This Week in Mixed Reality: Issue 1

In the spirit of This week in Firefox/Rust/Servo, we’ve decided to start sharing weekly updates on the progress of the Mozilla Mixed Reality team. Late last year, we brought together all of the people working on Virtual and Augmented Reality at Mozilla to work in our new Mixed Reality program.

As part of that program, we're working in three broad areas.

Browsers

We recently announced Firefox Reality, a new browser for standalone AR/VR headsets based on the best pieces of Firefox with both GeckoView and Servo.

• The official announcement went out on the Mixed Reality and official Mozilla blogs.
• Servo continued to deliver a ton of new features, including landing 66 PRs and 5 new contributors.

Social

We are working on a new social platform for Mixed Reality.

In the last week, we have:

• Smoke test back up and running in prep for launch (bots in the virtual space we use to integration test pushes)
• Fully working “Hello World” of full environment GLTF pipeline tooling publishing GLTF “bundles” to S3 with A-Frame components being injected, etc.
• Space bubble fixes and improvements landing this week
• Deployed metrics collection on Janus SFU for OKR tracking post-launch https://github.com/mozilla/janus-eventhandler-sqlite
• Finished migration to Github/Waffle, all tasks for MVP tagged as “Duck MVP” https://github.com/mozilla/mr-social-client/issues
• PoC of navmesh-based character controller collision (ie, can’t walk/teleport through walls, tables, etc.) https://github.com/mozilla/mr-social-client/pull/113

Content ecosystem

And of course without great experiences, there’s no reason to put on a headset in the first place! Making sure that developers - whether they are web-first or coming from tools such as Unity - are successful in targeting WebVR and later WebXR...

• Created initial prototype adding WebGL2 support to three.js
• Reached the end of the A-Frame / Sketchfab creation experiment