Awesome! I have all the parts in the bins, and now I have a reason to build a VR rig!
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.
Browser vendors don’t control drivers or hardware support on the different OSs. VR is pretty much a Windows game today with limited and experimental Vive support on OSX and Linux. I’m sure that Mozilla in particular is eager to support linux.
Oculus GO is an Android system. No Windows involved. Unfortunately it has replaced the operating system with a shopping mall. You want that free Firefox download? Log-in to Facebook first. Every apk has to go over the shop, no sideloading. Which is a shame - would be a nice system if it only were more open.
Doesn’t look that great in the screenshots to be honest - would be nice if it’s not just a gimmick because “we can” but some new paradigm of more effectively and immersive Ly consume the web... I mean - the kind of distraction free “reader mode” that you do in Safari, imagine if you had that in VR and then a 3D way to navigate between web docs/pages based on the links on the current page and smart topics - a bit like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu[1] project from the 60s or whenever - the real vision behind hypertext!
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 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)
Yeah there is, if you go to some of the sites on the home page there's an "enter VR" button, where the site does the equivalent of fullscreen for VR (it enters VR mode and it's much like a VR app).
The main problem with web browsing in VR is it's way too low resolution to read text and you can't see your hands so you have to type everything in with that remote character by bloody freaking character.
But I guess, if you want to browse the web in VR you might as well do it in Firefox.
Here's a VR text-input concept by Elevr. Using three dimensions you only need one hop from the center of a 3x3x3 cube to hold 26 letters, plus a space in the middle. http://elevr.com/keycube-3-torus-based-typing-in-vr/#h.a9zrf... (This shows the setup but it's not the final version, because eventually they realized that returning your cursor to the center after each character works better with muscle memory.) So use various controller axes to indicate positive-neutral-negative for three axes, and you have a letter. If you use chording you can type reasonably fast. There is quite a learning curve though.
I'm open to new ideas but I can't imagine this being a very efficient way to input words and characters into a computer. I have worked with older game consoles and remote controls that tried to do this stuff and I'm not sure anyone likes it.
Why not simply speech to text? I don't think a lot of people are doing VR in a room with other people.
The article states the firefox reality actually supports tts.
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
Steam's VR home or whatever they call it made great use of the touchpad by treating them as two fingers on a virtual keyboard. It was effortless to learn and rather quick.
Too bad Steam VR's desktop is awful. I have 3 monitors side by side, and Steam shows your desktop at a constant width, which means my display is super super tiny. Can't even zoom in, and to left click, you have to keep the controller super constant or it registers as a drag.
Sorry to be dense, but why would one want do to web browsing in VR at all? It's all built on a metaphor of flat sheets of paper, so it's paradigmatically 2D.
I want to be working in VR. Once the resolution gets decent enough I can just get 20 screens wherever I look. Plus I can sit, stand, whatever. Sounds fantastic. Coffee might get a bit cumbersome though.
We just need one 8k screen per eye, which will be doable as soon as 8k smartphones are on the market.
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.
Maybe vector-based CRTs like in oscilloscopes can be made small enough to use in headsets (if they haven't already). Either project floating text on transparent AR glasses or project a text layer on the lower resolution graphics display. I'd prefer the AR approach if it means I won't need a $500 GPU to generate floating text.
This is my ideal for VR. I'm really hanging out for the day I can create infinite amount of virtual screens, and reconfigure screen layouts on the fly.
Throw in a camera so you can toggle AR mode when needed (coffee), and you have my dream workstation.
I think this problem is solved already, see this video about TrackIR from 1:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AO0F5sLdVM (it is called motion scaling). Of course people may still get injuries from this if they do it for 40 hours a week...
I think my ideal VR workspace would be one screen directly in front of me, and then as many screens as I want off in the distance.
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.
Maybe it could improve ergonomics? A lot of people suffer injury from the posture required to sit at a desk looking at a monitor all day. A sufficiently high resolution VR display could be combined with a reclined posture that supports the head, neck, and back. Of course there's the whole input method problem to solve too. :)
The issues with text input are a large part of why we added voice input even in our very first release! w.r.t. text rendering, we're doing a lot of fundamental work in rendering higher-quality text (you can't fix resolution fundamentals, but you can take into account the optics of the hardware better than we all do today), but nothing to announce there yet.
Interesting. The DeepSpeech github indicates that it's not capable of realtime transcription, even using a GPU. How is that fast enough for this use case?
Another thing to check out in this area is JanusVR. The thing about Janus is that it makes the internet navicable from an immersive perspective. Granted this requires adding FireBoxRoom code to your site in order to make everything 3D, but it does seem to fit the VR "paradigms" a bit better than what I'm seeing here from Firefox.
We have a VR-only browser on launched on SteamVR (Vive) / Oculus Store (Rift). Relevant to HN, we went through a recent YC batch. Still early but focused on 6DOF headsets, and ignoring 2D for now.
This was meant to be a joke. At the same time, it was meant to foster people's curiosity/education on what our industry has tried before. Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way, though.
Now an absolute honest question… how long do you think it'll be before we come across something like VRML again?
No problem, the question comes often. It’s understandable if you have not kept en eye on the space for a while. A-Frame is built on standards (HTML and WebGL), it runs on any browser without extensions or plugins. But it’s not a standard on itself so it can evolve much quicker and make design decisions based on real world usage by the community. While A-Frame offers high level primitives like `box`, `sphere`, `light`... the emphasis is on extensibility through an entity-component architecture. We aknowledge that A-Frame cannot anticipate all needs for all projects so we wanted to make very easy to extend and reuse 3rd party pieces.
Good point on trivializing other people's work. I can definitely see how it can be interpreted that way. Just to be clear: that was absolutely not my intention. It was more like a "this reminds me of some good old times, does anyone else share the same nostalgia?" type of comment. So, again, sorry if I rubbed you (or anyone else) the wrong way. And I appreciate you taking the time to expand on what I thought was a simple comment.
I spent a good year of my free time in high school creating navigable 3D worlds with VRML. Now it seems like noone has heard of it, and they’re next to impossible to render.
I was working for a company in 1997 that was convinced VRML was the next big thing. They even spent a fair amount of effort writing their own custom browser plugin to improve performance and add their own extensions to VRML. The whole project folded after only releasing a couple of tech demos.
This reminds me of animating paperback book pages as a transition to directly linking web pages. The paradigm is leaking over to the new one where the new one doesn't have a good way to do it yet. Instead, I would have a hall with portals you could zoom up to as you wave your hand out in front of you, kind of like the iWatch but not sure the puke factor.
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.
GPU hardware acceleration has nothing to do with video decode. (Okay, the hardware is often on the same physical silicon die, but they're separate things in software.)
There is literally no support yet for any unix video decode APIs in Firefox. No VA-API, no VDPAU, no V4L2, no nothing.
Because if you're compositing on the GPU, you're not compositing on the CPU :) It shouldn't help that much with video players, but it does always help a little
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[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadBut 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).
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?
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)
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.
But I guess, if you want to browse the web in VR you might as well do it in Firefox.
Learn to touch type! (Though even then, you're stuck with the problem of finding your keyboard.)
https://uploadvr.com/vr-keyboard-logitech-vive-tacker/
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
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bekathwia/2462986853
A straw, maybe?
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.
Throw in a camera so you can toggle AR mode when needed (coffee), and you have my dream workstation.
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.
(Typing on a keyboard would still work better, if you can do so without looking.)
Latest Vive should be decent.
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.
It lets you create multiple windows and position / resize them.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that they were being put onto a VR project.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/803010/Supermedium/
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://askubuntu.com/questions/491750/force-enable-hardware...
(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqZpvOPI_aI