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Comment by afarchy | Hacker News Reader

Hello HN,

After spending the last decade designing and building 3D/AR/VR products, I've realized there are many hurdles one has to overcome to create a complete experience. Between learning the principles and tools, building the experience, testing, iterating, distributing, and ensuring everything works correctly on different devices, there's quite a bit of boilerplate work required to bring your imagination to life.

I designed Virtual Maker to simplify the whole process, letting you focus directly on designing your experience. Let me know what you think!

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As someone who has been down this road several times over the last 7 years, all I can say is... good luck.

And watch out for Mozilla. With A-Frame and Hubs, they like to play up "we're all one, big, happy, WebXR family", then quietly copy all your features and claim they were first.

That is extremely off-base, it's unfortunate you felt that way.

Y'all setup a "recruiting" call with me before releasing A-Frame, asked me tons of questions about my WebXR framework, which I had in the wild for almost a year, which Josh admitted you had been using as part of your testing of Firefox Reality, then announced A-Frame and called it "The world's first WebXR framework". I had growth before the announcement, then nothing after, and people started accusing me of copying A-Frame. How was I supposed to feel?

EDIT: Excuse me, "WebVR support in Firefox". WebVR hadn't been renamed to WebXR, and Firefox Reality didn't exist, yet.

Cool! I run Spatial Ape (the VR industry trade show) and its great to see new authoring tools. Where do you see this fitting in relative to existing solutions like Unity and Unreal? Thanks for sharing!

First time hearing about Spatial Ape - do you still do the weekly trade show?

I've worked with both Unity and Unreal on past projects. While I love both, they have steep learning curves, long build times, and deploying cross-platform is much more difficult than the web.

Virtual Maker is a simplification of the whole process. We have built-in actions, navigation modes, and assets that you can use to get going quickly. We take care of hosting for you, ensuring your scenes work across platforms, with instant deploy times.

Of course, that means Virtual Maker won't give you all the options that Unity and Unreal do to build anything you can imagine. It's a trade off, and depends on what kind of project you're making.

A great FOSS alternative to Unity and Unreal engine is Godot engine. I've found it much easier to learn and work with, extremely Blender3D friendly, and it's cross-platform and web export support seems to be excellent thus far as I've tried any of it. It does still require a fair bit of learning, as any complex tool does, but there's many great tutorials on the web and YouTube to help with that.

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