2020 is the year VR stops being a baby
Bi-weekly update with the latest insights from the Metaverse: news, posts, creations and communities.
Welcome to yet another faithful newsletter. Thanks to all who continue to support it! I’d love to hear your thoughts, so if you have any feedback, please do send it my way :).
The year is starting to pick up pace and I’m increasingly getting the feeling that VR is maturing. This week comes with several announcements around tooling, both for world creation and for WebXR development.
I’m also excited about the announcements coming from the decentralized community. Together with XR, these are very promising technologies that still need to mature, but step by step they’re getting closer to being ready for mainstream use.
Enjoy!
On the news
IPFS will soon be a native citizen in Brave Browser: It’s one of their key objectives for 2020. This will surely push the decentralized Web forward. With Brave being Chromium based, which supports WebXR, we’ll soon be able to build decentralized XR content. Can’t wait! [Link]
Major investment into Planetary, a Secure-Scuttlebutt based social network: Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, is one of the main investors. And one of Planetary’s founders is an early Twitter employee. The linked thread explains the vision for Planetary. It’s an important milestone for the SSB network and a big push for decentralized communication. It’s a very nice community and I’m looking forward to having a nice interface to hang out there more. [Link]
AR social network: Octi appeared on Techcrunch with its AR social network. The mobile app identifies your friends and lets you do all sorts of things with them with AR and post them. It’ll be fun to watch how XR will shape the kind content we can create. [Link]
Ubiquity6 lets you build virtual worlds from photogrammetry: They recently released display.land in public beta. You use it to capture a 3D space with your phone and then edit that into a virtual world that you can visit via a URL. Techcrunch mentions it’s still rough, but these kind of tools are necessary to push the space forward. [Link]
Food for thought
Another nice intro into the Metaverse: Matthew Ball, who’s a VC, writes an interesting post about what the Metaverse is and how to get there. It feels like the vision for the Metaverse is reaching more and more people. It’s a good summary of where we are and the different players. [Link]
Cool Creations
WebXR Avatar Builder: Ada at Samsung has recently launched an avatar builder. You can then use your avatar in different different WebXR experiences without sending any information to a centralized server. [Link]
WebXR showcase by Mozilla: They continue to push WebXR forward. They’ve just launched Hello WebXR, a pleasant experience where you can check out all sorts of content that’s possible with WebXR. [Link]
Controller library for WebXR: We’re on a rampage here with WebXR. Nell Waliczek from Amazon has made a crucial tool for WebXR development. It gives support for all VR controllers with a common API and provides models for those controllers. [Link]
A possible trustworthy AR headset?: Trevor from Transmutable is pushing the idea of an AR headset that’s based on a privacy-first open stack. It’s definitely a really hard project to bring to life, but hey, most of us don’t want to buy headsets by Facebook. If anyone has any ideas or is willing to help, please message him! [Link]
Interesting Meetups & Communities
Vhite Rabbit podcast: A new daily WebXR podcast. Tune in to learn about WebXR and the different projects building on top of it. [Link]
Reality Quest podcast: A recent bi-weekly podcast about VR. It already has interesting interviews, make sure to check it out! [Link]
Thanks for tuning in, that’s it for today. If you find anything interesting that we should post in the next one, reach out via Twitter or Email.
See you in 2 weeks!
Alberto