Category: open web

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Decentralizing Identity in VR with Holonet & Self-Sovereign Identity

alberto-eliasHolonet is an open source project that implements the Decentralized Identity Specifications for open web VR platforms like WebXR. A self-sovereign identity system could enable the seamless portability of your avatar identity across multiple sites without having to use centralized authentication methods that would require you to login to every site with a unique username and password, or have to re-upload assets onto every metaverse world that you visit. The Decentralized Identity Foundation formed in May 2017 with a number of blockchain companies and bigger companies like Microsoft who got together to open source their blockchain identity IP in order to create a number of decentralized identity open standards.

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Investor Chris Dixon recently published an essay titled Why Decentralization Matters where he argues that some of the most exciting entrepreneurial & development opportunities are in building out a robust decentralized Internet architecture that leverages the blockchain technologies and cryptonetworks. These decentralized systems are a counter balance to the aggregated power of centralized companies like Google & Facebook, who are currently dominating the the online advertising market. Dixon argues that these companies initially collaborated with third-party developers to grow their ecosystem, but they all eventually started to focus more on “extracting data from users and competing with complements over audiences and profits.” In order to drive their advertising-based revenue models, Google and Facebook have pioneered methods of “surveillance capitalism” that tracks information about what users do online to form unified profiles to model behaviors and ultimately match advertisers with potential customers.

VR & AR technologies will provide the opportunity to have access to even more powerful biometric, emotional, embodied movement, and eventually eye tracking data, which has an unknown ethical threshold between what is predicting or controlling user behavior. Be sure to check out Voices of VR episode #520 for a more comprehensive write-up, discussion, and links to other episodes covering the complicated privacy issues that VR and AR introduces.

Holonet developer Elias hopes that one antidote to companies tracking your every movement and action in virtual worlds is build compelling user experiences that leverage decentralized identity technologies to put the control of your identity and data back into your own hands. He’s released a sparse toolkit to start to integrate self-sovereign identity tools within WebVR sites on the open web, and he’s planning on working on integrations with the popular A-Frame WebVR framework.

It’s still early days for where the open immersive web is headed, but High Fidelity is probably the most robust example of what’s possible with open web technologies. Co-founder Philip Rosedale told me that they’re planning on implementing a self-sovereign identity system, and High Fidelity also recently launched a beta of their own High Fidelity Coin cryptocurrency. Elias hopes that Holonet can provides tools for open web developers to create compelling user experiences that leverage the power of the open web with a decentralized user identity. There’s not a lot of compelling experiences just yet, but if Dixon is right, then we’re going to be seeing a lot more decentralized cryptonetworks in the future, and infrastructure tools like self-sovereign identity are going to be crucial ingredient for an open and portable metaverse that’s architected for privacy.

Other decentralized services mentioned in the podcast:

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How Mozilla is Driving WebVR Content & Tooling with the A-Frame Framework

Mozilla’s mission statement is to ensure that the Internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all, and they’ve been helping to bring VR to the web for the past three years. A-Frame is an open source framework for creating WebVR content that has gained a lot of momentum over the last year with more participants on the A-Frame Slack channel than the official WebVR Slack.

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Diego Marcos

I had a chance to catch up with A-Frame core developers Diego Marcos & Kevin Ngo at the IEEE VR conference in March to get an overview of A-Frame, and how it’s driving WebVR content and innovations in developer tools. Mozilla is also planning on shipping WebVR 1.1 capabilities in the desktop version of Firefox 55, which should be launching later this year in August.

Kevin Ngo

Mozilla believes in open source and the open web, and they have a vibrant and very supportive community on the A-Frame Slack that is very helpful in answering questions. Ngo has been curating the weekly highlights from the A-Frame community for over a year now posting the latest experiences, components, tools, and events in his Week in A-Frame series on the A-Frame blog, which has helped to grow the A-Frame community

A-Frame uses a entity-competent model that’s very similar to Unity’s model where you spatially position 3D components within a scene, and then you add behaviors and scripts that drive the interactive behavior. There’s a visual editor to move objects around in a scene, and a VR-editor is on the roadmap to be able to put together WebVR scenes in A-Frame while being in VR. There’s an open source collection of components that is being officially curated and tested in the A-Frame registry, but there’s also various collections of interesting components on GitHub repositories such as these Awesome A-Frame components or this KFrame collection of components and scenes. collection of components and scenes.

Google even announced at Google I/O that they’re using A-Frame in order to rapidly prototype Google Expeditions experiences. WebVR and A-Frame is a perfect combination to serve Google’s mission of trying to organize all of the information in the world. The strength of the open web is that you’re able to mash-up data from many different sources, and so there are going to be a lot of educational and immersive experiences focusing on mental presence built on top of WebVR technologies.

In my interview with WebVR spec author Brandon Jones, he expressed caution of launching the Google Chrome browser with the existing WebVR 1.1 spec because there were a lot of breaking changes that will need to be made in the latest “2.0” version order to make the immersive web more compatible for both virtual reality and augmented reality. Because Chrome is on over 2 billion devices, Jones said that they didn’t want to have to manage this interim technical debt and would prefer launching a version that’s going to provide a solid future for the immersive web.

Some WebVR developers like Mozilla’s Marcos and Ngo argue that not shipping WebVR capabilities in a default mainstream browser has hindered adoption and innovation for both content and tooling for WebVR. That’s why Mozilla is pushing forward with shipping WebVR capabilities in Firefox 55, which should be launching on the PC desktop in August.

Part of why Mozilla can afford to push harder for earlier adoption of the WebVR spec is because the A-Frame framework will take care of the nuanced differences between the established 1.1 version of the WebVR spec and the emerging “2.0” version. Because A-Frame is not an open standard, they can also move faster in rapidly prototyping tools around the existing APIs to enable capabilities, and they can handle the changes in the lower-level implementations of the WebVR spec while keeping the higher-level A-Frame declarative language the same. In other words, if you use the declarative language defined by A-Frame, then when the final WebVR spec launches then you’ll just have to update your A-Frame JavaScript file, which handles the spec implementation and allows you to focus on content creation.

Mozilla wants developers to continue to develop and prototype experiences in WebVR without worrying that they’ll break once the final stable public version of WebVR is finally released. Mozilla is willing to manage the interim technical debt from the WebVR 1.1 spec in order to bootstrap the WebVR content and tooling ecosystem.

Mozilla is also investing heavily in a completely new technology stack with their Servo browser, which could eventually replace their mobile Firefox technology stack. Marcos previously told me that Servo is aiming to be built to support immersive technologies like WebVR as a first-class priority over the existing 2D web. Servo has recently added Daydream support with GearVR support coming soon. They’ve shown a proof of concept of a roller coaster Daydream app built in three.js that runs natively as a native application within Daydream.

Overall, Mozilla believes in the power of the open web, and wants to be a part of building the tools that enable metaverse that’s a public resource the democratizes access to knowledge and immersive experiences. There’s a lot of questions around concepts like self-sovereign identity, how an economy is going to powered by some combination of crytpocurrencies and the Web Payments API, as well as the concepts of private property ownership and how that might be managed by the blockchain. A lot of the concepts of a gift economy that Cory Doctorow explores in “Walkaway” are being actively implemented by Mozilla through the open source creation of the Metaverse, and everyone in the WebVR community is looking forward to a stable release later this year. For Mozilla, that begins in August with Firefox 55, but this is just the beginning of a long journey of realizing the potential of the open web.

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Mozilla on Enabling the Open Metaverse with WebVR, A-Frame, and Servo

dmarcosSome of the earliest experiments of making VR a first-class citizen on the web originated at Mozilla in 2014. Then the WebVR spec was drafted in a collaboration between Mozilla and Google’s implementations. There’s been a lot of excitement and momentum building around WebVR over the last couple of months first with the WebVR announcements by Oculus at Oculus Connect 3, and then with over 140 WebVR developers meeting for a W3C workshop on WebVR that happened on October 19th & 20th.

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chris-van-wiemeerschI had a chance to stop by Mozilla’s offices and catch up with two of the company’s WebVR developers, Diego Marcos and Chris Van Wiemeersch, who talked about the big takeaways that happened at the recent W3C WebVR Workshop.

There were some commitments made for a publicly available WebVR-enabled browser from Google in Q1 2017 and a pilot program from Mozilla also in Q1. Diego talks about Mozilla’s new experimental, high-performance web browser, Servo, implementing the WebVR APIs, and Chris talks the unprecedented momentum and public support that WebVR is seeing across the VR industry.

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We also talk about some of the open web concepts like progressive web apps, launching WebGL games as native apps using Electron, emerging technologies enabled by the blockchain like the IPFS distributed web, and some of the next steps for WebVR.

WebVR Resource Links

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