IPFS VR

tags: `devlog`

Website: https://ipfs.io/
Github: https://github.com/ipfs
Roadmap: https://github.com/ipfs/roadmap
Resources: https://awesome.ipfs.io/

VR requires A LOT of data and speed. Distributed P2P file systems like IPFS could provide the infrastructure that the decentralized Metaverse needs to scale. The mission of IPFS is to create a resilient, upgradable, open network to preserve and grow humanity’s knowledge

The timeline for building a decentralized backbone for upgrading the Internet aligns with the next wave of computing and VR/AR. For the sake of building the ultimate version of the Metaverse, we think it is crucial to bring together the spatial computing and IPFS communities closer together.

This collaborative document is less about the tech and more how to align and grow the communities around the intersection of IPFS and virtual worlds. We are building bridges.

Community Meetup

Connecting the Metaverse with IPFS - Jin @dankvr
- https://hackmd.io/@XR/motivation
  - We’re getting closer to living in a massive, persistent digital reality adjacent to our own. That digital reality is often owned by a single corporate entity. An open metaverse is a moral imperative.
  - They’re starting off on trying to extend the web / internet. There are points of centralization there in both unity (for 3d rendering) and chrome for web.
  - 99.9% of “social VR” is currently built with a non-free engine.
- WebXR is positioned as an open answer to this problem space
  - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebXR_Device_API
  - https://www.w3.org/TR/webxr/
  - Can open portals to IPFS hosted worlds
  - Demo: dragging an IPFS-backed asset out of the web UI into a VR world
    - JanusXR: https://janusxr.org/
  - Demo: spacialize a 2D conference presentation into a 3d world.
    - @jacobheun presenting on libp2p circuit relays
  - Group: m3 (metaverse makers mixer)
    - https://github.com/M3-org/research
    - https://github.com/M3-org/awesome-metaverse
    - 33 people met a virtual reality modeled off of eth denver physical space
- Connecting metaverse & IPFS
  - Virtual worlds currently try to do everything (api, avatar, world, storage, market), and create their own silos
  - VR Chat is the largest social VR platform at the moment
  - https://github.com/exokitxr - Tools for virtual worlds in the browser. Works on all headsets.
  - The imagination is different overlays for the different layers - an avatar layer, etc.
  - Imagine AR goggles for the social layer on top of a virtual reality world
  - You can see holograms of people that are chiming in from the browser into your VR world without modifying the client.
  - They’ve got all the tech: WebXR, OpenXR, GLTF, Wasm, IPFS, ETH. but they haven’t completed ‘the webaverse’ yet.
    - Discussions occurring in mozilla hubs (https://hubs.mozilla.com)
    - A Japanese XR event coming up soon - to replace canceled conferences due to covid
      - 6 months ago they had an ‘expo’ with 600 exhibitors across 14 worlds. Provided templates. Mostly commerce for avatars and wearables.
      - Had 700,000 visitors
    - “Virtual market 4” in one month. 1,400 exhibitors
    - Jin will be hosting a virtual field trip.
    - Don’t need VR, can visit in ‘desktop mode’
    - These occur in ‘VR Chat’
  - IPFS provides the data layer
  - Already good enough to act as a shared whiteboard
  - Consider: a virtual expo for the IPFS ecosystem
  - Advantage: can teleport back to the conference world from 6 months ago.
  - Currently many booths have QR codes for a backend payment processor. Jin wants to more seamlessly integrate eth for the web3 community.
  - WebXR can be both the creation and distribution platform.

Q/A, Help Wanted

What is WebXR browser support like now?
- Oculus / other headsets out at the moment, you can visit a link and go into ‘VR mode’. It connects headsets to the browser. There should always be desktop support as well.
EXOkit - is that like VRChat?
- It’s a ‘meta’ layer - with exokit in any VR world, it’s like you have AR on in your virtual world. To go to a different world would be a different experience. Exokit is trying to treat everything as a holographic layer that can composite together.
Should we do a VR meetup?
- It takes a couple days of planning
- Meeting up in hubs is a good first step.
- If companies need booths, the model can be providing templates, and then offering services to customize - but that asset can then be re-used at other events.
Best way to contact Jin:
- Discord: jin#6455
- Twitter: @dankvr

Silicon Valley

The decentralized web has its moments in the popular show Silicon Valley. Given unlimited time and resourcse, Richard explains his ultimate vision of building a new internet powered by the collective computing power of everyday devices.

See full clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJVW_DqLntg

Later in season 4, two programmers from Pied Piper integrate their compression algorithm to the investors VR demo. The performance boost greatly reduced latency, a very important metric for anything VR/AR. This is illustrated in the scene by how Richard, who is sensitive to motion sickness, was able to enjoy the VR experience the next time he tried it.

The demo was so compelling that the investor decided to outright acquire the startup Pied Piper. The moral of the story is that VR demos are super compelling and help sell the vision for what web3 infrastructure companies are building. It's like peanut butter n jelly or mac n cheese.

The producer of the show even attended the Decentralized Web Summit oragnized by the Internet Archive to talk about the parallels between the concept and the non-fictional movement.

JanusXR

Inspired by the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash, the JanusXR community has pioneered a number of ways VR and the distributed web work together. This is because the VR experiences and avatars made in Janus are websites made using open 3d model formats, a next-generation VRML language, and Javascript.

There are opengl / webgl clients which uses the latest threejs to render with. Both clients can read and even write the same markup with a built-in editor, allowing a person to build a VR world inside the VR world, collaboratively.

2015

FireVR: https://github.com/spyduck/FireVR

FireVR is a blender addon that exports the current scene to the JanusXR markup language. It generates the XML description of the scene automatically, exports the objects and provides instant publication over the IPFS network (no server needed!). It can also export the room to a local destination (no IPFS required).

This pipeline basically turned Blender into a WebVR development platform with easy hosting solutions like IPFS and Vesta (similar to neocities but for VR websites) bundled in.

There is even the option to add a link portal so you could connect multiple virtual worlds together from Blender. It's incredible how forward thinking this is. In the year 2015, years before Decentraland, the JanusVR community combined the world's most popular open source 3D game development with a collaborative 3D web browser and direct publishing to the distributed web.

2016

Metaverse Lab pioneered many incredible experiments with VR and IPFS for worlds and avatars.

Details: https://hackaday.io/project/5077-metaverse-lab/details

The OASIS will just be a mirage if you're going to trust corporations to build it from the top-down. It's up to us to make the future be compatible with digital human rights by implementing bottom-up solutions.

Opening portals to IPFS hosted worlds. Video shown is an older native version of JanusXR.

2017

Decentraland raises 25M in an ICO to build a decentralized virtual reality world.

2018

Lab day is a day-long event dedicated to contributors and collaborators in the Protocol Labs ecosystem. The goal was to gather the community to share and collaborate with each other in a fun and inspiring environment.

Speakers gave presentations in the bean bag gathering area in the center.

Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhuBigpl7lqvIymGaM7A_VT4CYZW3R_4Q

Exhibitors and collaboration spaces were placed inside shipping containers all around the large hangar space. JanusXR developer Bai was presenting WebVR demos of the Internet Archive and a fully working Decentraland client in VR with hand tracking.

Hologram Speakers

The format that the presentations were captured then uploaded to Youtube was wonderful to work with in post. The screen and the presenters stayed in a consistent layout.

Because the background was a solid color, we were able to erase it and spatialize the presentation recordings into 3D worlds. Imagine instead of simply rewatching the youtube videos you had the option of reliving the experience of Lab Day.

What about hosting a Lab Day every month in smaller portions? The barrier to entry is lowering each day for producing and attending these types of productions.

There's a rough reconstruction of the event venue made from 3D scans taken during the event. Perhaps someday this could serve as a sketch for a virtual community hub.

The 3D model is a good enough reference for a pro 3D modeler to use to create an optimized and quality looking model that can be used in a variety of virtual world platforms.

2019

During Dweb camp, Protocol Labs occupied a small room next to the Mesh Hall which turned out to become one of the best 3D scans from the entire event.

Perhaps this scan can get packed inside a digital shipping container and decorated somehow.

2020

The year 2020 welcomes new additions to the IPFS VR family such as Webaverse. The approach of Webaverse is to utilize open standards like WebXR for packaging spatial applications into a token that can be owned, traded, and shared anywhere.

The home-space project is nearing a full version release. The demo features a customizable virtual space hosted on IPFS and ENS, like a decentralized web version of VRChat.

Distributed Virtual Lab

One of the book recommendations that came from Protocol Labs is The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. It traces some of the most important inventions of the 20th century from the transistor to cellular telephony from inside the facilities that great minds worked in.

This was an interesting book recommendation from a company that lacks a central office with a workforce that is entirely remote. During the midst of covid-19 lockdown, Protocol Labs produced an in-depth article about how they run their company remotely: https://protocol.ai/blog/how-we-work-at-protocol-labs/

The key bullpoints are:

Startpage

Working remotely from home can be hectic for newcomers who have to learn to adjust work, online, and offline life separately. According to the blogpost, Protocol Labs offers a company handbook. What if that handbook, as well as the other work apps, can all be packaged together and easily accessible?

I have an idea for helping remote teams to stay more organized. The daily standard suite of tools and essential resources can exist on a local-first HTML homepage so that it is always easy to access and infinitely more useful than what most browsers ship by default. Here is an example I made and the source code.

The bottom apps are from left to right: Nextcloud, Guacamole, HackMD, Collaborative Whiteboard, SomaFM and Metaverse programs like JanusXR, Cryptovoxels, and VRChat.

You can find many more great customizable startpage templates here or searching on Github.

WebOS

According to the roadmap, IPFS wants to build a WebOS which is described as something where the web platform and OS'es merge.

The rift between the web and the OS is finally healed. The OS and local programs and WebApps merge. They are not just indistinguishable, they are the same thing. "Installing" becomes pinning applications to the local computer. "Saving" things locally is also just pinning. The browser and the OS are no longer distinguishable. The entire OS data itself is modelled on top of IPLD, and the internal FileSystem is IPFS (or something on top, like unixfs). The OS and programs can manipulate IPLD data structures natively. The entire state of the OS itself can be represented and stored as IPLD. The OS can be frozen or snapshotted, and then resumed. A computer boots from the same OS hash, drastically reducing attack surface.

What does WebOS look like and will it be enough to get people excited to use it? How much of working remotely can combine with eating your own dog food to test WebOS?

Meanwhile, the Webaverse community are thinking about many similar concepts in building user owned virtual worlds. By having virtual community events we can share and archive knowledge in new ways that onboard more people to collaborate with us on building the future of the distributed web together.

Community Events

Speakers

Our VR studio is ready for production. We're currently exploring a number of different formats for creating engaging and educational content.

interviews
panels
roundtable
field trip

Hallways

To enhance networking at community events, we can decorate the virtual world with information and booths. Avatars can walk around a snapshot of the distributed web ecosystem and know where to find people to talk to based on where they are in proximity to various exhibitions.

Use sector maps like this one below as a top down floorplan for a giant convention. Source

Every logo on the map can be 3D modeled into an exhibitor booth. There are plenty of options from picking a booth template to customizing one to represent the project on the showfloor.

Here are some resources for making IPFS related booths. Once we build a number of booths to represent the landscape, we can port them into a bunch of different maps easily. Video game levels, 3D scans, expo halls, virtual streets can become an exhibition of the distributed virtual web.

For more about virtual events, check out https://hackmd.io/@XR/vrconferences

Stay Connected

Have ideas, feedback, or comments? Reach out to the writer on discord (jin#6455) or Twitter.

Summer time: Working on a virtual festival inspired by Salvador Dali / Art Basel / Burning Man! Massive collab with crypto artists, marketplaces, web3, musicians, avatar makers, world builders.

Virtual productions like podcasts and panels. All a guest needs is an Oculus Quest to join.