immersive-web / navigation

Repository for the discussion and research in to navigating from page to page whilst staying in immersive mode. Feature leads: Rik Cabanier and Brandon Jones
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Rapid consolidation of market share and advancement of closed "metaverses" in contrast to slow deployment of metaverse-enabling features for the open web. #14

Open runvnc opened 1 year ago

runvnc commented 1 year ago

I apologize if this seems critical or non-constructive. And I know that standardization is very challenging, especially with regards to safeguarding users and knowing that standards can't be undone once they are used. But I feel like there is a lack of urgency for getting some of these most key features into the hands of users and developers via open browser tooling. And somehow I suspect that a conflict of interest with companies sponsoring browser development can contribute to this. Whether that has any basis in reality or executive priorities or not, closed "metaverses" continue to consolidate marketshare and rapidly advance their featuresets.

It is a safe bet that pretty soon (maybe tomorrow/later today?), Meta will start to push features that allow for users to share their home space by inviting their friends' avatars into a multiplayer session inside of their shared space. They will encourage users to adopt this and developers to build around this type of functionality. EDIT: sorry, somehow I missed it: they already started rolling this out more than a month ago.

The more that these types of efforts by Meta and other companies advance without equivalent enabling features being available for open systems, the further behind the open metaverse (which I consider web browsers to be the best option in the near future for this) falls. The ability to follow a link directly into another VR space such as on a friend's "web page" could be a first step towards sharing spaces. It could be combined with other APIs like WebSockets or WebRTC to allow for seamless transition into multiuser sessions. For example.

Thank you so much for all of your work advancing this feature and features like it.