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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to get friends to join me on VRChat. Lower pressure than a Zoom call, and after a day of typing, feels good to just talk a bit from the couch. Of course, VR as a requirement has been a bit of a deterrent.

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mozilla hubs is a lower barrier to entry because you don’t need to download a whole game. You can just give your friends a link and they also don’t need VR either.

https://hubs.mozilla.com/

Mozilla does all these cool things, and I’m afraid they’re gonna shut it down in a year or two :-/

Hubs itself seems a bit abandoned for ~1y. They laid off a large number of folks related to it back in 2020

My understanding is that they laid off their WebXR team in 2020.

The Hubs team has been consistently shipping new features, and just posted 3X new roles a couple weeks ago.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6886711377419870210-...

The VR in VR chat is optional. There's a desktop mode for people without the headset.

I know :-) I constantly have to explain that

You don't have to have a VR headset or hardware in order to join people in VR chat. I've joined friends using a standard monitor with a keyboard and mouse.

Of course the name doesn't help, but it isn't impossible to join if you don't have one.

I know, that's part of what I try to tell people :-) it does require a somewhat beefy desktop/laptop though, and most folks are used to doing everything on their phones these days

It works on standalone quest hardware as well, but you'll be limited to the worlds you go to, and you will usually end up using people's "fallback" avatar.

It's a great game, it's entirely community driven so it's full of personality. However it did take a bit getting used to the weird sexual aspect of it, a lot of people living out odd fantasies. If you can filter through the weirdness, there's some amazing gems. I'd highly highly recommend the 3D movie theater.

Does it work well on linux these days?

I play it fine on Linux through Steam/Proton with a Valve Index. If you have a Quest it may be quite difficult, but it should be fine without VR as well

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