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Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

Looks like they are jumping on the whole "Meta" train, with enough expertise to make a dent.

I would be astonished though, if people used a web browser in virtual reality to do serious work.

I get this take... You might find my post on this topic interesting https://bkardell.com/blog/wolvic.html

Very excited to see this, my ongoing prediction is that the metaverse will be WebXR based. No 30% cut from walled gardens, and sites can evolve from static, 2D flat experiences to immersive ones. Of course, apps will work day one on any headset in a platform-agnostic manner. And for the spark, just wait until the Apple headset ships with WebXR and WebGPU supported by default....

Also, my team are currently working on bringing Unreal Engine to WebXR.

One Metaverse based on WebXR + CRDT for shared state of the world on top of WebRTC, please. With React on top.

UE5?

Fantastic piece of history about TBL and Ian Ritchie.

When APK of Wolvic for Quest 2?

Edit — found it: https://github.com/Igalia/wolvic/releases/download/0.9.3/Wol...

This reminds me of Virtual Desktop on Value.

Very compelling post, thanks for sharing!

A VR browser is however very useful eitherfor browsing 3d content or having access to content that is useful for other VR apps. Especially for standalone headsets where you can't just switch to your pc desktop.

I've used passthru on the Quest 2 with a browser window hanging in my living room. There absolutely is an allure to having a tv as big as my wall playing a youtube video while I'm folding a mountain of laundry. Working, serious work it's a bit of a stretch at this moment yeah

I haven't used immersed yet, but the whole "I can see my environment and my hands and type on a keyboard I can see with N floating windows" thing is neat and will only get nicer as the resolution improves

I build a WebXR app at work. It's a virtual environment for taking foreign language classes. You travel around the world and talk about what you see in-language.

react-xr?

Hell no

Why not? Do you use vanilla WebXR?

Those... aren't the only two options. I use Three.js.

I never really saw what the hype was about React. It seems like most people who got really into it never really had much experience building componentized code before, so what they think of as being the "great" thing about React doesn't really need React at all.

Virtual DOM is overhead, overhead I can't really afford. I have to hit 120FPS on the Quest 2 with an immediate-mode renderer, when React's V-DOM was designed for a 60FPS retained-mode environment. It's just... too much of a leaky abstraction to deal with when I have about 8 milliseconds to do absolutely everything. And yes, I hit 120FPS.

Honestly, managing 3D objects is one of the smallest parts of my job. Some days, it can be all consuming, but other times, I can go weeks without touching the graphics. The biggest concern I have is with data management and efficient transmission and decoding of assets.

I continue to be astonished (and dismayed) that people use a browser on the desktop to do serious work. Really, the browser provides a horrible user experience, no matter where you use it.

I miss native apps and the engineering that went into them, as compared to the slapdashery of web apps.

Serious work can be as little as searching for something and reading content. No reason why a web browser can not do this - in fact it was built for this purpose.

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