Could big tech please stop ruining enthusiast things

Back in the day, independent social media enthusiasts were building their own social spaces on RSS/Atom and self-hosted publishing. There was a huge ecosystem of feed readers and publishing software, where anyone could use their own choice of tools to interact with the space, and it was super cool.

Then Google got into it and made Google Reader, which was a really good feed reader, but they couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable and wanted to shove everyone over to Google+, so they shut Google Reader down, and then the tech press breathlessly claimed that RSS was now dead as a result, and because RSS was (in their eyes) dead, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nowadays, RSS is seen as an obsolete thing only used by diehards, and corporate social media has become the norm, with a relatively tiny faction of people settling on ActivityPub instead, despite it being a poor match for the kinds of things that people used RSS for.

Read more…

Steam Frame rambling

Amazingly enough, Valve have finally at least made an announcement breaking the “curse of three,” and their third1 VR headset is actually materializing soon™.

Anyway. Aside from the lack of pricing I’m super optimistic about the Steam Frame. It doesn’t yet hit quite all the marks for me but it’s super close and actually does a lot of stuff that I’d been wanting to see in a headset.

Read more…

VR hand tracking update

Since my last post about this I have obtained a Leap Motion 1 and have experimented with it a whole bunch, and unfortunately, it’s just not quite there for what I need out of it.

Read more…

Bigscreen Beyond day 2

I wasn’t planning on getting into VR tonight but I ended up doing it anyway.

The Bigscreen folks suggested washing the facial interface gasket with soapy water, and that seems to have fixed the skin irritation. So there must have just been some residue left over.

I also printed a Vive DAS adapter so now I have a much easier time putting the headset on and setting up the audio and so on. It ends up not sitting on my head quite right, though, and adjusting the fit to my eyes is a little more fiddly. Unfortunately the design of the BSB doesn’t make it easy to put on a top support strap (the DAS adapter has a little dealybop for the DAS’s top strap but I couldn’t get it to stay attached with double-sided tape and I’m not yet willing to use permanent adhesive) so my choices are either off-axis lenses or having it so tight it gives me a headache.

I also ended up removing the lens inserts for now, and I’ll wait for the QC-passing ones to arrive.

Everything is just so sharp now. I like it.

Bigscreen Beyond

My Bigscreen Beyond arrived today, right before I had to leave for choir practice. So of course as soon as I got home I set it up and tried it out. This is a quick first-impressions review.

Read more…

SlimeVR

Today my SlimeVR trackers finally arrived, after about a year and a half of waiting. I bought the 7+3 kit. I’ve got them set up pretty well, I think. Here’s some observations.

Read more…

Matrix Third Room

Back when the VRChat debacle took place, I’d rambled quite a lot about the idea of a standards-based truly-distributed VR system. I probably mentioned how back in the day I was designing something like that, and was intending to use XMPP as the actual transport mechanism; in my more recent reevaluation of the idea I was thinking that using WebRTC to stream the actual realtime data (voice, character animation, etc.) would be the way forward.

Well, the Matrix folks just announced Third Room, which is the same basic concept, running on Matrix and WebRTC! They’ve also made a bunch of other great technology choices along the way.

This is pretty exciting and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. At least from a 20,000-foot view it hits all of the right notes for me. For example, using glTF for all object interchange, focusing on in-world editing, and allowing for (apparently optional) world persistence.

Hopefully this can disrupt the stranglehold VRChat has on social VR and will also be a fun, compelling experience in its own right.

A virtually good time

On Sunday I finally broke down and bought a Meta Quest 2. I’m not thrilled with having a Facebook-controlled device strapped to my face, but it’s a pretty decent bit of hardware and is an all-in-one setup that is way cheaper than most headsets, and doesn’t require me to upgrade my PC GPU (which is still a bit too expensive). And on the plus side it can also be used as a tethered headset, when I’m ready to finally upgrade my GPU.

Anyway, with all that out of the way, I’m having a lot of fun. VRChat is a fun experience, at least if you ignore most of the awful people in public spaces. (I’m fluffycritter there if anyone wants to friend me and hang out in non-public spaces.) And I’m thoroughly enjoying Beat Saber as well. It’s a heck of a fun workout, and even though I’ve only been playing for a couple days I’m already holding my own in online play. But then again, I’ve always had an affinity for rhythm games.

Read more…