Earlier this month, the Hubs team spent a week working on an internal hackathon. We figured that the start of a new year is a great time to get our roadmap in order, do some investigations about possible new features to explore this year, and bring in some fresh perspectives on what we could accomplish. Plus, we figured that it wouldn’t hurt to have a little fun doing it! Our first hack week was a huge success, and today we’re sharing what we worked on this month so you can get a “behind the scenes” peek at what it’s like to work on Hubs. Try on a new look As part of our work on Hubs, we thi ..read more

An updated look & feel for Hubs, with an all-new user interface, is now live. Just over two years ago, we introduced a preview release of Hubs. Our hope was to bring people together to create, socialize and collaborate around the world in a new and fun way. Since then, we’ve watched our community grow and use Hubs in ways we could only imagine. We’ve seen students use Hubs to celebrate their graduations last May, educational organizations use Hubs to help educators adapt to this new world we’re in, and heck, even NASA has used Hubs to feature new ways of working. In today’s world where we ..read more

The latest version of Firefox Reality for standalone VR headsets brings a host of long-awaited features we're excited to reveal, as well as improved stability and performance. Add-on support Firefox Reality is the first and only browser to bring add-on support to the immersive web. Now you can download powerful extensions that help you take control of your VR browsing experience. We started with favorites like uBlock, Dark Reader, and Privacy Badger. Autofill Ever get tired of typing your passwords in the browser? This can be tedious, especially using VR headset controllers. Now, your browser ..read more

Mozilla and the Hubs team takes internet security seriously. We do our best to follow best practices for web security and securing data. This post will provide an overview of how we secure access to your rooms and your data. Room Authentication In the most basic scenario, only people who know the URL of your room can access your room. We use randomly generated strings in the URLs to obfuscate the URLs. If you need more security in your room, then you can limit your room to only allow users with Hubs accounts to join (usually, anyone can join regardless of account status). This is a server-wid ..read more

At Mozilla, we believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet. We especially believe that this is the case in social VR platforms, which process and transmit large amounts of personal information. What happens in Hubs should stay in Hubs. Privacy expectations in a Hubs room First, let’s discuss what your privacy expectations should be when you’re in a Hubs room. In general, anything transmitted in a room is available to everyone connected to that room. They can save anything that you send. This is why it’s so important to only give the Hubs link out to people you want to be in the ..read more

Amidst the pandemic, our research team from Mozilla and The Extended Mind performed user testing research entirely in a remote 3D virtual space where participants had to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). This research aimed to test security concepts that could help users feel safe traversing links in the immersive web, the results of which are forthcoming in 2021. By utilizing a virtual space, we were able to get more intimate knowledge of how users would interact with these security concepts because they were immersed in a 3D environment. The purpose of this article is to persuade you that Hubs ..read more

The wider XR community has long supported the Mozilla Mixed Reality team, and we look forward to that continuing as the team restructures itself in the face of recent changes at Mozilla. Charting the future with Hubs Going forward we will be focusing much of our efforts on Hubs. Over the last few months we have been humbled and inspired by the thousands of community organizers, artists, event planners and educators who’ve joined the Hubs community. We are increasing our investment in this project, and Hubs is excited to welcome several new members from the Firefox Reality team. We are enthusi ..read more

We just released ECSY v0.4 and ECSY-THREE v0.1! Since the initial release of ECSY we have been focusing on API stability and bug fixing as well as providing some features (such as components’ schemas) to improve the developer experience and provide better validation and descriptive errors when working in development mode. The API layer hasn't changed that much since its original release but we introduced some new concepts: Components schemas: Components are now required to have a schema (Unless you are defining a TagComponent). Defining a component schema is really simple, you just need to de ..read more

Have you ever played a VR game and needed a tip for beating the game... but you didn’t want to take off your headset to find that solution? Or, have you wanted to watch videos while you played your game? Or, how about wanting to immerse yourself in a 360 video on Youtube? Released today, Firefox Reality PC Preview enables you to do these things and more. This is the newest addition to the Firefox Reality family of products. Built upon the latest version of the well-known and trusted Firefox browser, Firefox Reality PC Preview works with tethered headsets as well as wireless headsets streaming ..read more

Unity's development tools and engine are far and away the most common way to build applications for VR and AR today. Previously, we've made it possible to export web-based experiences from Unity. Today, we're excited to show some early work addressing the other way that Unity developers want to use the web: as a component in their Unity-based virtual environments. Building on our work porting a browser engine to many platforms and embedding scenarios, including as Firefox Reality AR for HoloLens 2, we have built a new Unity component based on Servo, a modern web engine written in the Rust lan ..read more