HN Explorer

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masterspy7
How to use it Desktop: Click to start, WASD and mouse to move

Mobile: Dragging on left half of screen is move, right have is look

Append any subreddit to the url to switch subreddits

Tech stack - Babylon.js for the 3d rendering engine

- Google Cloud Function which queries Reddit Api and then transforms the data depending on the data type

- For images: Transform and serve through https://images.weserv.nl

- For videos (try /r/gifs, experimental) gets a url which can be played through a <video> tag, which is later copied frame by frame to a texture

- For websites, use puppeteer to take a screenshot

- For multiplayer (you can see other people in the same subreddit as you) https://colyseus.io/ and App Engine Flexible

- For chat, Firestore

Also, apologies for only having one avatar option! I wanted to add different genders, characters etc but didn't have time for the MVP!

Discord for more discussion: https://discord.gg/nrxQnT

subir
I love it! Thanks for sharing under-the-hood stuff!
0xDEFC0DE
Do you filter NSFW stuff by default?
masterspy7
Right now it just loads whatever the subreddit returns. I'm working on adding an option for that. If you want to browse a SFW one you can just pick a subreddit you know is SFW:

https://3dforreddit.com/r/aww

mruts
Why would you want that?
ghostbrainalpha
I clicked on the link at work and had an embarrassing moment as sexy Game of Thrones cosplay popped up for my boss.
noknownsender
I dig the museum layout style.

It really popped on r/gonewild

bartread
Uh, yeah, so, for anyone who didn't realise: r/gonewild is very much NSFW. I have just been educated on this point myself.
diimdeep
Please share your thought process, how you get idea to build something like this?
ljf
Same question here - a long time ago when I first became a PO it was because I told my boss about an idea I'd had where our users could walk around our site - a little like this (this was a site aimed at kids). But this was 15 years ago and likely wouldn't have been half as cool! They asked me to rebuild the site anyway - though I was far far more traditional in my delivery in the end.
481092
His implementation may be new but the idea of interfacing with content in a 3D manner isn't. I remember trying out a 3D desktop program around 2003 and if I recall correctly, it came with a game demo disc.
orangse
Not trying to flame the guy since he obviously put in a lot of work on his own, but the original idea is from a lainchan thread [1] for the 3d anonymous imageboard 3dchan [2]. I'm only assuming they're not the same person since this project is not on the 3dchan owner's github [3]. Again, the two are quite clearly different, and parallel creativity does exist in the realm of possibility, but my personal guess is he used the same concept to build something similar.

[1] https://lainchan.org/%CE%A9/res/17698.html

[2] https://3dchan.net/dungeon/

[3] https://github.com/AlexKrunch/AnonIB-3D

Kiro
There's no "original idea" here. It's an obvious idea I presumed most people have had. At least I have and I haven't seen any of these before so I don't see why he couldn't have made this independently of 3dchan.
deskamess
How do you make it stop so you can move your mouse to other tabs/parts of the browser?
omgmog
Press the Escape key on your keyboard to regain mouse control
rgoulter
On Desktop, Ctrl-l works for focussing on the "location" input, too.
drusepth
I spent like a full minute trying to figure this out before remembering I could just physically touch those other parts/tabs of the browser.
thefifthsetpin
Is there a way to invert (or even just disable) the y-axis?
asciimo
I would love to invert the y-axis, too.
pixelpoet
Same. I guess we're in some kind of weird minority...
airstrike
Played more flying games than FPS ones growing up? ;-)
tempestn
I played a fair bit of both, but inverted always just felt more natural to me. I swear early FPS games had it that way by default, but maybe I'm mis-remembering! Definitely hard for me to grok how people prefer the 'normal' way though.
siddboots
Just spin your mouse around 180 degrees
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deadbunny
Can't get it to work on Firefox on Android.
godelski
Works for me on FF 68.1 on Android. /r/gifs doesn't though
samvher
Pretty cool! My vision keeps shifting to the left though if I don't actively counter-rotate to the right. It makes it a bit hard to keep looking at the same object.
mappum
Amazing, this is clearly a glimpse into a future of internet content being less like a document and more like a virtual world.

Suggestion: the enter key should focus the chat box (like a FPS game) so you don't have to hit escape then click on it.

DC-3
If this is what internet content is going to be like in the future I'm not looking forward to the future.
JustSomeNobody
Yeah, looks like project looking glass for the desktop ca. forever ago. The future is here?
52-6F-62
The dream of the [late] 90's is alive?
Narishma
You mean the future as imagined by someone from 1995?
seiferteric
Maybe we can get a modern updated VRML spec going.
ben_w
We definitely should, although probably from a completely different perspective than ‘94: High end phones can capture in 3D, so we should be able to store and view 3D images properly.

I’m starting with the idea of PNGs where the channels represent RGBZ instead of RGBA, but obviously we need more than 8 bits of depth information, and we are starting to get and care about high dynamic range for RGB data as well… would 16R:16G:16B:16Z work?

There’s also the point that depth information will have sharp boundaries, and it will probably be much worse for RGB information to blur over such a boundary as compared with the equivalent parts of a flat JPEG.

kalleboo
Yeah I remember trying a demo that was literally trying to do this, just on our Mac Performa 5200 over a 14.4 modem (you had to pre-download the "map"). Even the design is eerily similar.
mustacheemperor
I think it's possible that vision is closer to the real future than that sounds at face value. I also initially thought of lawnmower man era breathless predictions for VRML and mockups of the future 3D internet. But this is actually a surprisingly compelling experience. Is it wrong I kind of like that almost everything from the browsing experience of reddit is removed except the titles and the linked content? It's got a pleasing simplicity and the tangible nature of making the internet a physical place is appealing to my primitive brain somehow. Definitely not my new way to browse the web, but surprisingly charming.
kthejoker2
Thanks, I hate it?

Seriously, great job, supremely disorienting - it almost felt like the Internet again.

kthejoker2
Also, I could walk through the walls of the "museum", are there no clipping options?
masterspy7
It's definitely possible, I just didn't have time to implement clipping properly haha.
King-Aaron
Clipping first, then it just needs NPC trolls that follow you everywhere spewing the actual comments from each thing you're in close proximity too - then you'll have a pretty neat game
SketchySeaBeast
I actually followed the "rules" of the walls myself, until my forward key got stuck and I started phasing through things. I never even thought to check the clipping.
gojomo
Watch out, eventually every visit to Reddit on mobile will have half the screen taken up with:

  See this post in:
    
    Reddit 3d  [   OPEN   ]
    Reddit App [   OPEN   ]
    Safari     [ CONTINUE ]
tbassetto
I was surprised how usable it was on my iPhone, great job!
fredley
This is glorious. It's a less good 'user experience' than browsing reddit itself, but it's also better in every way.
krm01
This is surprisingly fun.
givinguflac
This doesn't work at all for me in Safari tech preview on Mac, just has weird blue background and some white lines. Normal safari seems to load a visual, but I can't seem to do anything with it. TL;DR- I don't get it, but thanks for sharing.
saagarjha
It's hilariously broken on Safari Technology Preview, but I think that's because it's using WebGL calls that Safari doesn't support correctly yet.
staticautomatic
How about when you visit certain subreddits it turns into a game of Doom?
tiborsaas
I remember VRML being a thing and me wanting it be something usable :) Thanks for making this.

Feature request: I'd like to run holding shift

hombre_fatal
Love this. Was much better than I expected since you also showed other users, what they were looking at, and let us have personalities like looking at each other and nodding yes/no which kept cracking me up.

A few people were at the Game of Thrones Cosplay submission (an image of two cute women in costumes) looking at each other and nodding. Some people formed a conga line.

It's easy to imagine stopping this project when you have the basic rendering + WASD working, but the multiplayer aspect was simple and fun.

desi_ninja
the multiplayer aspect was pretty neat. another way of engaging with people
madc
It should be called 3ddit.com
jgtrosh
I was thinking of r3ddit but 3ddit is good too.
madc
r3ddit is a nice one too, good catch!
ozzmotik
this is an absolute gem to experience. my question: do you shard it off to different servers or some such thing? i only ask because trying to connect on both my mobile and my laptop, i can't seem to ever end up in the same apparent room as myself. but that's no but deal, just a minor curiosity.
masterspy7
Yes, I have multiple servers running and each room is limited to 12 players, so it's likely that each device is connecting to a different room.
qqii
Pretty neet! I recall an imageboard with a similar design.
hans1729
This is glorious, I just found a friend and we nodded at each other for a good while. Then I walked through the next best wall and lured others out, since they can still see the beam indicating the direction of my view.

Thanks for this!

surfsvammel
I want music similar to Doom to go with this!
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not_a_cop75
Disappointed. This would work better as a first person shooter.
yowlingcat
Fantastic! Simple concept, but the effect is amazing. I felt like I was in a museum, except I was browsing reddit. This gives me a lot of really fun ideas regarding the future of the internet! I keep wondering where VR is going to go!
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austinhutch
This is insane! You could kind of see Epic ripping this off and browsing a Reddit museum with your Fortnite character. It reminds me of Playstation Home too.. but the fact it's so easy to jump in really alters how this could work.