Decentralized Web Summit 2018

Young and old computer wizards are working together to decentralize the web and make it really awesome again too.

Originally published August 2018

tags: devlog dweb janus

Main website: https://decentralizedweb.net/

There was a very positive reaction from the Dweb crowd when showing off demos of the Internet Archive experience and what decentralized virtual worlds look like.

The Virtual Worlds installation was inside of a steel vault in the SF Mint, a place that once held a third of the gold in the US.

Using measurements given to us and pictures, planning began with a 3D models mocked up for the room and LED shapes for a rough idea on where things would go.

Early in the day one, Kyle Drake, who created Neocities but now works on IPFS, was amazed by Vesta's features and said its something that hes always wanted to create. Awesome!

We also talked about the initiatives of the VRBA while showing examples of the inventory script working in Janus and HiFi.

Demos

For demos, we had a nicely polished oculus rift + leap motion WebVR demo where people can step inside a matterport scan of the Internet Archive, reach into various collections, and play them on machines. Another table had Janus on an Oculus Go and Daydream setup where people would meetup with a metaverse guide in the vesta lobby showing them cool rooms. Lastly, those that wanted more information, we had panel discussion and an ipad containing links to documentation and pictures of components we've built like the inventory system, vending/change machine, vesta, and workspaces.

When there was no foot traffic, Tango scans were taken of the room and then optimized in blender. On day two, people hung out in the vault while the projector screen displayed live world building using a combination of JanusVR, Etherpad, FireVR (Blender plugin), and Vesta. Those amazed by the Archive demo were blown away at how such content gets made in a collaborative, version controlled pipeline built on top of open source and the open web.

Early access to this experience is available here

Next we got invited to Lab Day

During Lab Day we gave demos of the Internet Archive library experience, you can see someone putting a virtual disc on the Phonograph

Afterwords, 3D scans taken with phone and computer modeled shipping containers were combined into a scene to recreate the experience

In progress shot of Lab Day world

Current Projects

Building a Virtual District inside Cryptovoxels

Virtual Vending Machine to buy NFTs

Virtual Ticket Machine with ERC721 Tickets