Hello and welcome friends of the Wider Web!
I’m deep in production mode of a limited series of Tiny Memex but took a bit of time outside of my decifactory to find and share the best people, projects, and events on the Wider Web and the Agreement Bedrock. It’s a rocky time on planet Earth and I’m grateful for everyone (including you!) who works toward a stable future for inter-state communication.
As always, send your tips, corrections, and offers of support to trevor@TransmutableNews.com or @TransmutableNew on Twitter.
Fill your bathtub with water, tape up your windows, and check your stock of candles because it’s time for another issue of the Transmutable News Weekly!
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News
The Combinatorial Growth of Open Tools
Imanol Fernandez of Igalia demonstrated the power of open source by revealing that the Wider Web browser Wolvic can now run on multiple web engines, including Mozilla’s Gecko, WebKit’s WPE, and the back end of Google’s Chromium.
Will the Models Have Legs?
The first annual Metaverse Fashion Week will start on 24 March in Decentraland, offering catwalks as well as sales of clothes and accessories that bundle physical and digital versions.
Refugee Creators Accepting New Clients
WA/AR Studio is a team of XR creators who were forced to leave Ukraine and now they are looking for work for their experienced designers and developers.
Get Paid To Widen a New Platform
Qualcomm launched their Snapdragon Metaverse Fund that aims to distribute $100M to teams who are willing to work on their Snapdragon Spaces developer platform. It would be excellent to bring Wider Web apps to the generally native-app-oriented platform, either through an immersive browser port (perhaps Wolvic?) or a native wrapper for progressive web apps.
Welcome to XR, Webheads
Google’s HTTP 203 show hosted Ada Rose Cannon of Samsung and the W3C’s Immersive Web groups for a discussion about how WebXR fits into the Wider Web.
Without Protons and Neutrons Our Electrons are Slippery
Long-time SVVR community leader and contributor Jon lost everything in their Oculus account 14 days ago and while Meta has acknowledged the issue they’ve offered no guidance on when (or if!) Jon’s many games and digital bodies will be returned.
“Wider” Doesn’t Mean “Wider For A Few”
The United States Department of Justice issued new guidance for web teams who obey the Americans with Disabilities Act. As the new display modes and input types of the Wider Web become more prevalent our community will need to work with the DOJ to include guidance on those new capabilities and hurdles.
At Long Last, Emoji
The Mozilla Hubs team updated their editor, Spoke, with a new text editor from James C. Kane that uses Jason Johnston’s Troika library to provide fast 3D text rendering with solid Unicode support.
Today’s “Firsts” Actually Aren’t
Charlie Warzel of the Atlantic published an interview with Wagner James Au, the author of New World Notes which is one of the longest running publication about virtual worlds, the Metaverse, and other XR spaces. Au has diligently chronicled the social, political, economic, and hype cycles of Second Life as well as its relationship with the many other platforms that have launched and disappeared and in this interview they share insights that they collected along the way.
Stay open, friends.