Not trying to flame the guy since he obviously put in a lot of work on his own, but the original idea is from a lainchan thread [1] for the 3d anonymous imageboard 3dchan [2]. I'm only assuming they're not the same person since this project is not on the 3dchan owner's github [3]. Again, the two are quite clearly different, and parallel creativity does exist in the realm of possibility, but my personal guess is he used the same concept to build something similar.
There's no "original idea" here. It's an obvious idea I presumed most people have had. At least I have and I haven't seen any of these before so I don't see why he couldn't have made this independently of 3dchan.
Same question here - a long time ago when I first became a PO it was because I told my boss about an idea I'd had where our users could walk around our site - a little like this (this was a site aimed at kids). But this was 15 years ago and likely wouldn't have been half as cool! They asked me to rebuild the site anyway - though I was far far more traditional in my delivery in the end.
His implementation may be new but the idea of interfacing with content in a 3D manner isn't. I remember trying out a 3D desktop program around 2003 and if I recall correctly, it came with a game demo disc.
I played a fair bit of both, but inverted always just felt more natural to me. I swear early FPS games had it that way by default, but maybe I'm mis-remembering! Definitely hard for me to grok how people prefer the 'normal' way though.
Pretty cool! My vision keeps shifting to the left though if I don't actively counter-rotate to the right. It makes it a bit hard to keep looking at the same object.
Right now it just loads whatever the subreddit returns. I'm working on adding an option for that. If you want to browse a SFW one you can just pick a subreddit you know is SFW:
Love this. Was much better than I expected since you also showed other users, what they were looking at, and let us have personalities like looking at each other and nodding yes/no which kept cracking me up.
A few people were at the Game of Thrones Cosplay submission (an image of two cute women in costumes) looking at each other and nodding. Some people formed a conga line.
It's easy to imagine stopping this project when you have the basic rendering + WASD working, but the multiplayer aspect was simple and fun.
Amazing! I might just use this as my go-to reddit app moving forward...
A couple suggestions: any chance movement could be a bit faster? I'd rather run through the museum if given the chance, just as I can scroll quickly through reddit. Maybe I'm just too used to playing CSGO and expect my character to move a bit faster
I kinda wish it included some slight head bobbing to, but I guess that's a matter of preference.
I like the casual nature of walking through a museum, but I agree with having a faster option. Possibly allow sprinting with shift key or as an alternative allowing double tapping of the wasd keys to run.
I made a similar (single-player) version a bunch of years ago when Mozilla first released WebVR or whatever they called it back then! https://github.com/mrspeaker/InternetExplorer - The controls were weird (they were ok in VR): wsad + arrows, and "enter" loaded any linked subreddits.
That is good fun. What's interesting is the amount of thought I'm willing to give something that's virtually hanging on a wall over an onscreen sentence in a list.
On a different note, one of the images from a Bloomberg post was simply showing "We've detected unusual activity from your computer network" and the usual reCaptcha "I'm not a robot" box.
Please join me in condemning such hostile behaviour of web sites. Of course it's 'unusual activity', it's unusually creative, and it's what the Internet used to be about.
I actually followed the "rules" of the walls myself, until my forward key got stuck and I started phasing through things. I never even thought to check the clipping.
Clipping first, then it just needs NPC trolls that follow you everywhere spewing the actual comments from each thing you're in close proximity too - then you'll have a pretty neat game
Rendering quality would be greatly improved by generating mipmaps for your rendered text [1]. It's unclear how you're rendering text in Babylon, but you might have to use a slightly different approach to improve quality.
r/Art and related subreddits really lend themselves to this. As the documenting of "related subreddits" is not standardized, reddit.com/dev/api has no way of listing them. Some write a /wiki/related page, most have it in the sidebar. Would make for an opportunity to add a webring-like "next" button.
Dear devs, please `return false` from your keypress handlers (or preventDefault, stopPropagation, any of them!)
Otherwise my browser doesn't know you do something important with them, and uses keyboard for its own navigation and shortcuts, which fucks up your page.
This is insane! You could kind of see Epic ripping this off and browsing a Reddit museum with your Fortnite character. It reminds me of Playstation Home too.. but the fact it's so easy to jump in really alters how this could work.
I think it's possible that vision is closer to the real future than that sounds at face value. I also initially thought of lawnmower man era breathless predictions for VRML and mockups of the future 3D internet. But this is actually a surprisingly compelling experience. Is it wrong I kind of like that almost everything from the browsing experience of reddit is removed except the titles and the linked content? It's got a pleasing simplicity and the tangible nature of making the internet a physical place is appealing to my primitive brain somehow. Definitely not my new way to browse the web, but surprisingly charming.
We definitely should, although probably from a completely different perspective than ‘94: High end phones can capture in 3D, so we should be able to store and view 3D images properly.
I’m starting with the idea of PNGs where the channels represent RGBZ instead of RGBA, but obviously we need more than 8 bits of depth information, and we are starting to get and care about high dynamic range for RGB data as well… would 16R:16G:16B:16Z work?
There’s also the point that depth information will have sharp boundaries, and it will probably be much worse for RGB information to blur over such a boundary as compared with the equivalent parts of a flat JPEG.
Yeah I remember trying a demo that was literally trying to do this, just on our Mac Performa 5200 over a 14.4 modem (you had to pre-download the "map"). Even the design is eerily similar.
Great idea and the implementation is pretty good for v1. The v2 can index reddit and render that index as a fancy 3d structure that gives a 10,000 feet view on what's going on in reddit: relationship between subreddits, topics, comments, users. Perhaps this structure can look like a forest where heavy subreddits look like big branchy trees and users look like bees adding comments. Big plus if this is rendered in real time, at least with 1 fps. It's not entirely impossible that this idea may be good enough for a little startup (afaik, YC offers 150k for 7% if the idea seems worth exploring).
Congrats on shipping it! It worked nicely on my first try.
I think this might be the feature for visualizing data, when VR/AR become mainstream.
Imagine this but with stylized graphics that respond to real-time data: you could see a popular post like some sort of concert with tons of people (the website visitors). Every comment made on the post can be also read from them in real time.
It's a way I wanted to browse the web for a long time.
I'm experiencing a similar bug. I think it's particular to the Linux build of Firefox, because I experience the same bug in krunker.io, but nowhere else.
You really should not use this old-school QuickTime VR reverse-drag scrolling on a mobile device. That is not what anyone who's used a touch device in the last ten years expects.
When someone drags on a touch device, they expect to be dragging the thing they see. You touch something on the screen, move it around, and that thing follows your touch. Whatever you touched, it follows your finger around.
This site does just the opposite. When you drag on the screen, things move in the opposite direction. That's how QuickTime VR worked, but no one who is used to modern touch devices will be able to use this without being confused.
Or desktop devices for that matter. There is a simple solution: just study how Google Street view works on both mobile and desktop devices, and do that.
This could be a great site, and I would love to try it again if this one fundamental bit of navigation is fixed.
Fantastic! Simple concept, but the effect is amazing. I felt like I was in a museum, except I was browsing reddit. This gives me a lot of really fun ideas regarding the future of the internet! I keep wondering where VR is going to go!
This is glorious, I just found a friend and we nodded at each other for a good while. Then I walked through the next best wall and lured others out, since they can still see the beam indicating the direction of my view.
This is a really neat concept! I love how you can see other people and their literal sightlines.
Some people have said that they wish movement was faster; I completely agree with that.
I also wish that more of the interface were integrated into the "museum" -- it would be nice to be able to go to other subreddits from within the museum itself rather than having to leave and go to the address bar.
I'd also like to be able to see comments somehow, since that's 80% of the experience of reddit for me!
The movement speed is definitely a dealbreaker though.
I think I read a John Grisham book that had something like this in it.... they had to find and destroy a file or something, but this is exactly how I pictured it.
this is an absolute gem to experience. my question: do you shard it off to different servers or some such thing? i only ask because trying to connect on both my mobile and my laptop, i can't seem to ever end up in the same apparent room as myself. but that's no but deal, just a minor curiosity.
Is it just me or do all other avatars freeze in place after a few minutes?
Loving this honestly, although I must say I saw another comment about visiting /r/gonewild. I must have been living under a rock because I did not know it was THAT kind of subreddit. Assumed it was hiking photographs.
I'm not into games at all, but this really captures my imagination. I can imagine enjoying interacting with the web this way. Maybe even coding this way if possible. Thanks!
Well that is just neat. Took a little time to adjust to movement on mobile but super fun when you get the hang of it. Really smooth. Thank's for sharing.
allows Apple Watch Series 5 to offer all-day 18-hour battery life
How is 18 hours considered "all day"!?!?
I retired my previous fitness watch (Polar M600) when its battery life got that bad, and moved to a Garmin 645M with almost a week of battery life. Being able to to travel on business without worrying about carrying (and loosing) the charger is very nice. The watch is "always on", does notifications, music, etc.
This doesn't work at all for me in Safari tech preview on Mac, just has weird blue background and some white lines. Normal safari seems to load a visual, but I can't seem to do anything with it. TL;DR- I don't get it, but thanks for sharing.
is this sort of brain-dead Redditor "humor" what HackerNews has devolved to? At the risk of making a unsubstantive comment myself, I sometimes wish HackerNews remained a smaller discussion forum, mainstream online visibility seems to inevitably attract flies.
Mobile: Dragging on left half of screen is move, right have is look
Append any subreddit to the url to switch subreddits
Tech stack - Babylon.js for the 3d rendering engine
- Google Cloud Function which queries Reddit Api and then transforms the data depending on the data type
- For images: Transform and serve through https://images.weserv.nl
- For videos (try /r/gifs, experimental) gets a url which can be played through a <video> tag, which is later copied frame by frame to a texture
- For websites, use puppeteer to take a screenshot
- For multiplayer (you can see other people in the same subreddit as you) https://colyseus.io/ and App Engine Flexible
- For chat, Firestore
Also, apologies for only having one avatar option! I wanted to add different genders, characters etc but didn't have time for the MVP!
Discord for more discussion: https://discord.gg/nrxQnT