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Mozilla Project Working on Immersive Displays (Video)
Yes, it's 3-D, and works with the Firefox browser. But that's not all. The MozVR virtual reality system is not just for Firefox, and it can incorporate infrared and other sensors to give a more complete picture than can be derived from visible light alone. In theory, the user's (client) computer needs no special hardware beyond a decent GPU and an Oculus Rift headset. Everything else lives on a server.
Is this the future of consumer displays? Even if not, the development is fun to watch, which you can start doing at mozvr.com -- and if you're serious about learning about this project you may want to read our interview transcript in addition to watching the video, because the transcript contains additional information.
Is this the future of consumer displays? Even if not, the development is fun to watch, which you can start doing at mozvr.com -- and if you're serious about learning about this project you may want to read our interview transcript in addition to watching the video, because the transcript contains additional information.
Mozilla seems to spend a lot of effort on things that have nothing to do with fixing their increasingly bad browser....
VRML is dead! Long live VRML!!
OK, ok, I know that's not what it's about, but a man can dream...
Hot damn! Does this mean that Firefox is finally getting a new UI? The current one is so last week.
VRML LIVES
But can you making a fucking browser that isn't bloated and runs faster than Chrome?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Ad shows 100% of time. But there is an audio track of a guy (apparently Indian).
Sorry, not against ads, but I'd like to see the images, too... and, yes, I'm using Firefox. :-\
Sorry, son, you're the one who's full of shit in this matter.
Firefox's share of the market is plummeting because people are unhappy with it. It's likely under 10% at this point, across all platforms. IE 11 and Safari for iOS each almost have more users than Firefox does in total. Chrome for Android has far more. Even Opera Mini almost has as many users as Firefox does!
Fuck, even Mozilla's own Firefox satisfaction numbers show that its users don't like it. Over 80% of Firefox users are unhappy with it! That's an unbelievably bad rating, regardless of product and industry. Even the most despised politicians rarely see such poor satisfaction levels.
It's your kind of attitude that's directly responsible for what's happening to Firefox. Firefox's few remaining users are very clearly saying that there are some severe problems. Yet instead of doing the sensible thing and listening to these users and considering what they're saying, we have people like you who just deny that there are any problems.
While you and other Firefox advocates are spewing out denial, these long-standing bugs, performance issues, and idiotic changes remain unfixed. Each day some more of Firefox's remaining users will finally give up, and move to some other browser. Since no new users are bothering to use Firefox due to these problems, Firefox's market share dwindles.
Eventually it will get to the point that there are so few Firefox users that nobody will care what Mozilla thinks. After all, Mozilla's revenue and influence are only possible due to the size of its user base. But when Firefox has next to no users, nobody will do lucrative Firefox search deals with Mozilla, depriving them of their funding. Nobody involved with the standardization of web technologies will listen to them. Mozilla will go from being a respected, innovative organization to a totally irrelevant organization.
Personally, I don't want to see that happen. But thanks to people like you, and a complete lack of sensible action from Mozilla, I fear we're seeing the decline of Firefox and Mozilla getting closer every single day.
Call me an old onion-belt but I just don't get it. How is waving my hands around like an idiot in front of my computer... how is that immersive? VR, I understand. A wearable display, that's immersive because I'm not looking at everything else in the room. Hand tracking, that's immersive because it replaces typing with more natural movement. But none of that works without a full VR system. Put hand tracking on a normal laptop or desktop and you have yet another input device doomed to failure because it does the same thing with more effort.
This is just a huge stinking pile of feeping creaturitus,
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I just downloaded Nightly and the VR addon.
Hooked up my DK2 and the Leap Motion sensor.
It crashed mozilla instantly. Every single time. I tried everything and all it does is crashing.
All on W8.1 x64.
Please don't announce things like they work if they fucking don't.
We may be getting to the point where Mozilla, as an organization, is suffering from death throes.
As an organization, maybe they know that Firefox, their only successful product, is on its way out. It's being rejected by the market. The changes Mozilla has made to it over the past several years have been near-universally despised, and their competitors have been getting better and better. Nobody wants to use Firefox when they can get a much better experience by using Chrome, Safari, and even modern versions of IE.
Maybe they also know that none of their other efforts have seen much success. Firefox OS is a total failure. Thunderbird has pretty much been abandoned. Firefox for Android and Persona have been ignored. Rust took forever to get a 1.0 release out, and we're already seeing the hype surrounding it pretty much die off completely, now that people realize it isn't all that useful and that C++ is still a better choice. Servo is a toy, at best. Bugzilla is a relic. Let's Encrypt keeps getting delayed, from "Summer 2015" to "Mid-2015" to "September 2015" to "Q4 2015" as of today.
Then there are the political shenanigans, like how they ganged up on Brendan Eich. Nobody should have to lose his job, voluntarily or involuntarily, and regardless of his sexual orientation, merely because of his beliefs regarding marriage. I don't know what came of it, but I also remember hearing about some executive there getting worked up about some comments that were posted at reddit from an alleged Mozilla employee.
So amid this uncertainty, we see organizational flailing. We see them grasping here and there, trying to remain relevant. Yet this clearly isn't working, because of the lack of focus, and because all of this flailing totally ignores what current and potential users actually want and need.
I think it would be a shame if Mozilla became irrelevant like, say, Netscape did. But then again, maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. Maybe it would allow them the rebirth they need. A return to their earlier days, when they produced actually-usable versions of Firefox, instead of spinning their wheels endlessly like they seem to be doing these days.
Fix the damn fucking browser first, before doing any pet projects.
"...the user's (client) computer needs no special hardware beyond a decent GPU and an Oculus Rift headset."
So in other words the client computer requires no special hardware, except the special hardware.
This statement might sound a bit less ridiculous if it worked with Google Cardboard...
https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/
Seriously.
If Mozilla wants to do other projects, GREAT.
But stop trying to fold in every half-assed pseudo-plugin into the browser! Allow people the ability to install AT WILL, rather than forcing people to fuck around with your buggy, unstable alpha code!
This is why Mozilla was born in the first place! Bloat in Netscape!
And, while you're at it, get someone developing Mozilla who actually BELIEVES in developing Mozilla. Not re-jiggering Mozilla to look and act like Chrome because you've got a hard-on for Chrome and want to fondle the Google cock.
Because the current leadership at Mozilla has exactly ZERO interest in continued development and bugfixing of their flagship product.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I can't watch this video in Firefox.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
If there ever was a time for the return of the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag, this is it.
Thunderbird is still the best email reader by far. I have many gigabytes of email in 10+ accounts all easily and quickly available on all machines. The editing experience, especially inline threaded replies, is the best. Outlook is a joke here.
And, at least for a power user, Firefox is still the best browser. I commonly have hundreds of tabs open, up to 700+. Only Firefox handles that gracefully, remembers all of them with all of their history, and, at least after a restart, uses a reasonable amount of memory. And with Nightly, now it's multithreaded which is starting to get interesting.
On desktop, Firefox has about equal share to IE and just under half of Chrome. Not terrible. Hopefully they will take IE's share. ;-)
Stephen D. Williams