Hello and welcome friends of the Wider Web!
I took a break from running lathes and thinking about Fully Automated Luxury Communism to check out what’s happening around the Wider Web and friends, it was a pretty good week for web devs, spatial designers, and firewall hopping encrypted data.
As always, send your tips, corrections, and offers of support to trevor@TransmutableNews.com or @trevorflowers@WiderWeb.org.
Grind a light roast, tamp the puck, and pressurize to 900kp because it’s time for another issue of the Transmutable News Weekly!
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News
250 Reasons to Make a Space
Tim Steer released The Base Mesh, a library of 250 3D models “to be used in a range of creative applications”. (via Joe Simpson on read.widerweb.org)
An Exciting Leap Forward… Maybe
I’m always a bit saddened when a company whose products I use (and often employing people I know) is acquired so when I read the news that Fastly acquired Glitch my first feeling was negative.
Glitch has long been a proponent of the open and accessible Wider Web and I hope that doesn’t change.
Fastly has contributed quite a bit to development WebAssembly tools, hiring a few key people after Mozilla layoffs, which I appreciate. It should be interesting to see what the Glitch team can do with tighter integration of Fastly’s edge nodes. There’s a huge opportunity to build a global federation of multi-scale scene replication nodes which would fundamentally change the nature of the Wider Web so let’s hope they pull it off.
VPN over RTC for the WW
Felicitas Pojtinger announced weron, a project to create trusted networks over WebRTC. One of the initial target uses is to create virtual private networks which work for people who are locked behind corporate or state firewalls but the same tools can be used to create secure networks for the shared scenes, replication, media streams, and messaging that make up social spaces on the Wider Web.
Perhaps the weron and LiveKit teams could join forces to create a fantastic shared media space that can traverse the many hurdles of the Splinternet?
Modular Mix and Match
Stephan J Carnam wrote an essay about evaluating Wider Web libraries on which to base WebXRPress, a set of “template entities” which can be used to “quickly create virtual reality based worlds and applications”.
A Glimpse of a Plan
The immersive MMO, Shattered Lands, published a whitepaper (pdf) detailing their game design as well as a section, “Tokenomics”, which broadly describes their planned use of in-game currency, the Polygon blockchain (backed by Ethereum), and a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). While this isn’t the first Wider Web team to target this combination of technologies in the context of an MMO, it does stand out by making visible progress toward a working platform through the use of Vercel tools. (via mâ‚‚ on Mastodon)
Stay open, friends.
p.s. I run a Mastodon instance, WiderWeb.org, for people of the web and/or XR persuasion. If that’s you and you’d like to dip your toes into the fediverse then I’d be happy to host you. Our local timeline is, IMHO, more interesting than what you’ll find on the global social media sites and it would be even better with you there.