Transmutable News

Issue #5

Feb 22, 2022

Hello and welcome friends of the Wider Web!

After last issue’s metric ton of news this week is relatively light-weight. That bit of saved time in your day is just right to install Wolvic on the Quest and check out a few experiences from Extended Collection.

As always, send your tips, corrections, and offers of support to trevor@TransmutableNews.com or @TransmutableNew on Twitter.

Sew EL wire to your seams, boot The Grid, and sharpen your identity disc because it’s time for another issue of the Transmutable News Weekly!

Job listings

Jin from OMI is looking for a designer and React developer to take on a short term contract to polish an open source, Wider Web-based, 3D character creator similar to Ready Player Me. If that is you then join their Discord and DM Jin.

Interested in listing your job openings and supporting my work? Email trevor@transmutablenews.com for details.

Opportunities for support

If you appreciate my work and want it to continue then I hope that you’ll head to my Ko-fi for a single contribution 🎉 or to Patreon for a subscription 🎉🎉.

News

The Lab that is Bigger on the Inside

The new Wolvic immersive browser is now available for general use on the Quest’s App Lab and developer Imanol Fernandez mentioned that (unlike Firefox Reality) it implements WebXR.

Quite the Echo in this Chamber

Survey results from the State of JS 2021 reveal that 83% of Javascript developers have never heard of WebXR so we have a lot of work to do.

Talking About the Z-Axis

After taking part in several conversations about layout and workflows on the Wider Web (including spatial controls) it became clear to me that we couldn’t make progress when anyone involved didn’t understand the history and use of “intrinsic web design” as detailed in Jen Simmons’ video, “Everything You Know about Web Design Just Changed”. It’s an hour well spent, even (or especially?) if you want to throw away CSS and start over. Let me know if you’re interested in reading a Transmutable News article about intrinsic design specifically for spatial UX.

Hot to Drop

There are a variety of methods for analyzing decentralized protocols (include the W3C’s rubric) but it’s increasingly apparent for reasons of climate crisis and GPU shortages that energy use is a critical consideration. That’s why Filecoin.Energy’s real-time tracking of energy use for the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is an excellent contribution to our ongoing conversations about agreement technologies. The information dashboard separates data storage energy (currently estimated at 56 megawatts per day) from the overhead of cryptographic sealing (37 MW/d) which allows us to compare decentralization costs with more precision.

Seven Days of The Future

FIVARS was nominated for “Event of the year” at the 2022 WebXR Awards and is running all of this week. Tickets are available for a multitude of VR gems, dome experiences, live VR performances, as well as artist talks and presentations.

Coin Critique

Rufus Pollock collected a trove of articles about blockchain-based technology from experts, pundits, and everyone in between.

Hypertext? No, Hyperspace!

Fabien Benetou linked VARTISTE’s new “export to URL” feature to Mozilla Hubs to make it easy to create 3D art and then hosting it in your personal Wider Web space.

More Fora on the Agora

Tim Kokke created a WebXR Twitter Community for folks building the Wider Web.

Stay open, friends!