the far left and tend to open a browser or editor on the left half (or two thirds) of the right monitor, while opening reference materials like PDFs in the rightmost extreme.
I do have traditional virtual desktops where a hot-key press can shift my displays to show any one quadrant of a logical 15360x4320 desktop. This is a holdover from my days on a single, lower resolution screen. I find that I use it far less frequently now, as I can indeed use the large visible area to organize things related windows spatially. I use it mostly for mode-switching between different sets of windows which may keep the same arrangement for weeks at a time. For example, one quadrant is my code-editing and communication space and another is a deployment/test suite/log-following space. I have room to open other reference materials or sample data around my code editing, and conversely room for other SSH shells and state-spelunking tools around my test and log windows.
One of the biggest things we've found that people like to do in VR is private viewing. They'll collect links of videos all day and then come home to watch them on a "big screen" but don't have a laptop or TV that supports miracast, so use a VR headset. Or they like to watch twitch streamers or their favorite movie providers or just bounce around searching content.
As the hardware becomes more mature, we'll support more use cases, but we wanted to enable some compelling early use cases (especially voice search) and learn from users as soon as we could.
A $15 chromecast + a TV or monitor that someone may not have/want for whatever reason. A chromecast wouldn't be private either if you have other people in your household.
VR headsets are pretty awful at watching traditional 2D content though. And yeah, who buys an entire VR headsets because the don't have an HDMI cable or a Chromecast? This sounds implausible.
That is certainly true, but you can still only focus on a "window" that is similar in size to your 24 inch screen (and even currently I guess the focus - the area where you read - is actually quite smaller than the screen size).
True, you have more screen real estate for the "Alt-Tab" aspect of window selection, but I am not sure that is such a leap.
VR offers a number of advantages for productivity. As many virtual desktops as you want of any size. New ways to model data and manipulate it, think 3D graphs. Virtual telepresence for meetings. Those are just the ones off the top of my head.
> but why would I want to have a device on my head to look at a 2D canvas?
Office managers are sooner or later going to find one VR headset cheaper than 2 or 3 large screens for tech work. At that point, you will be given a headset instead.
I think the point here is the availability of unlimited screen space. Everywhere you look can be a monitor. Combined with the potential increase in productivity, and the use of VR offices for remote work, I can see a business market developing for this. I don't think we're ready to say monitors will go away. But I think all the pieces are there for VR headsets to be adopted by some companies once the resolution gets good enough.
You still can only focus on one monitor/window? The only difference is that you switch focus/windows via head tilting instead of keyboard/mouse, so I don't really see what that buys you.
Laptops aren't perfect, you need to take them everywhere, the screen is much smaller, and they are expensive.
Imagine a world where you only need a smartphone and a headset. You are traveling by airplane? You take out your headset, and you have a huge screen in front of you to work with.
I think VR/AR could replace the need of laptops in maybe 10 years. Firefox is stepping in the right direction for it. Firefox combined with AWS Cloud9, and you can have a programming machine in VR.
> There is maybe a use case for VR to add immersion for games (like space sims or racing games), but why would I want to have a device on my head to look at a 2D canvas?
Virtual big screen (IIRC, not too many years ago headsets were sold for exactly that purpose, without even VR capability; they were basically like modern VR headsets burn without motion tracking.)
I'm not sure if it's just about the 2D canvas. With WebXR (I think - I'm not too up-to-date on the field), websites can also offer VR examples. You will need a browser to discover them, but they can still be immersive - you just also need a 2D canvas for regular websites that get you there.
Like I said I get the use-case for games and I also think there is potential for AR - but pure VR for the web? If it were that important to have 3D to represent information on the web, we would have a lot more 3D websites (without VR) already - which is technically possible for a long time.
if you think of the web as a delivery vector for apps, it makes sense. Visiting a URL to play a VR game or initiate a VR experience makes sense and complies well with the original intent of URLs. Imagine launching (e.g.) minecraft.net and instead of a website, you get dropped into a demo version of the game with a contextual "frame" of information, links, and so on. Or a virtual showroom for a kitchen company where you can explore a 3d model of the kitchen, interact with the furnishings, and select new colours or models.
Putting 3d content on a screen sucks in the same way that putting a 2d plane in 3d does. Making 3d content explorable in 3d makes a lot more sense.
Well... Everything that you'd use a regular VR app for, I guess. It's not quite clear yet what the most important use cases for VR will be, but Mozilla appears to be betting big on providing all API's that might be required to make the web just as capable of providing VR experiences as regular apps (i.e. what ideally would have happened with web apps in the first place), and for that, they need a VR browser. In other words, you'd be able to play a VR game without needing to install anything, by simply visiting a Web VR app, and that app would work on all VR platforms that run VR browsers like Firefox Reality.
Another thing to check out in this area is JanusVR. The thing about Janus is that it makes the internet navicable from an immersive perspective. Granted this requires adding FireBoxRoom code to your site in order to make everything 3D, but it does seem to fit the VR "paradigms" a bit better than what I'm seeing here from Firefox.
The main problem with web browsing in VR is it's way too low resolution to read text and you can't see your hands so you have to type everything in with that remote character by bloody freaking character.
But I guess, if you want to browse the web in VR you might as well do it in Firefox.
Sorry to be dense, but why would one want do to web browsing in VR at all? It's all built on a metaphor of flat sheets of paper, so it's paradigmatically 2D.
I want to be working in VR. Once the resolution gets decent enough I can just get 20 screens wherever I look. Plus I can sit, stand, whatever. Sounds fantastic. Coffee might get a bit cumbersome though.
I think this problem is solved already, see this video about TrackIR from 1:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AO0F5sLdVM (it is called motion scaling). Of course people may still get injuries from this if they do it for 40 hours a week...
I think my ideal VR workspace would be one screen directly in front of me, and then as many screens as I want off in the distance.
You'd be able to easily see the screens in the distance and look for updates/etc and just click on it or whatever to pull that screen closer to you if you want to actually read on that screen.
This is my ideal for VR. I'm really hanging out for the day I can create infinite amount of virtual screens, and reconfigure screen layouts on the fly.
Throw in a camera so you can toggle AR mode when needed (coffee), and you have my dream workstation.
We just need one 8k screen per eye, which will be doable as soon as 8k smartphones are on the market.
Sadly having an 8k screen on a smartphone seems mostly pointless, and achieving the necessary economies of scale is hard with VR headsets alone.
My biggest hope is a paradigm shift in UI design. Everything we have is designed to accommodate low resolution screens. With ubiquitous high resolution screens UI patterns from print like "lean in to read this detail" become viable, and if popular would justify much higher display resolutions, directly benefiting VR.
Maybe vector-based CRTs like in oscilloscopes can be made small enough to use in headsets (if they haven't already). Either project floating text on transparent AR glasses or project a text layer on the lower resolution graphics display. I'd prefer the AR approach if it means I won't need a $500 GPU to generate floating text.
Maybe it could improve ergonomics? A lot of people suffer injury from the posture required to sit at a desk looking at a monitor all day. A sufficiently high resolution VR display could be combined with a reclined posture that supports the head, neck, and back. Of course there's the whole input method problem to solve too. :)
Here's a VR text-input concept by Elevr. Using three dimensions you only need one hop from the center of a 3x3x3 cube to hold 26 letters, plus a space in the middle. http://elevr.com/keycube-3-torus-based-typing-in-vr/#h.a9zrf... (This shows the setup but it's not the final version, because eventually they realized that returning your cursor to the center after each character works better with muscle memory.) So use various controller axes to indicate positive-neutral-negative for three axes, and you have a letter. If you use chording you can type reasonably fast. There is quite a learning curve though.
I'm open to new ideas but I can't imagine this being a very efficient way to input words and characters into a computer. I have worked with older game consoles and remote controls that tried to do this stuff and I'm not sure anyone likes it.
Why not simply speech to text? I don't think a lot of people are doing VR in a room with other people.
The article states the firefox reality actually supports tts.
Just because people don't like it initially, doesn't mean it can't become a fairly fast input method given enough practice. Here is another example of a keyboard in much the same vein as using a controller, for people with carpal tunnel syndrome: https://orbitouch.com
The issues with text input are a large part of why we added voice input even in our very first release! w.r.t. text rendering, we're doing a lot of fundamental work in rendering higher-quality text (you can't fix resolution fundamentals, but you can take into account the optics of the hardware better than we all do today), but nothing to announce there yet.
Interesting. The DeepSpeech github indicates that it's not capable of realtime transcription, even using a GPU. How is that fast enough for this use case?
Steam's VR home or whatever they call it made great use of the touchpad by treating them as two fingers on a virtual keyboard. It was effortless to learn and rather quick.
Too bad Steam VR's desktop is awful. I have 3 monitors side by side, and Steam shows your desktop at a constant width, which means my display is super super tiny. Can't even zoom in, and to left click, you have to keep the controller super constant or it registers as a drag.
We have a VR-only browser on launched on SteamVR (Vive) / Oculus Store (Rift). Relevant to HN, we went through a recent YC batch. Still early but focused on 6DOF headsets, and ignoring 2D for now.
I think before they get big we needed a resolution update. Reading text is still difficult in VR and I can't see collaborative VR spaces getting big until texts start becoming more legible. Also I think we needed trackable office furniture and keyboards. Finding my keyboard blindly while in VR is a pain still. Once those issues are solved I think collaborative spaces will come. It's a good space for a startup to solve.
This reminds me of animating paperback book pages as a transition to directly linking web pages. The paradigm is leaking over to the new one where the new one doesn't have a good way to do it yet. Instead, I would have a hall with portals you could zoom up to as you wave your hand out in front of you, kind of like the iWatch but not sure the puke factor.
Doesn’t look that great in the screenshots to be honest - would be nice if it’s not just a gimmick because “we can” but some new paradigm of more effectively and immersive Ly consume the web... I mean - the kind of distraction free “reader mode” that you do in Safari, imagine if you had that in VR and then a 3D way to navigate between web docs/pages based on the links on the current page and smart topics - a bit like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu[1] project from the 60s or whenever - the real vision behind hypertext!
EDIT: [1]: Bit is history on Xanadu https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ - and there’s a video of it somewhere and you can/could even download a real demo of it on floppy disk I seem to recall
I have no idea what the current future is, all I know is that is doesn't include 3D TV sets and tablet computers replacing PCs (apparently, the PC can decline all on its own)
I'll admit to not being particularly well-acquainted with VR, but a few observations:
1) This is being used as a target for Servo. Even if it ends up being useless (I won't pretend to be able to predict the future), the investigation into getting consistent 90+ FPS performance out of web rendering engines, regardless of content, is going to be excellent for the web. VR is a challenging environment for the Servo team to prove its technological prowess, and for many engineers, a challenging environment is exactly the kind of motivation necessary to push at boundaries.
2) Mozilla missed the "social" hype train and their mobile OS project was widely considered too little, too late (not to mention the terrible performance of mobile web engines at the time). Both of these areas are dominated by large, (effectively) proprietary vendors. Facebook's purchase of Oculus signaled to many that "social" was going to move to yet another platform. Mozilla's goal here is to get out in front of a potential VR hype train, keeping the open web as a major player in order to keep their mission relevant.
3) Mozilla believes the web is the ultimate platform for connecting people. It is one of the few markets with a political landmap that encourages collaboration between the multiple players. Therefore, for Mozilla, the capabilities of the web must always be expanded to prevent balkanization of the Internet into product-specific networks, such as Apple's iMessage. I am actually encouraged by their willingness to jump in front of VR, despite my own belief that VR won't be as relevant as many prognosticators think.
This is my analysis, take it with multiple grains of salt.
I spent a good year of my free time in high school creating navigable 3D worlds with VRML. Now it seems like noone has heard of it, and they’re next to impossible to render.
I was working for a company in 1997 that was convinced VRML was the next big thing. They even spent a fair amount of effort writing their own custom browser plugin to improve performance and add their own extensions to VRML. The whole project folded after only releasing a couple of tech demos.
This was meant to be a joke. At the same time, it was meant to foster people's curiosity/education on what our industry has tried before. Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way, though.
Now an absolute honest question… how long do you think it'll be before we come across something like VRML again?
No problem, the question comes often. It’s understandable if you have not kept en eye on the space for a while. A-Frame is built on standards (HTML and WebGL), it runs on any browser without extensions or plugins. But it’s not a standard on itself so it can evolve much quicker and make design decisions based on real world usage by the community. While A-Frame offers high level primitives like `box`, `sphere`, `light`... the emphasis is on extensibility through an entity-component architecture. We aknowledge that A-Frame cannot anticipate all needs for all projects so we wanted to make very easy to extend and reuse 3rd party pieces.
Good point on trivializing other people's work. I can definitely see how it can be interpreted that way. Just to be clear: that was absolutely not my intention. It was more like a "this reminds me of some good old times, does anyone else share the same nostalgia?" type of comment. So, again, sorry if I rubbed you (or anyone else) the wrong way. And I appreciate you taking the time to expand on what I thought was a simple comment.
Yeah there is, if you go to some of the sites on the home page there's an "enter VR" button, where the site does the equivalent of fullscreen for VR (it enters VR mode and it's much like a VR app).
That might be a big drawback of the very experimental release and fail method of development. You eventually start loosing trust in an organization that keeps giving you things, you make the effort to get used to them and then it takes them away. I'm sure the learning they get from it is very valuable, but you just spend a bunch time and energy and got nothing in the end.
Firefox still does not support hardware encoding of videos on Linux. So when I watch Youtube videos my CPU usage goes through the roof and I cannot watch HD.
GPU hardware acceleration has nothing to do with video decode. (Okay, the hardware is often on the same physical silicon die, but they're separate things in software.)
There is literally no support yet for any unix video decode APIs in Firefox. No VA-API, no VDPAU, no V4L2, no nothing.
Because if you're compositing on the GPU, you're not compositing on the CPU :) It shouldn't help that much with video players, but it does always help a little
Awesome! I have all the parts in the bins, and now I have a reason to build a VR rig!
But uh... I don't see linux on the compatibility lists, and I'm not using my work mac for this, and my gaming windows computers are too old (XP), and with lineageos on my phone without gapps... I'm not buying a bunch of proprietary hardware to play with a new open technology so geez I guess I can't play with it at all. Bummer.
Browser vendors don’t control drivers or hardware support on the different OSs. VR is pretty much a Windows game today with limited and experimental Vive support on OSX and Linux. I’m sure that Mozilla in particular is eager to support linux.
Oculus GO is an Android system. No Windows involved. Unfortunately it has replaced the operating system with a shopping mall. You want that free Firefox download? Log-in to Facebook first. Every apk has to go over the shop, no sideloading. Which is a shame - would be a nice system if it only were more open.
Hm, I don't get it.
There is maybe a use case for VR to add immersion for games (like space sims or racing games), but why would I want to have a device on my head to look at a 2D canvas?
I mean it's a nice tech demo, but it seems like the 2000ish hype around these 3D-cube window managers that ... looked cool, but otherwise don't add anything to your workflow. Do people really want to work (e.g. develop) with a VR in a 3D environment?
The advantage of this particular app is that it works on standalone VR headsets, which otherwise don't have access to a decent web browser. Also integrates with Web VR content so you can find and play web-based VR games and videos without taking off the headset. Other than that though I agree with you; apart from a few niche use-cases, right now this isn't really much better than just using the browser on your phone.
Longer-term though, VR (and eventually AR) have the potential to offer a number of significant productivity advantages over desktop displays. Unlimited screen real-estate, the ability to organize your workspace spatially, better interaction with 3D models and data.
It's also possible that there's a whole new set of UI paradigms that we haven't discovered yet which will be enabled by VR/AR interfaces. If we were designing user interfaces from scratch with the ability to project images anywhere in 3D space, what would those interfaces ultimately look like? Are 2D interfaces really the most efficient? Or did we just arrive at that solution as the result of the limitations of current technology?
I don’t think unlimited screen estate is really a thing; you can get yourself multiple 4K 50+ TVs for less than the price of a top line iPhone, but such an environment is not ergonomic at all. It’s much easier to switch desktops than to move your head and body around. I think planar screens will rule productivity for the foreseeable future.
The advantage of having lots of monitors is that it lets you organize your workspace spatially, rather than having to constantly deal with the cognitive load of manual window management. Tilting my head a few degrees to look at my email client which is _always_ in the same place on my right monitor is significantly faster and more intuitive than having to grab my mouse and click the email icon on the taskbar, or Alt+Tab through a stack of recent programs until I find my email client among them.
There are practical limits, sure. Most people are not going to want to turn their entire body around 180-degrees just to look at another window. Within those limits though I find that more space is generally better.
Compared to tilting my head to the second monitor, it is measurably faster to type ^3 (Control + 3) to switch to the space/virtual-desktop where my email window is open (~1.5sec vs ~0.7sec).
If one has to Alt+Tab or Command+Tab through programs, yes, that would suck the life out of productivity.
The only real benefit larger screen spaces (larger than a ~30 inch monitor) provide me with, are when I need about 4-6 open windows (maximized vertically) to switch between when dealing with large merges/patches. I haven't experienced any practical benefits beyond two ~30inch monitors.
FWIW, I can easily shift my gaze from the upper left corner of my left monitor to the lower right corner of my right monitor in significantly less than half a second on my triple monitor setup (my measurements ranged from 0.2s-0.5s), so I'd dispute that part of your comment.
I also maintain that this is significantly more intuitive than having to memorize keyboard shortcuts for each of my more frequently used programs.
I suppose everyone's workflow is different though. If you're comfortable with just one monitor then good for you. I for one will be a lot happier once I can arrange my workspace into a neat grid of windows arrayed across my desk.
I have dual 28" 4K monitors on my desk and can look to any corner just by moving my eyeballs. I would reorient my head when focusing on a window for an extended period, but not for quick checks to read notifications or bits of text scrolling by in a shell or chat window.
I use a side by side in landscape orientation, so a 7680x2160 desktop. I think this is about ideal width and dot-pitch for me. Higher resolution in the same field of view would be wasteful as the pixels are already too small to see individually unless they are high contrast. I still prefer mild RGB sub-pixel anti-aliasing on fonts in this setting. A wider field of view would also be useless for desktop tasks since I would not be able to comfortably scan it all. While I wouldn't mind a taller field of view, I don't have the budget nor tolerance to stack monitors vertically nor to switch to an array of portrait orientation monitors.
VR will not give me any screen "real estate" unless it has incredibly high resolution and wide field of view or has solved eye-tracking and zero-latency foveal rendering. I am not interested in turning my head constantly to shift a high resolution porthole around a blurry overview or (worse) a blinkered black void.
Because of the gap between monitors, I sit slightly offset and favor the right half of the left monitor for transient tasks. I keep chat and email windows open on the far left and tend to open a browser or editor on the left half (or two thirds) of the right monitor, while opening reference materials like PDFs in the rightmost extreme.
I do have traditional virtual desktops where a hot-key press can shift my displays to show any one quadrant of a logical 15360x4320 desktop. This is a holdover from my days on a single, lower resolution screen. I find that I use it far less frequently now, as I can indeed use the large visible area to organize things related windows spatially. I use it mostly for mode-switching between different sets of windows which may keep the same arrangement for weeks at a time. For example, one quadrant is my code-editing and communication space and another is a deployment/test suite/log-following space. I have room to open other reference materials or sample data around my code editing, and conversely room for other SSH shells and state-spelunking tools around my test and log windows.
Even regular monitor sized screens are better in VR since you can move it wherever you like. The resolution is the only reason I don't do it more.
One of the biggest things we've found that people like to do in VR is private viewing. They'll collect links of videos all day and then come home to watch them on a "big screen" but don't have a laptop or TV that supports miracast, so use a VR headset. Or they like to watch twitch streamers or their favorite movie providers or just bounce around searching content.
As the hardware becomes more mature, we'll support more use cases, but we wanted to enable some compelling early use cases (especially voice search) and learn from users as soon as we could.
A $15 chromecast can easily enable this? I'm surprised this is an actual use case.
A $15 chromecast + a TV or monitor that someone may not have/want for whatever reason. A chromecast wouldn't be private either if you have other people in your household.
VR headsets are pretty awful at watching traditional 2D content though. And yeah, who buys an entire VR headsets because the don't have an HDMI cable or a Chromecast? This sounds implausible.
> but why would I want to have a device on my head to look at a 2D canvas
Because instead of having a, say, 24 inch screen, I can now have a "screen" the same size (or larger) as my field of vision.
That is certainly true, but you can still only focus on a "window" that is similar in size to your 24 inch screen (and even currently I guess the focus - the area where you read - is actually quite smaller than the screen size).
True, you have more screen real estate for the "Alt-Tab" aspect of window selection, but I am not sure that is such a leap.
have you browsed the web in vr before? its certainly like being in front of an imax movie theatre to me. i been using oculus go btw.
VR offers a number of advantages for productivity. As many virtual desktops as you want of any size. New ways to model data and manipulate it, think 3D graphs. Virtual telepresence for meetings. Those are just the ones off the top of my head.
> but why would I want to have a device on my head to look at a 2D canvas?
Office managers are sooner or later going to find one VR headset cheaper than 2 or 3 large screens for tech work. At that point, you will be given a headset instead.
The cost of a few monitors every few years is completely negligible relative to the salary of the person sitiing in front of it.
I think the point here is the availability of unlimited screen space. Everywhere you look can be a monitor. Combined with the potential increase in productivity, and the use of VR offices for remote work, I can see a business market developing for this. I don't think we're ready to say monitors will go away. But I think all the pieces are there for VR headsets to be adopted by some companies once the resolution gets good enough.
> Everywhere you look can be a monitor.
But what's the advantage of that?
You still can only focus on one monitor/window? The only difference is that you switch focus/windows via head tilting instead of keyboard/mouse, so I don't really see what that buys you.
No one looking over your shoulder?
So? Someone is still going to do the math, and if it comes up positive, it will happen.
Airplanes or portable computers.
Laptops aren't perfect, you need to take them everywhere, the screen is much smaller, and they are expensive. Imagine a world where you only need a smartphone and a headset. You are traveling by airplane? You take out your headset, and you have a huge screen in front of you to work with.
I think VR/AR could replace the need of laptops in maybe 10 years. Firefox is stepping in the right direction for it. Firefox combined with AWS Cloud9, and you can have a programming machine in VR.
> There is maybe a use case for VR to add immersion for games (like space sims or racing games), but why would I want to have a device on my head to look at a 2D canvas?
Virtual big screen (IIRC, not too many years ago headsets were sold for exactly that purpose, without even VR capability; they were basically like modern VR headsets burn without motion tracking.)
I'm not sure if it's just about the 2D canvas. With WebXR (I think - I'm not too up-to-date on the field), websites can also offer VR examples. You will need a browser to discover them, but they can still be immersive - you just also need a 2D canvas for regular websites that get you there.
> [...] websites can also offer VR examples.
But for what exactly (despite ... porn)?
Like I said I get the use-case for games and I also think there is potential for AR - but pure VR for the web? If it were that important to have 3D to represent information on the web, we would have a lot more 3D websites (without VR) already - which is technically possible for a long time.
if you think of the web as a delivery vector for apps, it makes sense. Visiting a URL to play a VR game or initiate a VR experience makes sense and complies well with the original intent of URLs. Imagine launching (e.g.) minecraft.net and instead of a website, you get dropped into a demo version of the game with a contextual "frame" of information, links, and so on. Or a virtual showroom for a kitchen company where you can explore a 3d model of the kitchen, interact with the furnishings, and select new colours or models.
Putting 3d content on a screen sucks in the same way that putting a 2d plane in 3d does. Making 3d content explorable in 3d makes a lot more sense.
Well... Everything that you'd use a regular VR app for, I guess. It's not quite clear yet what the most important use cases for VR will be, but Mozilla appears to be betting big on providing all API's that might be required to make the web just as capable of providing VR experiences as regular apps (i.e. what ideally would have happened with web apps in the first place), and for that, they need a VR browser. In other words, you'd be able to play a VR game without needing to install anything, by simply visiting a Web VR app, and that app would work on all VR platforms that run VR browsers like Firefox Reality.
Shopping?
porn
Another thing to check out in this area is JanusVR. The thing about Janus is that it makes the internet navicable from an immersive perspective. Granted this requires adding FireBoxRoom code to your site in order to make everything 3D, but it does seem to fit the VR "paradigms" a bit better than what I'm seeing here from Firefox.
The main problem with web browsing in VR is it's way too low resolution to read text and you can't see your hands so you have to type everything in with that remote character by bloody freaking character.
But I guess, if you want to browse the web in VR you might as well do it in Firefox.
Sorry to be dense, but why would one want do to web browsing in VR at all? It's all built on a metaphor of flat sheets of paper, so it's paradigmatically 2D.
I want to be working in VR. Once the resolution gets decent enough I can just get 20 screens wherever I look. Plus I can sit, stand, whatever. Sounds fantastic. Coffee might get a bit cumbersome though.
A straw, maybe?
> Once the resolution gets decent enough I can just get 20 screens wherever I look.
Isn't that stressful on your neck? In the current environment you can also have 20 screens and switch via key-combinations or using the mouse.
I think this problem is solved already, see this video about TrackIR from 1:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AO0F5sLdVM (it is called motion scaling). Of course people may still get injuries from this if they do it for 40 hours a week...
In VR that would likely make you violently ill
I think my ideal VR workspace would be one screen directly in front of me, and then as many screens as I want off in the distance.
You'd be able to easily see the screens in the distance and look for updates/etc and just click on it or whatever to pull that screen closer to you if you want to actually read on that screen.
This is my ideal for VR. I'm really hanging out for the day I can create infinite amount of virtual screens, and reconfigure screen layouts on the fly.
Throw in a camera so you can toggle AR mode when needed (coffee), and you have my dream workstation.
Put trackers on your hands and coffee mug and you should be able to drink coffee normally with a bit of practice.
I'm mostly worried about the goggles being in the way
Yeah me too, but I guess it will take a long time before we have headsets that can reproduce the same experience as high resolution screens.
We just need one 8k screen per eye, which will be doable as soon as 8k smartphones are on the market.
Sadly having an 8k screen on a smartphone seems mostly pointless, and achieving the necessary economies of scale is hard with VR headsets alone.
My biggest hope is a paradigm shift in UI design. Everything we have is designed to accommodate low resolution screens. With ubiquitous high resolution screens UI patterns from print like "lean in to read this detail" become viable, and if popular would justify much higher display resolutions, directly benefiting VR.
Maybe vector-based CRTs like in oscilloscopes can be made small enough to use in headsets (if they haven't already). Either project floating text on transparent AR glasses or project a text layer on the lower resolution graphics display. I'd prefer the AR approach if it means I won't need a $500 GPU to generate floating text.
Maybe it could improve ergonomics? A lot of people suffer injury from the posture required to sit at a desk looking at a monitor all day. A sufficiently high resolution VR display could be combined with a reclined posture that supports the head, neck, and back. Of course there's the whole input method problem to solve too. :)
Searching for VR porn?
For the same reason I alt-tab out of a game to check something.
Privacy.
Or simply use a Laptop Sock:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bekathwia/2462986853
This was a genuinely interesting rabbit hole. Never seen this before. Thanks.
Here's a VR text-input concept by Elevr. Using three dimensions you only need one hop from the center of a 3x3x3 cube to hold 26 letters, plus a space in the middle. http://elevr.com/keycube-3-torus-based-typing-in-vr/#h.a9zrf... (This shows the setup but it's not the final version, because eventually they realized that returning your cursor to the center after each character works better with muscle memory.) So use various controller axes to indicate positive-neutral-negative for three axes, and you have a letter. If you use chording you can type reasonably fast. There is quite a learning curve though.
I'm open to new ideas but I can't imagine this being a very efficient way to input words and characters into a computer. I have worked with older game consoles and remote controls that tried to do this stuff and I'm not sure anyone likes it.
Why not simply speech to text? I don't think a lot of people are doing VR in a room with other people.
The article states the firefox reality actually supports tts.
Just because people don't like it initially, doesn't mean it can't become a fairly fast input method given enough practice. Here is another example of a keyboard in much the same vein as using a controller, for people with carpal tunnel syndrome: https://orbitouch.com
> you can't see your hands so you have to type everything in with that remote character by bloody freaking character.
Learn to touch type! (Though even then, you're stuck with the problem of finding your keyboard.)
Logitech was working on a keyboard with a steamvr tracking puck
https://uploadvr.com/vr-keyboard-logitech-vive-tacker/
That announcement was nearly a year ago and nothing but crickets since. It doesn't seem that technically challenging. I wonder what the hold up is?
Driving something like Dasher (http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher/) with the remote would be easy enough.
(Typing on a keyboard would still work better, if you can do so without looking.)
The issues with text input are a large part of why we added voice input even in our very first release! w.r.t. text rendering, we're doing a lot of fundamental work in rendering higher-quality text (you can't fix resolution fundamentals, but you can take into account the optics of the hardware better than we all do today), but nothing to announce there yet.
What is doing the speech-to-text processing? Is this part of the Common Voice project? Is the code available to use outside of Firefox Reality?
I checked and it's using Mozilla's DeepSpeech library: https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/blob/dee6f4...
which is here: https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech
DeepSpeech is the actual voice recognition library, CommonVoice is a project to improve its accuracy by gathering more voice data.
Interesting. The DeepSpeech github indicates that it's not capable of realtime transcription, even using a GPU. How is that fast enough for this use case?
I guess with some kind of haptic or kinesthetic gloves you will not need to see your hands to type anyway.
Steam's VR home or whatever they call it made great use of the touchpad by treating them as two fingers on a virtual keyboard. It was effortless to learn and rather quick.
Too bad Steam VR's desktop is awful. I have 3 monitors side by side, and Steam shows your desktop at a constant width, which means my display is super super tiny. Can't even zoom in, and to left click, you have to keep the controller super constant or it registers as a drag.
> way too low resolution to read text
Latest Vive should be decent.
Are they not bringing it to SteamVR? Most Vive owners don't use viveport (outside of China), due to the spooky services it puts on your machine.
We have a VR-only browser on launched on SteamVR (Vive) / Oculus Store (Rift). Relevant to HN, we went through a recent YC batch. Still early but focused on 6DOF headsets, and ignoring 2D for now.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/803010/Supermedium/
FYI, a similar feature has been available for months in Chrome on Android under a flag. I don't remember which ones. Maybe
chrome://flags/#vr-browsing-native-android-ui
and
chrome://flags/#vr-browsing-tab-view
basically once enabled Chrome will show up as an app in the Daydream app launcher in VR
I've only used it on Daydream but it's nice to be able to search in VR, use a virtual keyboard, and also run WebVR pages all without leaving VR.
That's nice and all, but now that the hardware has caught up, where are the collaborative multi-user 3d hyperspaces à la Croquet Project/Open Cobalt?
Check out this project, also from Mozilla's emerging technology team: https://hubs.mozilla.com/
(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)
I think before they get big we needed a resolution update. Reading text is still difficult in VR and I can't see collaborative VR spaces getting big until texts start becoming more legible. Also I think we needed trackable office furniture and keyboards. Finding my keyboard blindly while in VR is a pain still. Once those issues are solved I think collaborative spaces will come. It's a good space for a startup to solve.
Out of curiosity, is this the project the Servo team got folded into?
I seem to remember reading somewhere that they were being put onto a VR project.
Yes, but this release doesn't include any of that work that is not already in upstream Firefox.
This reminds me of animating paperback book pages as a transition to directly linking web pages. The paradigm is leaking over to the new one where the new one doesn't have a good way to do it yet. Instead, I would have a hall with portals you could zoom up to as you wave your hand out in front of you, kind of like the iWatch but not sure the puke factor.
Would be really cool if you could just, you know, download the program and run it, not have to go through Viveport at all.
While we are on Viveport Mobile and all other relevant stores, a developer can always either build from sources or sideload the browser - https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/wiki/Sidelo...
Doesn’t look that great in the screenshots to be honest - would be nice if it’s not just a gimmick because “we can” but some new paradigm of more effectively and immersive Ly consume the web... I mean - the kind of distraction free “reader mode” that you do in Safari, imagine if you had that in VR and then a 3D way to navigate between web docs/pages based on the links on the current page and smart topics - a bit like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu[1] project from the 60s or whenever - the real vision behind hypertext!
EDIT: [1]: Bit is history on Xanadu https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ - and there’s a video of it somewhere and you can/could even download a real demo of it on floppy disk I seem to recall
> would be nice if it's not just a gimmick
I mean, this is the future, right?
Don't you mean was the future?
I have no idea what the current future is, all I know is that is doesn't include 3D TV sets and tablet computers replacing PCs (apparently, the PC can decline all on its own)
If I were to guess, I imagine room-sized VR is the next step.
Is this just another Firefox OS? It strikes me as another side project they'll abandon later.
I can understand Firefox OS, I wish they'd persevered, but I don't really get this.
On its own I don't think this makes sense. Maybe in the context of an in game browser.
But then who am I to comment.
I'll admit to not being particularly well-acquainted with VR, but a few observations:
1) This is being used as a target for Servo. Even if it ends up being useless (I won't pretend to be able to predict the future), the investigation into getting consistent 90+ FPS performance out of web rendering engines, regardless of content, is going to be excellent for the web. VR is a challenging environment for the Servo team to prove its technological prowess, and for many engineers, a challenging environment is exactly the kind of motivation necessary to push at boundaries.
2) Mozilla missed the "social" hype train and their mobile OS project was widely considered too little, too late (not to mention the terrible performance of mobile web engines at the time). Both of these areas are dominated by large, (effectively) proprietary vendors. Facebook's purchase of Oculus signaled to many that "social" was going to move to yet another platform. Mozilla's goal here is to get out in front of a potential VR hype train, keeping the open web as a major player in order to keep their mission relevant.
3) Mozilla believes the web is the ultimate platform for connecting people. It is one of the few markets with a political landmap that encourages collaboration between the multiple players. Therefore, for Mozilla, the capabilities of the web must always be expanded to prevent balkanization of the Internet into product-specific networks, such as Apple's iMessage. I am actually encouraged by their willingness to jump in front of VR, despite my own belief that VR won't be as relevant as many prognosticators think.
This is my analysis, take it with multiple grains of salt.
At a time when people are questioning the impact of technology on their lives and looking for leadership from independent organizations like Mozilla
Someone was paid to write that.
VRML, anyone? :-)
Already done. Check out a-frame: https://aframe.io/
Bonus points for doing it in Firefox Reality or another VR browser.
Thanks for the link! Seems neat!
I spent a good year of my free time in high school creating navigable 3D worlds with VRML. Now it seems like noone has heard of it, and they’re next to impossible to render.
What’s the latest scoop on VRML? I’m curious.
VRML became X3D, which is still around though not very popular. X3D is pretty much an XML translation of VRML.
There's project called X3DOM that uses JS and WebGL to view X3D models in the browser without a plugin. [https://www.x3dom.org]
I don't think it can view VRML files directly, but there are tools around to convert VRML to X3D.
I was working for a company in 1997 that was convinced VRML was the next big thing. They even spent a fair amount of effort writing their own custom browser plugin to improve performance and add their own extensions to VRML. The whole project folded after only releasing a couple of tech demos.
Gotta be one of these guys in every one of these threads.
This was meant to be a joke. At the same time, it was meant to foster people's curiosity/education on what our industry has tried before. Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way, though.
Now an absolute honest question… how long do you think it'll be before we come across something like VRML again?
I’m one of the maintainers of A-Frame (aframe.io). VRML in spirit but with some learned lessons applied. Happy to answer any questions.
Thanks! To be honest, mea culpa, I didn't look anything up before asking that question. Glad I did, though. Care to expand on the lessons learned?
No problem, the question comes often. It’s understandable if you have not kept en eye on the space for a while. A-Frame is built on standards (HTML and WebGL), it runs on any browser without extensions or plugins. But it’s not a standard on itself so it can evolve much quicker and make design decisions based on real world usage by the community. While A-Frame offers high level primitives like `box`, `sphere`, `light`... the emphasis is on extensibility through an entity-component architecture. We aknowledge that A-Frame cannot anticipate all needs for all projects so we wanted to make very easy to extend and reuse 3rd party pieces.
Right, when you make uninformed jokes like this, you trivialize the hard work that others are doing.
This isn't Reddit.
Good point on trivializing other people's work. I can definitely see how it can be interpreted that way. Just to be clear: that was absolutely not my intention. It was more like a "this reminds me of some good old times, does anyone else share the same nostalgia?" type of comment. So, again, sorry if I rubbed you (or anyone else) the wrong way. And I appreciate you taking the time to expand on what I thought was a simple comment.
Low content post, but i can't shake off the feeling we've been there already
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqZpvOPI_aI
Vuplex VR Browser (f.k.a. Viewport) for iOS and Android is also worth checking out: https://vuplex.com
It lets you create multiple windows and position / resize them.
FYI it looks like in the iOS store its still called Viewport. Can't speak for the Android side though.
I think it would be fascinating to study how old the people are who are into this.
I'm 47
Hmm, if only PSVR on PC is properly supported...
Still, this is a nice project!
But I remember some kind of virtual reality webpage a year back or so, or was it just custom made by some 4chan users back then?
I wonder what an obnoxious advertisement looks like in VR ...
We're not that far off from a Gibson-esque cyberspace. Just a matter of someone taking the time and effort.
Browsing this on Nightly on Windows says: 'Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead'.
Does anyone know if there's integration with WebGL?
Yeah there is, if you go to some of the sites on the home page there's an "enter VR" button, where the site does the equivalent of fullscreen for VR (it enters VR mode and it's much like a VR app).
Cool, another good-looking experiment that Mozilla will phase out a few months after I start depending on it.
If I had a Euro for every time I started using a Mozilla project that got cancelled...
Hear hear.
That might be a big drawback of the very experimental release and fail method of development. You eventually start loosing trust in an organization that keeps giving you things, you make the effort to get used to them and then it takes them away. I'm sure the learning they get from it is very valuable, but you just spend a bunch time and energy and got nothing in the end.
I completely lost trust, yes.
Not seeing it in the Viveport store myself...
Sorry - Firefox Reality is only currently available Viveport Mobile for all in one / standalone devices.
Is this another Firefox OS moment?
Also will this be usable on Meta AR?
Wake me up when Iron Man style interface is developed to domestic ease of use, not"early stage"
Maybe get 2D right before dabbling with VR?
Firefox still does not support hardware encoding of videos on Linux. So when I watch Youtube videos my CPU usage goes through the roof and I cannot watch HD.
xkcd even made a comic about it: https://xkcd.com/619/
I don't think the same teams are working on video decoding and VR browsing.
No but they're pulling funds from the same pot.
On my case it works when I force enable it, but it leads to occasional X crashes.
You can force enable hardware accelerated video encoding? How? And what difference do you notice when you watch Youtube videos?
If your GPU driver supports it yes.
Check "How to force-enable blocked graphics features".
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/upgrade-graphics-driver...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...
The difference is that my tiny netbook APU doesn't get bogged at 100% while playing videos, on an otherwise DX 11 class GPU.
Are you sure you are talking about Linux? Those pages mention mostly Windows and say nothing about video at all.
When I go to about:support I see "AzureCanvasAccelerated: 0" and "HW_COMPOSITING: Acceleration blocked by platform".
Setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true and restarting FF does not change that.
I tried it on 3 different machines with different graphic cards and different drivers and see the same behaviour on all 3.
Yes I am sure,
https://askubuntu.com/questions/491750/force-enable-hardware...
layers.acceleration.force-enabled overrides "Acceleration blocked by platform" (you should see "Force-enabled by pref" right under it).
But this indeed has nothing to do with video! This is layer compositing.
Sure it does, because it is part of the GPU hardware acceleration stack.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/491750/force-enable-hardware...
On my case for the EEPC 1215B Brazos APU it worked, like everything in Linux there isn't a solution that makes all desktop users happy.
GPU hardware acceleration has nothing to do with video decode. (Okay, the hardware is often on the same physical silicon die, but they're separate things in software.)
There is literally no support yet for any unix video decode APIs in Firefox. No VA-API, no VDPAU, no V4L2, no nothing.
Here's the bug for VAAPI: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727
There's a bounty for it: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/55506502-add-va-api-hard...
Understood, then why did it help reducing the CPU load on rendering?
Because if you're compositing on the GPU, you're not compositing on the CPU :) It shouldn't help that much with video players, but it does always help a little
Just in time for the death of VR.
In any case, why does the browser need to be VR aware? This is a job that should be left to the host OS or WM, not every client application.
VR is a new kind of media you will be able to embed in a web page. Like video or sound. Browsers have to be able to render it.
LOL, sitting here with a VRML .wrl file I made in the late 90s. Maybe I can finally open it again, without a browser plug-in this time :)
You can. see my comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024485
Awesome! I have all the parts in the bins, and now I have a reason to build a VR rig!
But uh... I don't see linux on the compatibility lists, and I'm not using my work mac for this, and my gaming windows computers are too old (XP), and with lineageos on my phone without gapps... I'm not buying a bunch of proprietary hardware to play with a new open technology so geez I guess I can't play with it at all. Bummer.
Browser vendors don’t control drivers or hardware support on the different OSs. VR is pretty much a Windows game today with limited and experimental Vive support on OSX and Linux. I’m sure that Mozilla in particular is eager to support linux.
> I’m sure that Mozilla in particular is eager to support linux.
Why would you think that? Firefox treats its Linux version as a second-class citizen (e.g. no hardware acceleration).
Oculus GO is an Android system. No Windows involved. Unfortunately it has replaced the operating system with a shopping mall. You want that free Firefox download? Log-in to Facebook first. Every apk has to go over the shop, no sideloading. Which is a shame - would be a nice system if it only were more open.
nerrrrrdddddddd