I’m beginning to think about an idea, and would like some feedback from the community (also, what’s up @RaananW ). I am part of a lot of webxr discords, and I feel like I’m not seeing as much babylonjs usage as I would like. I’m deeply impressed by cryptovoxels, and I think we should have a lot more stuff like that, and also a lot more “artist demos” that reach beyond this forum.
I’m wondering if this idea would be helpful in this regard: (1.) what if I made a bunch of glitch.com examples (VR, very basic) to demonstrate a lot of basic concepts (but again, in vr), and then (2.) maybe did a weekly (or every other week) online two hour hackathon, where people could fork them and do something with them (maybe it should be recorded and/or be a youtube thing, idk-- I’m not the most public person on the planet).
But, I’m trying to learn more VR babylon stuff every day, and I want to build more capacity for it, and I want to bring more artists into it (artists, game designers, hybrids, etc.). Again, I’ve never done anything like this before (though I have done a ton of just “pure arts organizing”); so, comments, thoughts, feedback, offers to help, whatever, is appreciated.
It would be amazing. I am sadly caught up with different things (that are not WebXR…) so I don’t have too much time creating demos. But if you have the time and want to develop a showcase, I promise I won’t stop you
I guess a good place to start would be here in the forum. Maybe in the job offering section. I know @jelster had some experience with asking good people to help him with an open source project (and, and AFAIK it is working very well :-).
Yeah, I am missing these to. It would be amazing to have a few of them. Sadly most of the demos in official webxr repositories are Three.js-based which makes three.js the starting point for every XR beginner.
@saitogroup
What other WebXR discords are out there besides m2’s? I’m trying to be active in the Babylon channel of the WebGL/WebGPU discord but I didn’t notice the Babylon channel in the WebXR discord until now. Here it is for anyone interested: https://discord.gg/KcFFgDTtRt
Obviously having more demos would help but it is a chicken and egg problem. To fix the “egg” side of things you can try being more active in game dev/XR dev communities and keep an eye out for developers asking for engine recommendations. You could also look for developers having trouble with their current engine and suggest Babylon as the solution to their woes.
Another not so obvious route is to join non-development VR/XR communities and try to convert consumers into becoming developers. It might be easier to convince VR enthusiasts to learn development than it is to convince developers to buy a VR headset. Sometimes a popular game being taken offline can cause this kind of conversion on a mass scale (google “Paragon remakes” for an example).
I am looking for a project to start exploring Babylon with and a WebXR demo could be interesting. My current plan is to make a multiplayer 3d chatroom and I might try adding WebXR support if it’s easy enough. I don’t own a VR headset though so I wouldn’t be able to test and verify that it doesn’t make people sick.
So, I already started, lol., by paring down one of your examples. (https://babylonjsvr1-scene.glitch.me). I guess I’ll just start posting regular updates about where I get with this… I have a multiplayer VR example where all players can see all players’ positions… I guess I should do that one too. Very aframe.
m2s links to a ton of others, but they are more niche. that’s a great discord, eh?
I think yeah I’m going to make a glitch collection of (a.) simple vr demos and (b.) dope shit, in the hopes of bringing more people in these communities into babylon
there’s a chrome extension you can use webxr mozilla extension so you can emulate a headset
I love you’re doing this! I think if the goal is developer and user ‘evangelism’, something I’m doing in my project is to include a prominent “powered by babylonjs” signage. The BJS team makes their branding toolkit available for use so you can stea- I mean borrow them freely
Keeping up talking about it is the first step, the second is to back the talk up with actions. It sure sounds like you’ve got the right direction and idea here, I’d say patience is another key, but you need to proactively make it easy for people to contribute. I’m still working on that myself
Ed: fwiw, while the project I referenced above isn’t a VR-first thing, I do fully intend on supporting and showing off WebXR with BJS!
So, I made two VR demos already. I’ve also made an outline of some others that I would like. I think I’m going to bundle them in a glitch “collection” and continually advertise them here, in the socials, and on the discords, as new demos come in. I guess eventually I should make a github page for it?
Do you have any thoughts about getting others involved. My thinking is that when cool demos come in here on the forum, I just want to VRify them. Like, did you make a cool shiny weird ball, we’re putting it in VR! Maybe get a little bit of help that way.
Glitch ← here are the first two sketches in the starter pack; working on the second more today; will eventually post this elsewhere, but just wanted to put this down.
My only real ask of you is that if you find something that is not working as expected, or could work better/easier, please don’t forget to let me know!
Oh, also, do you think this idea is logical: if I started a meetup.com group “babylonjs vr weekly hackathon” and I made it worldwide (like, anyone could participate) and I gave people these basic examples, coached them a little bit, and got people making things; is that a logical path forward?
Actually, I do not really know what a “hackathon” means (I am too old). Looking at those pre-meeting notes, at getting an OBJ from sketchFab, I do not think its for me. (I will use .babylon format for testing, but really use computer generated BABYLON.Mesh sub-classses from Blender with in-line geometry). I have no interest in anything to do with OBJ, or GLB for that matter.
I think it might be important give some hints about what a good model candidate might be though, like low poly. When people are making things for publishing, they have a tendency to make it “really” good by smoothing things such that you would need a microscope to pick out the triangles, and the poly count goes into the millions.
The other thing might be to get something meter scaled, thought that might be tough to know in advance. Random stuff might have a dimension of 300. In Xr, that is the size of an aircraft carrier. It is not that big a deal to scale it, but you should be ready to tell people that is the first thing they should check, or something might be so big that they are inside it.
