Mozilla Hubs – Private social VR in your web browser

Few times I've been on there, I've experienced similar to what you've mentioned.

But another few times, I've had some great experiences with clearly adults - notably, playing pickup HORSE basketball games in the lobby.

Hell, before the layoff, they only had one person working on WebXR for desktop Firefox. Seems like being penny-wise, pound-foolish.

Or comparing to normal first person video games, you can see your friends' character as a fully detailed model, you know they're controlling what direction it turns, when it moves, whether it jumps. But the character fundamentally isn't them, it's a character that they're controlling.

And that's the weird thing about people's avatars in VR, it might be a low resolution floating torso and hands, but being in VR where the physical motion of their head and hands is directly translated to avatar movements makes it feel like the avatar is a low-detailed person instead of a high-detailed puppet.

The games and other experiences are obviously part of the selling point too. Being able to deflect blaster bolts with a lightsaber, throw droids off the top of a building with the force, shoot hordes of zombies, fly a jetpack, become a wizard, solve puzzles by working together with giant and tiny copies of yourself, have your friends talk you through defusing a bomb, and so many other things that we haven't thought of yet.

Smaller market, but I can see a lot of promise for virtual training simulations as well. Less sophisticated than flight simulator cockpits for pilots, but dramatically more accessible.

ILMxLAB has another project in the works, I think in the setting from the Galaxy's Edge stuff at Disney's parks, which I'm not personally familiar with. But I'll get to try the VR experience, since my headset is a lot more convenient than a trip to Florida or California.

I think their biggest challenge for growth is that you really have to experience it to get it. People understand what "new Xbox" is all about, it's the same as the last one except improved in easily quantifiable ways, and they'll go spend $500 on it.

VR is still a new thing that people don't understand. But I think it'll get there.

The direction the Oculus/Facebook have taken with the Quest line addresses many of these issues (sacrificing quality of the graphics). VR is possibly going to have its breakout moment.

Historically (that is, from the point that VR first became a buzzword in the '90s), the importance of low latency and other ergonomic issues has been consistently underestimated. Improvements in hardware were usually eaten up by greater rendering fidelity and scene complexity, keeping latency right on the edge of acceptability, which unfortunately means that about 10% of the population experiences loss of orientation or motion sickness. A similar effect occurs on standard desktop setups, but affects a much smaller group (something about the difference between moving the scene in response to head vs. hand movements).

As long as developers (of both platforms and games) keep trying to push more polygons at faster refresh rates without addressing latency, 1-in-10 people are going to reject it outright, and rather more forcefully than in a "eh, not for me" sense.

Keep in mind that the reason disagreement between the inner ear and visual field causes nausea is to get you to vomit harmful psychoactive substances, so it's a pretty deeply rooted response that doesn't respond much to desensitization through exposure (ie. If it's a problem for you, you may not be able to "get used to it").-

E-ink is in the same boat to many patent held by people unwilling to license them for a reasonable price, in 15-20 years most will expire and we will get e-ink everywhere

For the time being, when Oculus launches Horizon, maybe anyone with an Facebook account can still download it and run in on their Valve Index using Revive, but if competing standalone android-based headsets come out I think workarounds like that become less likely. If you want Horizon, you buy a Quest. But any of those other headsets could use Hubs regardless of where their friend-group is.

It's the iMessage group text problem but on a system that's probably going to be a lot less easy to just substitute with WhatsApp. It remains to be seen if we'll have a functionally equal option that isn't platform locked.

Or maybe they'll just port it everywhere, own the main social space, and squeeze all the advertizing tracking they can out of that. Either way, I don't love it.

- The New Tab Page isn't an actual page that lives in a tab anymore. Instead, it's a sort of "launcher" that lives outside the tabs. This creates all sort of bizarre UX issues, like if you click on a top-site, click back, and click on another top-site, you now have two tabs open.

- The tab switcher has been replaced with a janky spring-loaded pop-tart that appears to have been lifted directly from the Google Maps search results screen without any understanding of why it works in that context.

- Several important areas of the UI are now dedicated to "Collections", a feature that's just like bookmark folders (which are still present), except for weird subtle differences like not syncing properly.

- You can no longer display your bookmarks on the New Tab Page.

- You can no longer use themes other than the included "light" or "dark".

- You can't navigate to data URIs anymore -- you get a generic something-bad-happened error instead.

- A thousand little UI papercuts. Why do half the animations do weird-looking double fades? Why is the New Tab Page scrollable even when there's no additional content to reveal by scrolling? Why are the contents of the hamburger menu slightly different when you're on the New Tab Page?

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Midori recently got a mobile port, it runs quite well and I do not think it's a chromium reskin.

- Tab queue is gone.

- Bookmark keywords stopped working.

- Sharing directly from another app to a synced desktop Firefox is gone.