Firefox Reality Now Available
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
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?
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
But I guess, if you want to browse the web in VR you might as well do it in Firefox.
A straw, maybe?
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.
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.
Throw in a camera so you can toggle AR mode when needed (coffee), and you have my dream workstation.
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.
Why not simply speech to text? I don't think a lot of people are doing VR in a room with other people.
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
Learn to touch type! (Though even then, you're stuck with the problem of finding your keyboard.)
(Typing on a keyboard would still work better, if you can do so without looking.)
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.
Latest Vive should be decent.
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.
(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)
I seem to remember reading somewhere that they were being put onto a VR project.
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 mean, this is the future, right?
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 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.
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.
Bonus points for doing it in Firefox Reality or another VR browser.
What’s the latest scoop on VRML? I’m curious.
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.
Now an absolute honest question… how long do you think it'll be before we come across something like VRML again?
This isn't Reddit.
It lets you create multiple windows and position / resize them.
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?
If I had a Euro for every time I started using a Mozilla project that got cancelled...
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.
xkcd even made a comic about it: https://xkcd.com/619/
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.
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.
But this indeed has nothing to do with video! This is layer compositing.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Why would you think that? Firefox treats its Linux version as a second-class citizen (e.g. no hardware acceleration).