Last week I celebrated the birthday of my blog with a party on WebVR hosted by Enea Le Fons. Lots of people told me that couldn’t participate for personal or technical reasons, so I’m writing this post to tell everyone how was my experience with it! Are you interested?
Morning party on UXR
In the morning (Italian time), there has been a yacht party in UXR, Enea’s full-secure and encrypted social VR environment running on the web. The scene featured a big yacht with various balloons, cakes and other cool things like that. Thanks to UXR’s ability to easily import online videos, Enea has been able to import some DJ set videos and put on some nice dance music.
The scene also featured various easter eggs, like a big statue under the boat, some floating aliens and also a faraway island that could be visited by flying, so that to relax a bit. You can try spotting all of them in the above video 🙂
The good
The experience was overly cool, because it really felt to me like having a big party on a very big boat. I’ve never been so rich to have a real yacht party, but thanks to VR I was able to feel like having one: there was the music, the balloons, the personal pool, and all the other details that made the party feel real. It was great!
The bad
The scene had maybe too many things to experience, so in the end, it weighted really a lot, like 100MB. Some friends tried joining me from China, but they couldn’t download it in an acceptable time.
Evening Party on Mozilla Hubs
To celebrate his friendship with Mozilla, Enea has decided to host the second part of the party on Mozilla Hubs, the WebVR social space by Mozilla (whose engine is also at the basis of UXR). To avoid the weight problems of the morning, he re-created the whole scene, this time over-simplifying all the environment (so, no more easter eggs) and compressing all the custom 3D models using Draco GLTF/GLB format.
Since he had to remove all the wonderful graphics of the yacht, he decided to give up on realism and to invest in the fun. He tried to give the party a crazy touch (VRChat-like crazy) and filled the boat of psychedelic stuff, dancing 3D models (like a Stormtrooper and Donald Trump) and other fun stuff of this kind.
The good
It was overly fun. My goal was to make some noise, and there was a lot of noise there: lots of animated images, of dancing animated models, video, music, etc… When some friends joined, everyone loved the mood of the party, everyone started dancing between Trump and the Stormtrooper… it was insane!
And since everyone could import images and 3D models by just using a link, we started all importing even more stuff in the environment, making everything even crazier. At a certain point, someone even added a fantastic Robo-DJ!
The bad
Half of the people had problems with the microphone, and couldn’t talk. We don’t know why: they tried the procedure lots of time, but the microphone refused to work.
When we all started importing too many models, the environment started becoming glitchy, and living it in VR was an extreme experience.
Considerations
From this experience, I learned once more how WebVR is cool. You can set up an environment, and let people from all over the world access it just by clicking on a link. I had people from Spain, UK, Brasil, China joining me, and no one had to install a single thing! They clicked a link and then they could join me from VR, or even from just a simple PC or smartphone.
Importing elements inside the scene is super-easy: you just take a link from Sketchfab, Google Poly or similar and you can import a 3D model into the room. Similar procedures let also you import images and video. Everyone in the scene can add new elements easily, and this adds fun to an experience like a party, but can also be incredibly useful for collaboration between people from all over the world inside WebVR meetings.
Anyway, it also confirmed me how WebVR is still a bit unripe. There have been various technical problems: someone wasn’t able to talk, some other people got rejected by the system, other people more couldn’t download the scene.
Whoever develops applications for the web knows this pain: there are too many configurations of the users, too many browsers to support, too different connection bandwidths and in the end, it is easy that there is something that doesn’t work for someone.
Speaking with Enea about this, he informed me that some of these problems will be fixed when the browsers will become WebXR 1.0 compatible: when browsers will adopt the standard, all the WebXR-compliant experiences should work better.
Suggestions if you want to make a WebXR event
Some suggestions if you want to organize something like this on Mozilla Hubs, UXR or similar environments:
- Create the room much earlier than the event;
- Don’t add too many elements in the scene: less is more. WebVR experiences may be shared with a simple link… but they have anyway to be downloaded to be rendered. And then also the rendering may become sloppy, if there are too many elements;
- Use compressed Draco GLTF/GLB format on the 3D models for better performances (thanks Messias of Mespper for this suggestion!);
- Try to access it from multiple browsers and multiple locations in the world (ask some friends to do that) and verify what are the problems that may arise;
- If you have the leads of the participants, suggest them via e-mail to pre-load the room before the event. Also, write to them what are the workarounds for the most common problems they may face;
- Prepare for the fact that something won’t work as expected 🙂
In the end
In the end it was fantastic, and I can’t wait to do that again! It was the coolest birthday party I ever had. I had a blog birthday party on a big yacht, with people from all over the world… I think that it is not something that happens every day 😉
I hope to see you all for the 4th birthday of my blog!!! Cheers!
P.S.
Hey, it is not over! If you want, you can still join my blog’s birthday party room below here!
Try typing the message “/fly” to navigate all the scene easily and have fun in WebVR!