4 ms·

What was Mozilla Hubs? Never heard of it until now.

• a_bonobo 3y ago
  The community took Mozilla's announcement of shutting down parts of the org very negatively, but your comment agrees with my feelings: they're shutting down the stuff nobody uses. Hubs is/was a private 3D world for conference and teaching, it's essentially metaverse: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/for-20-a-month-you-can-host-meetings-in-mozillas-mini-metaverse/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/for-20-a-month-you-can-hos... But I've never seen anyone actually use it. Good on Mozilla for making the hard decisions.
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    I've considered using it at work but it wasn't really great. There was only a web client. I think it was a weird tangent for Mozilla, but the product itself is not bad at the core. Probably some more specialised org will take over management of it like what happened to Mozilla's other abandoned products.
    • a_bonobo 3y ago
      Yes, let's hope! The strategy has worked out sometimes - Google shut down 'Google Refine' 10 years ago, it got turned into 'Open Refine', last release five days ago. https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine It's a hugely useful tool if you're working with messy Excel-scale data, i.e., most biologists or social scientists.
    • dale_glass 3y ago
      I think of the weird things that Mozilla does, this one made sense. It's a web-based environment. At the very least it's useful to push Firefox to do 3D better. If you're looking for something desktop based, by the way, I work on such a thing.
      • wkat4242 3y ago
        > I think of the weird things that Mozilla does, this one made sense. It's a web-based environment. At the very least it's useful to push Firefox to do 3D better. Fair enough, good point. > If you're looking for something desktop based, by the way, I work on such a thing. Oh I've tried several. Spatial (which is now more general metaverse and less businessy, sadly), Arthur. Immersed. And now we're using MS Mesh. Mesh kinda sucks (it works, but you can't do anything and even the meeting host has no control over the instancing). But it's free with O365. Mesh is basically a rebadged AltSpaceVR by the way, but with most of the features removed, curiously. I'm kinda curious which one you're working on though :) I know there's more than the above but I haven't tried them. The biggest problem of all of them though is the usecase. The why. Even though Mesh is free now, I have a really hard time justifying why to actually deploy it. The whole convention thing is not really worth it IMO, and not many sites bother with WebXR anymore. Personally I'm a huge VR enthusiast and just hanging out is a perfectly good reason for me but I have bosses that are a lot more critical :)
        • dale_glass 3y ago
          > I'm kinda curious which one you're working on though :) I know there's more than the above but I haven't tried them. I'm on Overte, an open source fork of the dead commercial High Fidelity. We don't have WebXR right now, but we could grab that functionality off another fork quite easily. The main reason we didn't is that we're desktop VR focused and that the readily available code is slow and buggy. But we do have a pathway there should there be enough interest. > The biggest problem of all of them though is the usecase. The why. Even though Mesh is free now, I have a really hard time justifying why to actually deploy it. Our deployment process is extremely simple. Both the client and server can be compiled trivially, there's no complex dependencies. Our usecase is doing whatever you want. Unlike most everyone else we've got a distributed model where we don't control what you do with it. It's a bit like a 3D webserver in principle. The software is very suitable for massive environments though.
        • gfodor 3y ago
          The team that build Hubs was also part of the team that built AltspaceVR.
    • loloquwowndueo 3y ago
      Everything is a web client. Just because they wrap it in Electron and peddle it as a “native client” doesn’t usually make it so.
      • SahAssar 3y ago
        I don't think most other "metaverse"/VR-chat type stuff is electron. Mozilla wanted this to be a web client presumably to be a good demo/killer app for webXR and related tech.
        • moron4hire 3y ago
          That's how it started, but then Mozilla laid off their WebXR team. I never understood why they did that but kept Hubs. And there were weird things, too, like Hubs would work on the Quest in Meta's WebXR-compliant fork of Chromium, but not on desktop in Google Chrome with all the same necessary WebXR features. Truly bizarre priorities.
  • lopis 3y ago
    We gave it a try during covid and while it was fun, it gave some people vertigo so we had to drop it as a work tool. It was fun though.
• charcircuit 3y ago
  It's Mozilla's metaverse platform
  • acomjean 3y ago
    That’s basically it. I used it to visit a virtual art opening during the pandemic times. It was a little wonky but did work. I was able to talk to people and roam around the space that was set up.
• pmontra 3y ago
  I'm with you. This is probably the first time I heard about this service. The usage numbers they give in the announcement would be great for any of my customers but not particularly important for Mozilla IMHO. Much smaller than Firefox.
• dathinab 3y ago
  neither have I which I think is the core of the issue it's a hardly known hardly used product and with the community edition another company could pick it up if it's just anywhere close to profitable