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This week in Mixed Reality: Issue 12

Nancy Hang Nancy Hang    - 

This week we landed a bunch of core features: in the browsers space, we landed WebVR support and immersive controllers; in the social area, added media tools to Hubs; and in the content ecosystem, we now have WebGL2 support on the WebGLRenderer in three.js.

Browsers

This week has been super exciting for the Firefox Reality team. We spent the last few weeks working on immersive WebVR support and it's finally here!

  • Completed prototypes of immersive mode for WebVR support
  • Implemented private browsing on the new UI
  • Added mini tray
  • Immersive mode for presentation is now implemented across the supported standalone headsets
  • New controller models landed
  • Support for asynchronous loading of models and textures
  • Mapped out client side error pages for text only (DNS error, SSL certificate error, etc)

Here are two sneek peaks of Firefox Reality. First is support for entering and existing WebVR:

Quick enter and exit WebVR test in Firefox Reality from Imanol Fernández Gorostizaga on Vimeo.

The second is controller support:

Firefox Reality WebVR controllers from Imanol Fernández Gorostizaga on Vimeo.

Servo's Android support is receiving some care and attention. Not only can developers now build a real Android app locally that embeds Servo alongside a URL bar and other fundamental UI controls, but we can now support regression tests that verify that the Android port won't crash on startup. These important steps will allow us to work on more complicated Android embedding strategies with greater confidence in the future.

Social

We are making great progress towards adding new features on Hubs by Mozilla:

  • Making improvements on the following: scene management and nested scenes, references, GLTF export, breadcrumb UI/UX, many bug fixes
  • Demoed media tools (paste a URL: get an image, video, or model in the space) at Friday’s meetup. Finishing up polish and bugfixing on that and adding support for more content types.
  • More progress on drawing tools, better geometry generation and networking implementation in place.

Interested in joining our public Friday stand ups? For more details, join our public WebVR Slack #social channel to participate in on the discussion!

Content ecosystem

This week, we landed initial WebGL2 support to the WebGLRenderer in three.js!

Found a critical bug on the Unity WebVR exporter? File it in our public GitHub repo or let us know on the public WebVR Slack #unity channel and as always, join us in our discussion!

Stay tuned for new features and improvements across our three areas!