Hello and welcome friends of the Wider Web!
If my searches and timelines are to be believed then this has been a light news week for the Wider Web and the Agreement Bedrock. Longer trends like improvements to our tech stack and changes in the business environment continue to play out but I didn’t catch any huge changes to the larger systems. It could be my journalism or it could be caused by the chaos of the early days of World War III. What do you think?
As always, send your tips, corrections, and offers of support to trevor@TransmutableNews.com or @TransmutableNew on Twitter.
Get your hearing checked, open the blinds, and listen to the wind because it’s time for another issue of the Transmutable News Weekly!
Opportunities for support
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Corrections
In issue 12 I attributed the addition of inside-out tracking to the Monado OpenXR implementation to Collada (a file format) instead of its actual developers, Collabora (a talented team of human-type people).
News
We Win Some, We Lose Some
Imanol Fernandez announced that they’re leaving the Wolvic team at Igalia and joining Meta to work on graphics, performance, and UX challenges instead of browser technologies like WebXR. Fernandez has been a major contributor to several WebXR implementations and an excellent member of our community.
But Will There Be Mall Cops and Food Courts?
Dean Takahashi from Venture Beat published a write-up of The Mall from MetaVRse. The Mall team plans to launch in Summer 2022 with a shopping mall experience for any device that can run a web browser, from handsets to headsets. The general idea of a nearly-infinite shopping mall with store and brand deals has bounced around XR communities since at least the 1980s so I’ll be interested to see how it fares on the modern Wider Web.
Legal Names? No, Thank You
6529, the pseudonymous creator of the crypto-centric XR web site, OnCyber, announced that their OM project has 3500 incoming requests for participation. Details are very light but apparently this museum district is an early experiment for the project. It seems like every day there is another separate project announced with the aim to create “The Open Metaverse” and it’s beginning to feel a bit like this xkcd comic about how “universal standards” proliferate. I see this as a communication failure about value that standards bodies offer as well as a lack of effort (and resources) to harness the energy and interest that is currently poured into ill fitting tools like Discord.
Stay open, friends.