xrdevlog meta

tags: devlog

Website

• https://xrdevlog.com
• https://github.com/madjin/xrdevlog
• • https://hackmd.io/@XR/about (2020)
• https://hackmd.io/@XR/timeline (slides)
• https://hackmd.io/@XR/book (WIP)
  • https://hackmd.io/@xr/avatar-interop (book version)

About

• https://xrdevlog.com/about/

xrdevlog has been a labor of love for several years. It consists mostly as an index of collaborative markdown documents and serves a primary function to keep track of ongoing projects and research happening in corners of passionate open metaverse builder communities.

Background

It started out of necessessity from seeing incredible work being done by some of the smartest and most principled metaverse makers around me get unnoticed and the fear that such knowledge and experiments might be lost forever.

Sometimes things are built so fast and then we move onto the next thing that documentation becomes an afterthought. Sometimes it's simply a matter of survival for some builders and we just can't afford the time.

I feel blessed to have been acquianted with the VR industries brightest inventors and want to immortalize their contributions into metaverse history. However, it's really not enough to just keep a record of everything if nobody cares to read it. Even if I create the most comprehensive knowledge base of open metaverse projects and communities who is paying attention and how can it be more useful?

Coordination

One of the main challenges of building the open metaverse is simply coordination. We're spread across the world, across different platforms, different messaging apps, etc, and yet want to find ways to make our projects more compatible with one another.

Why

We spend a lot of cycles repeating ourselves, reinventing things, or looking for stuff when our work is not well documented or easily discoverable.

• Documenting as you work helps you keep track of progress and ideas
• You can get help faster from people by sharing your notes rather than exhaustively explaining everything manually each time
• Our work does not exist in a vacuum, discord is not publicly indexable, great projects and ideas will get lost in due time if you do not document
• Your notes are useful for others working on similar things, even with regarding to similar issues along the way
• It is faster to make presentations / bug reports / blog posts when you have notes and screenshots already organized

How

Working in public like the way we develop open source software is the most efficient system we have for collaborating remotely with strangers around the world. So if you have an idea for a new project, start writing it up in a hackmd!

• It takes practice, good habits take time to build, you'll get feedback along the way
• Learn markdown, it's the most versatile, productive, and portable way to write text
  • HackMD > Google docs
• Find ways to incorporate documentation into your workflows and not save it all as an afterthought (will end up overwhelming yourself that way)
• Start with media first if you don't have words, drag n drop into a hackmd and then write about it
  • Programs ShareX and gyazo make media creation easier as you work

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Index

Site: https://xrdevlog.com
Template: https://startbootstrap.com/snippets/portfolio-one-column

This is where the entire library can be viewable. The index offers easy access to hop into any dev log as well as a visible moment of appreciation of all the hard work we've been doing! I basically built it with a very simple startbootstrap template that gave me enough space for the preview image, title/description, and multiple links.

The original idea behind picking this template was that I was going to make every preview image an iframe that opens a 3D website version of the blog post. Something else really cool would be to visualize the index as a bookshelf with every dev log as a 3D hard cover case. This could maybe work as a MSF object on 3D sites such as M3 org website. Inside + outside both having a 3D component to inspect dev logs is powerful since one can lead to the other.

The minimal design is in part inspired by NODE's website: https://n-o-d-e.net/

How can the front page be written with markdown, as to make the entire website more self contained, easy to updata, and portable?

There's the main preview image, header, sub-header, description, and then links. Current links are:

• View hackmd
• See photo album
• Code
• Demo (planned)

How can such be represented nicely in a row? Quick sketch of a possible markdown redesign:

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Maps of the Internet

Visualizing the Internet landscape

📃 View	🗺 Map	🖼 Album	💾 Code	💻 Demo

Collection of various visualizations of the Internet and infrastructure projects to digitize Earth for anchoring spatial web content onto.

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It'd be nice to get a quick preview tooltip of the contents before opening a new tab with the media map image each dev log has, similar to Wikipedia.

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Dev logs

• https://hackmd.io/
• https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd
• https://getsharex.com/
• https://gyazo.com/

In my opinion HackMD is the best alternative to gdocs. Markdown was invented to be the most productive and portable way to type documents, so it's highly worth learning. With a collaborative markdown editor like hackmd it is frictionless to share / collab with others.

Have an idea for a new project? Cool, spin up a hackmd and document it so you don't lose it.

Need inspiration? Capture quick screenshots or clips using sharex and gyazo and paste them in. This is how I often like to work: capture media first, dump into a hackmd, and later on write text to describe such and fill in the gaps.

Dev logs by themselves are not polished enough to be blog posts, but they can be good fodder to help write one. I like to think of dev logs as a sorta fridge, stocking ingredients, notes, and inspiration that can be later synthesized into more refined pieces such as presentations, videos, blog posts, etc. In fact, hackmd makes it quite trivial for turning your markdown document into different formats like slideshows and books…

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Slide Mode

• https://hackmd.io/c/tutorials/%2Fs%2Fhow-to-create-slide-deck
• https://hackmd.io/slide-example?both

One of the cool features hackmd has is the ability to easily convert your project to a reveal.js slideshow presentation by modifying the markdown a bit with dashes to separate vertical and horizontal slides (3 dashes for new horizontal, 4 dashes for new vertical slide).

You can press escape in order to view the entire presentation, see example.

Timeline*

• https://hackmd.io/@XR/timeline#/
  • https://hackmd.io/@XR/timeline/edit

Slides can also easily be all exported as a PDF in a clean way, which can be converted to jpg/png in one command, which can then be useful for all sorts of things such as spatialization.

be easily made with a bullet point list. You can choose to have parts of the list auto-open or be collapsed with tags, as well as if the link opens as an external site or loads as an iframe. Below are two examples of loading links on the site.

Slideshow in book	3D website iframe in book

One catch with book mode is that the open source version of HackMD, CodiMD, does not support a book mode. We will need another self hosting option for organizing all sorts of markdown documents. Few options include:

• gitbook
• github pages
• docusaurus
• MkDocs

Because garden notes are densely linked, a garden explorer can enter at any location and follow any trail they link through the content, rather than being dumped into a "most recent” feed.

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Obsidian.md

• Site: https://obsidian.md/

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base software that can be ran on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. M3 member A has been using Obsidian for a few years.

What if dev log / nodes being currently worked on could be glowing? People can see the relationship to surrounding nodes and find more paths to align and collaborate.

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Virtual Worlds

Examples include Mozilla Hubs / NeosVR / Hyperfy / etc

One can bring up these dev logs or fork them Knowledge Base own and use it as pre-written notes before hopping into a platform that supports easy media sharing. From there it is easy to get into group flow state by drag n' dropping notes into the world and to contribute ideas back into the dev log.

Alternative: https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan## Anarchy Arcade

• See https://hackmd.io/@XR/hackfs#Mind-Palace

Can turn dev logs into node clusters, slideshow MSF objects, interactive screenshots, or export metadata
More:

• https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow
• https://github.com/jarun/nnn

into something else.

Generated Objects

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Mirror.xyz

• https://mirror.xyz/

Seems like a no brainer to start a proper blog. Dev logs are not by themselves finished and polished blog posts, they are better thought of as materials to produce such though.

Mirror recently added the ability to add subscriptions and people can collect NFTs of published posts.

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Archiving

Dev logs are currently hosted on HackMD which makes it easy to download all markdown documents you have on your account. In addition to downloading all your files (which I do regularly), it'd be good to have the means to completely self-host dev logs including associated media files also.

Gallery Creation

Required software

• Pureref
• Python3

1. Export HTML file from hackmd into a new folder for each dev log
2. Start a web server (python3 -m http.server 9000 in directory) or upload HTML to IPFS
3. Drag n' drop the URL into into pureref, right click and arrange images by addition
4. Delete the duplicates on bottom half
5. Add notes (Such as title / original publish date)
6. Save pureref with dev log as filename, export all images into folder, and scene (mainly jpg for speed, png for selections only since file size ends up huge with larger resolutions)

What other ways could you use transparent images arranged in pureref? You can copy and paste selections directly from pureref into Hubs, figma, or NeosVR for example.

We now have a pretty decent one pager of the dev log with most of the original images!

Scene exports as 3.66mb jpg

Note: The max width for a pureref scene export is 20,000 pixels

Static HTML gallery generator

• https://xrdevlog.com/gallery/
  • https://github.com/thumbsup/thumbsup
  • https://xrdevlog.com/gallery/dclflow.html

npm install -g thumbsup
thumbsup --input ./photos --output ./gallery

Slate.host

• https://slate.host/jin/the-grid
• https://github.com/filecoin-project/slate

Makes it easier to mint and backup since all files get IPFS hashed.

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Documentation using a DAO

• https://hackmd.io/@XR/web3-foss
• https://app.dework.xyz/webaverse

Currently testing methods to scale open source documentation teams with Webaverse MMO (Metaverse Makers Org):

• setup a new github org / dework
• forked select webaverse repos
• import issues into dework, adding bounties
• integrated coordinape (more on that later)
• designing badges as future rewards / airdrops

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Side scroller

I imported all the xrdevlog preview images into pureref to make a timeline that went from old to new which can be a way to storyboard.

We can texture atlas all these images and include them in a bigger work of art that acts as the environment background for a side scroller game.

See demo: https://smsithlord.com/jerec/

Can have the timeline at bottom and use this overworld for accessing an experience for every dev log.

Find public domain game dev / sprite art or generate using stable diffusion / midjourney / DALLE-2.

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NFTs

• https://opensea.io/collection/m3rcury-post
• https://m3org.com/nugz/
  • https://rarible.com/dankvr/sale
• https://hackmd.io/@xr/m3grants

Idea: Pull resources and inspiration from every dev log to create a NFT that represents the research ideas as a collectible object. Could perhaps even create a NFT from the HTML snapshot itself. Applying skeumorphism here would be good, such as a folder of lab notes or a book or perhaps expo booth.

NFT Ideas

• 3D cryptovoxels parcel snapshots for CV dev logs
• Home Spaces for hhomekit and clonex-pods
• Sprite sheets for avatarlod
• Cryptoart for Internet Archive

etc…

Collaboration

We could use the web based collaborative image editing software aggie.io to create pieces inspired by content from each dev log and turn that into NFTs.

We can drop into NeosVR or some other collaborative 3D environment and create a 3D equivalent of such by drag n' dropping content from the dev log or whatever might be related to it.

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Anarchy Arcade Nodes

Nodes are basically a cluster of metashortcut-files in Anarchy Arcade that you can create and spawn anywhere.

Any file or link can turn into a 3D interactive object, a cluster of these objects is a node. Half of xrdevlog has been converted into nodes.

Ecosystem map	Nodes	Spawning nodes

Sith is currently working on open sourcing a subset of arcade cabinets and adding cross-compatibility between Anarchy Arcade and a Playcanvas version.

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Expo

• https://m3-org.github.io/research/vket4.html
• https://hackmd.io/@XR/OM

Inspired by Virtual Market and seeing a screenshot of Phettas booth in OM, what if we converted OM by 6529 into an exhibition space for showcasing all the dev logs?

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M3taverse News

• https://my90stv.com/

We have virtual reality sets + OBS templates ready to

Countdown	Template 1	Template 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YbngNXQZD0&feature=youtu.be

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AI NPCs

Use Webaverse Story studio and lore files to train NPC AIs on open metaverse related dev logs. Each NPC can be a subject matter expert of a particular topic.

Media files will need to be translated into text (img2text is possible, being integrated into Webaverse also) for the AIs to properly understand. It'd be crazy to have AIs talk with each other, bouncing ideas, and come up with some breakthroughs while you are afk. One day…