Web Surfaces

[sirkitree]

IT'd be great to have web surfaces so you could browse websites and watch YouTube in NeosVR.

[Frooxius]

This is likely going to take some extensive work to implement, especially within the context of Neos. It has a pre-requisite of video streams for textures (which will take some doing as well), so it can be synced across the instanced, with one user doing the rendering.

[riftopia]

Nice suggestion! This is definitely a good feature to have along the road. Off topic, but priority wise, with the beta going public in a couple of days, the main thing to focus on at present imho is ease of use for first time users. Non-essential functionality can be introduced later. Questions such as: "What buttons do I use, how do I get my own avatar? What can I do? Why should I spend my time in this app compared to the others out there?" and the answers to them need to be crystal clear in order for the app to gain traction. One way of gaining traction once the most important issues have been solved would be to do an interview with Kent Bye of the voices of vr podcast (http://voicesofvr.com/). A lot of other social VR platforms were (repeatedly) featured on the podcast, including Alt, Bigscreen and VR Chat.

[Frooxius]

@riftopia Oh yeah, I'm not going to work on this now. I've got a few more things I want to do for the open beta, should have basic intro tutorial finished today and few more fixes. Gonna do a tutorial on building an avatar as well.

And I've sent Kent Bye a message and key! He would like to do a live stream of Neos actually! :D Scott Hayden at Road To VR said he's working on "Hands on" article as well, so I'm pretty excited (but also terrified) for these.

[riftopia]

Good to know you have publicity opportunities coming up! Your app has a range of unique features, further development will make them shine. RtVR will understand this imo.

[Karel64]

Also known as a Web Browser

Will allow users to browse websites and use browser based software for video conferencing (Google Hangouts, Jitsi,...), office software (Office 365, LibreOffice Online,...) and much more.

Prerequisite: Video Encoder https://github.com/Frooxius/NeosPublic/issues/142

[BassOnToast]

Has CefSharp been considered for this? "CefSharp is an easy way to embed a full-featured standards-compliant web browser into your C# or VB.NET app.", and is "based on Chromium Embedded Framework, the open source version of Google Chrome"

This is also free and open source.

I've heard the core of Neos is written in C# but don't know for certain if this would be compatible. Just an idea if it helps.

https://cefsharp.github.io/ https://github.com/cefsharp/CefSharp/

[Frooxius]

It's one of the solutions we are considering, but this feature is not currently a priority, so we haven't investigated what would be best fit for Neos yet.

This feature would likely need video streaming a pre-requisite so the visual can be synced to other users as well.

[jam10o-new]

when this gets some eyes or interest again, I'd love consideration for private/local web surfaces, and some logix nodes or tools to introspect the state of the web surface. would immediately give us more tools for ingame logic (via js and wasm in the web page) and significantly lower the learning curve for building rich experiences in Neos as well (any webdev could build useful local UI components for Neos, or use a websurface as the core of their world's logix, simplifying it significantly).

based on the discussion here it actually sounds like private surfaces would be easier to implement (doesn't need to be streamed to others) and if the public visibility of the surface is one of the blockers for considering this, my two cents are that the majority of the usecases I'm thinking about using this for actually benefit from not being public at all 😅

[sirkitree]

This one keeps coming up in my client work. Is there anything we could do to make this feature a priority?