Mozilla Hubs is an open source software to “Meet, share and collaborate together in private 3D virtual spaces.” It seems really focused on easily creating meeting rooms that can be collaborative work areas. To create a room, you first have to create a project in the web based builder called Spoke. This application is nice, but simple. I did not see a way to create a room using VR, so a regular 2D interface would have to suffice. Dragging and dropping 3D models from local machine as well as from SketchFab was a nice feature, unfortunately only GLB models are supported. Likewise it is easy to drag in an image or video and select if it should be “flat projection” or “360-equirectangular” (more on that in a minute) Once the project is created you create a room from that project. Hub.Link does a good job supporting a traditional web browser client, or VR. A nice touch is to generate a shortcut code so you can easily type that into your headset browser.
As stated previously, the use case for Hubs is really as a meeting place. Can it be used as a basic system to support showcasing immersive content? I gave it a try by creating a project and a room (You can go here to check it out) I envision a simple gallery with images on the wall. Clicking on an image would take you to view the 360 view of the image. Seemed pretty straightforward! I put two images on the left wall, and then tried to figure out how to make a link, that’s where things got harder. You can’t make any object clickable, you have to use the link object. However, the link object doesn’t support setting what it looks like, it just grabs a generic image of the scene. So below each gallery picture I put a link object to a “waypoint” Waypoints I think are key to viewing 360 images in Hubs. You can set the waypoint and disable movement, essentially making the waypoint a 3DOF, rather than 6DOF point. I put the waypoint inside a 360 sphere which worked OK. However, only equirectangular, monoscopic is supported. I do not believe over-under, or any type of stereoscopic format is supported.
I really wanted to like Mozilla Hubs. I think the web can be a great, open metaverse. But, pretty basic features are not available yet in Hubs. Making a quick mockup is a way to think about how things shoud work, and make a list of some basic functionality:
Cons
- No support for 360, over under, stereographic photo and video. This is a pet peave, immersive images are 360 and stereo!
- No ability to make objects links. This is the basis of the world wide web, links. In 3D links should be buttons, text, models, images etc.
- No VR create tool
Pros
- Hub.link makes it easy to join and room and invite others
- Seems setup for basic VRChat style interaction
- Server software is available on AWS to host your own client/server environment
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