Transmutable News

Issue #18

May 27, 2022

Hello and welcome friends of the Wider Web!

This week I took a break from thinking about the intersection of differential privacy, pictures behind glass, and permacomputing to search the Wider Web for news, upcoming events, and interesting projects for you, dear reader.

As always, send your tips, corrections, and offers of support to trevor@TransmutableNews.com or @trevorflowers@WiderWeb.org.

Check your normals, generate your mipmaps, and compress your scripts because it’s time for another issue of the Transmutable News Weekly!

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

A Specific POV for Free

AWE USA 2022 is scheduled for June 1st through 3rd and tickets are available. The event is booked for Santa Clara, California but the main stage sessions will be streamed. If you’ve ever wondered how people two levels of management above the production teams (and a council of overlords) think about XR then this is for you.

Neo Results are Rolling In (Discord)

The Pico Neo 3 Link’s browser was a topic of discussion in the WebXR Discord’s #off-topic channel and reportedly supports WebXR well enough to play Moonrider and to visit Mozilla’s Hello WebXR. (via mâ‚‚ on WiderWeb.org)

Let’s Get Small

There is a growing number of creators (UX designers, game makers, developers, etc.) who want a “clean-slate personal computing stack”. While implementations of this concept vary quite a bit, the uxn stack is growing in popularity with a number of emulators and a variety of applications. What is the equivalent for the Wider Web? If we focus on a device as “the stack” then perhaps it is a fully open and trustworthy pair of glasses that run just enough of an OS to run an immersive browser. That feels quite heavy compared to uxn. Is there a subset of browser features and OS features that brings us closer?

A Metaverse of Microverses on an OS in a Browser

Kent Bye published Voices of VR Episode #1088 in which he interviews David A. Smith about the new Croquet OS, a “OS for the Metaverse” aimed at creators of “microverses” on the Wider Web.

Jaggies and Laggies No More?

Igalia released version 0.9.6 of their immersive web browser, Wolvic, which adds anti-aliasing support on Quest by default and on other platforms via configuration.

Dithering Heights

Write Height will now convert grayscale images into glTF, OBJ, or STL 3D files for use on the Wider Web. Compatible height maps are available from many sources but a nice free landscape generator is Height Mapper. (via Joseph Simpson on read.widerweb.org who also published Ten Days of PlayCanvas)

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.