etherpad for hubs

[blairmacintyre]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. collaborative text content in often needed in social VR, for many sorts of gatherings. But, arbitrary web pages or native apps can't be embedded and shared

Describe the solution you'd like Etherpad (https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite) could serve as the basis for a native hubs tool. Since it's simple and open source, and already synchronizes across users, if a webgl-based rendering front end could be written, we could have collaborative editors embedded in hubs, that could be accessed before/after gatherings

Describe alternatives you've considered Screen sharing and working in separate windows

Additional context This came to mind because Mozilla has an internally hosted instance of etherpad. We wouldn't use that, most likely, and it's unclear what the right hosting approach is, but one could even imagine a hubs specific pad instance that erases content when rooms are destroyed, etc.

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[misslivirose]

Good example of something that should be able to be created with extensibility work. If we are to take this on today to support a specific conferencing scenario, we could think about this as a collaborative artifact from the text. Need to research if we can interface with etherpad or similar service.

Does the input have to be directly in the viewing window for this scenario to be addressed?

[blairmacintyre]

I think it’s useful without text input in-world. The key is “notes without screen sharing”. Especially if clicking on the etherpad view fires off a link-follow to open etherpad in another window.

The thing that would be nice for in world editing would be a pen-based drawing pad that has a good web app that leveraged the pen API on iPad/windows pen. Something that stores the history and let’s it be exported/saved later (not saying write that service, but if one exists, build a webgl interface for it).

[gfodor]

This might be tangential, but it seems the web has largely abandoned having any public etherpad instances, and the code for etherpad is 5+ years old. I'm worried that this would be the wrong choice of tech to consider for this use-case, unless the solution is more generic. Are there still etherpad servers in widespread use?

[blairmacintyre]

Dunno. We just set up a new one at Mozilla, which is what prompted this original post.

Any cloud-based open source document system (so we can create a webgl front end) would be ok ... something that can do more would be even better

[gfodor]

Ah yeah I saw the Mozilla one, but it's not public -- since we can't OAuth from within hubs, we wouldn't be able to use that.