Hello and welcome friends of the Wider Web!
This morning I shook the sawdust out of my hair, checked on how the long-awaited Ethereum merge is coming along (TL;DR still no firm dates), and fired up Mosaic to surf the Cyberweb for news and events from the Wider Web.
As always, send your tips, corrections, and offers of support to trevor@TransmutableNews.com or @TransmutableNew on Twitter.
Balance your brackets, prettify your indentation, and rename single-letter variables because it’s time for another issue of the Transmutable News Weekly!
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News
Take a Protein, Leave a Protein
The MoleculARweb revealed their new “build your own molecules” section for educators and inspired enthusiasts who want to create custom AR activities. The site now accepts a common file format for describing molecules, (PBD), so that users can customize XR experiences with their specific curriculum topics. They’ve also published a paper that describes the feature in detail.
Are You Larger Than a Proto-Human?
Keith Chan announced that the AnVRopomotron WebXR Museum added a new Hall of Human Evolution that provides scale models of our portion of the tree of life. How amazing would it be to eventually explore the entire tree in XR using a data set like OneZoom’s?
Don’t Try to Ride It
Marcel Wiessler (not to be confused with ubicomp creator Mark Weiser) announced their new configurator demo that was created in Unity and then exported onto the Wider Web. They’ve also opened up early access signup for their tools.
Let’s Put More Zeros On That Channel
AyÅŸegül Yönet’s WebXR YouTube Channel passed the 1K subscriber milestone, in part because of multiple playlists that explore the development of and culture around WebXR. Reach out if you have topics that you’d like to see on AyÅŸegül’s to-do list.
Compute Nodes Descend the Ivory Tower
One positive feature of our future Agreement Bedrock is the sharing of networked resources that would otherwise be idle. One such resource is computation, also known as number crunching. While distributed computation has been around for decades, a new wave of federated tools specifically for machine learning is bringing shared computation out of enterprise and academic teams and into general use by independent machine learning practitioners. For example, Flower provides multi-language, multi-platform networks of compute nodes to train neural networks. Flower clients also integrate with common tools of the trade such as Jupyter notebooks which make shared computation more accessible to new users.
Hardware Is Harder Than Usual
Backers of the Lynx R1 headset and its onboard immersive browser, Wolvic, will need to wait a bit longer than expected as CEO Stan Larroque admitted at the Game Developer Conference that they’ll miss their April delivery window and will (thanks to our new, less capable supply chain) mostly likely ship in June or July of this year. Their OpenXR-based software developer kit is on track to arrive soon, though.
Stay open, friends.