Immersive Web Weekly

Issue #043, March 23, 2021, ImmersiveWebWeekly.com

The XR cup overflowed this week with hours of new experiences ranging from a visit to an inspirational artificial life simulation, through a rocking session of synthwave AR, and then ending with a game that is most certainly not Tetris. Combine that fun with a flock of new educational works and code releases and it's truly a strong showing for our community.
Ship your gear, trim the mainsail, and batten down the hatches because it's time for another issue of the Immersive Web Weekly!

- Trevor Flowers from Transmutable

Boids! In! Space!

The original Boids was an early simulation of emergent flocking behavior and is often cited as an inspiration by modern digital creators. This new version brings the simulation into XR and also provides an open sample for interested coders.

Regine Gilbert on XR Accessibility

In this podcast Regine Gilbert of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering talks about XR and her "unshakable belief in opening up the world in an effort to widen communities and reconcile connection".

Adaptive Bitrate Streams Flow into 8th Wall

Arcturus HoloStream is a "capture agnostic" solution for volumetric video that is now integrated into the ever-growing suite of immersive web solutions from 8th Wall.

volumetric video 8thwall.com 8th Wall

XREngine is (Not Surprisingly) An Engine For XR

XREngine from Laguna Labs bills itself as "a social MMO engine for everyone with a fully-feature client, API server, real-time game server, game engine and dev-ops for scalable deployment". They've released the source code under an open license and are looking for funding through OpenCollective.

The Panopticon Parent

It can get a little weird when you're a life-logging parent who co-founded Flow Immersive.

Hydac and Plattar

Australian industrial hydraulics company Hydac partnered with Plattar to allow potential customers (and people who just like big machines) to experience digital twins of their massive machines.

huge machines sales hydac.com.au Hydac

"Axel F", But Anywhere

Google's new AR Synth experiment empowers you to live out your 80s synthpop dreams anywhere in spacetime.

synthesizers reality.news Google

Ayşegül's Big Book of WebXR

Our very own community group co-chair, Ayşegül, has a growing collection of helpful documents and videos about developing with WebXR.

U of M Prof teaches WebXR

In addition to the usual engines like Unreal and Unity, this Coursera course teaches students to build projects on the immersive web. The course is a part of a three part series named Extended Reality for Everybody.

Demo Project is Aware of Reality

This new repo from José Ferrão (aka Ten Tone) brings together many disparate aspects of building an immersive web experience that is aware of the environment: occlusion, lighting, shadows, and physics. A quick demo video is available, too.

WebXR Splashes Down in Milano Digital Week

Milano Digital Week writes:

Mariposa is an immersive storytelling experience, accessible through different devices and modalities: from desktop to smartphone, in Virtual or Augmented Reality.
In Naples and In Mexico - our two motherlands - mariposa means butterfly, a metaphor for the little things that can cause hurricanes.
Our Mariposa will take you to an interactive virtual showroom to confront you with a choice. What lies behind an ordinary consumer good like a coffee?

It's "Blocks Arcade" and Not "Tetris", OK?

If you're a fan of fitting falling blocks into patterns then Blocks Arcade might be for you. The code is also available under a permissive open license should you want to swap out the block assets for, say, strangely shaped cats.