German Officials Investigate Quest Accounts
The Oculus Quest 2 requires a Facebook account to work, something widely criticized by reviewers and VR fans. Germany's competition authority now says that requirement could be an abuse of Facebook's dominant market position.
Facebook previously stopped sales of the Quest 2 in Germany because of regulations that prevent merging data from its otherwise separate services.
TAG Reviews WebXR Layers and Hand Input
Last week the W3C's Technical Architecture Group met and reviewed two proposed extensions to WebXR: Layers and Hand input. Feedback has been generally positive and I'm hopeful that both proposals will be completed and approved in early 2021.
ART+TECH Festival
The 10th annual ART+TECH Festival happens this week with multiple sessions on the topic of the immersive web, including "Creating VR Music Videos" and "Async Art Cryptovoxels Tour" (covered in issue 12). The event also provides several online art galleries and events. An events pass is $35 and an all-access pass that includes the workshops is $199.
A New Polygonal Editor
Last week's announcement that Google Poly is decimated* prompted at least one web creator to build a similar editor using WebXR. In this tweet, Danny Yaroslavski gave us a look at the new Nearfiction XR editor which is still in development but already provides file export for local persistence of your work.
* That is the last time I use that joke, I promise.
Immersive Hopalong Orbits Visualizer
Prolific creator Ricardo Cabello (aka Mrdoob) announced this week that the Hopalong Orbits Visualizer (long a favorite Three.js demo) is now in WebXR for a relaxing distraction from world events. For the curious, this is a Glitch project so it's easy to take a look behind the scenes.