Mid-afternoon, Fall, 1997.

We filed into the computer lab and each classmate took a seat in front of a beige terminal monitor. Instinctively, I turned over the mouse and rolled the rubber ball in it. Computers weren’t in every dorm room yet. The novelty of an expensive device controlled by a bouncy ball made inspecting the mouse irresistible, especially if graduate students are urging you not to click anything on the desktop. Dr. Poole described the icon for us all to click on, and a rain storm of clicks could be heard throughout the computer lab. Those clicks were followed by a few complaints. It seems everyone launching the program simultaneously caused problems. The graduate students patrolled from each station launching the program. When they got to me, I saw a window about a third of the desktop space open. Every few seconds a colored polygon filled in the window and a room was forming. Having a few hours of DOOM under my belt, I started moving my view about my pressing the cursor keys. The farm girls from Victoria, Texas, were still a bit lost. Bored with that, I inspected the right side of the window that said I could input my name along with a few other avatar settings. After a few moments, flat images of avatars popped into existence and wobbled about--like they were fumbling in the dark. I typed into the chat window: Hi! A giggle could be heard from across the lab. Soon, typing could be heard intermittently as people tried to communicate. It was punctuated, however, by raised hands and claims that nothing was working. It was early days in the computer lab. This was Microsoft’s V-chat. This was the first time I saw any “Social VR”. The purpose of being in that virtual space was purely for interpersonal communication.

Late 2015.

After JanusVR became multiplayer, the memory of my afternoon in the computer lab came to mind. It was amazing that the new builds I was testing every night came from the brain of one recently frocked doctoral graduate. They crashed, like that afternoon, but usually if pressed to the limits or if a memory leak wasn’t considered. I dutifully reported my crash to help that one man shop. I couldn’t build the engine but I could break it! I knew of VRML, Virtual Reality Markup Language, a customized version of HTML, Hypertext Markup Language, which makes up this webpage, from an esteemed mentor that told me about a project he did long ago that required data visualization. I knew that JanusVR wasn’t the first to turn HTML into a virtual space. But I knew that VRML was a mostly deprecated language that wasn’t ready for the VR Renaissance brought about by affordable head mounted displays entering the market and high performance gaming PCs.

The best way to stay in the know when it came to the VR Renaissance was to be constantly refreshing Reddit’s “r/oculus” page. Throughout the day the hype would roll in. Denizens could see patterns after a while: the newbie that won’t read the FAQ, the sketchy European entrepreneur feeling out the market, the enthusiast Unity developer, the facsimile of a human that is paid astroturfing, and the gatekeeper keeping the well from being poisoned. I was always pleased when something from a fellow JanusVR enthusiast was posted. The comments, however, deflated me. Everyone expected a flawless experience, and a rock solid user interface. They wanted instant uploading of content and that every client would see that change. I started to feel like I was a minority user--my client rarely crashed unless provoked. I understood from my military simulation work how hard software development is. I forgave the bugs--it was one man doing all the heavy lifting. Not many have built a render engine from the ground up! The “upvotes” were always in the low dozens. It seemed like the subreddit didn’t have the patience for worldbuilding on their terms. Turning your webpage into a virtual space you could explore with others just didn’t inspire. They all wanted instant magic. The screenshots of Convrge’s floating heads showed that.

Then Mozilla posted that they were working on a way to enter VR in a special version of their browser. The main difference between that and JanusVR was the lack of a portal. You had to launch the supported website, click the visor icon and don your headset to experience VR. If you wanted to go to another website, you had to leave VR, navigate to another demo, and repeat the process. It was interesting, but it felt like JanusVR, something I was beginning to master, so I rarely bothered with it.

Every post on the subreddit by Mozilla: hundreds of upvotes, dozens of encouraging comments. That’s the moment the gilding on the VR Renaissance started to rust for me.

It just didn’t add up. Some of the JanusVR volunteers spent a lot of free time telling their stories, not just on Reddit, but Twitter and Facebook too. Hundreds of amazing worlds were created. My evenings could be spent exploring a fraction. It seemed that we lacked the arcane skills of a professional marketing person with a budget along with clear skin and a clear plan. Our signals were never boosted, nor lovingly crafted with non-offensive colorfully bulbous or polygonal illustrations and documentation. What came to follow was reminiscent of the struggles between the Wright Brothers and Curtiss in the early twentieth century. We were both “inventing the airplane” with the immersive web. Analysts years on show that research and knowledge were converging in the early century concerning aeronautics, and multiple iterations of the same inspiration were bound to come about. The same could be said of VR.

But in the case of JanusVR and Mozilla, the difference in results were remarkable. The sequence would go like this: many worldbuilders would hang out in the chat channel, out of VR. The magic of not being the primary programmer is that you can dream of lofty ambitious features--because ultimately, you don’t have to do the heavy code to bring them into fruition. The doctor would enter chat, often very late at night, and would instantly be assaulted with feature requests and bug reports. His introverted nature did not take well to this, and being late, he was probably tired as well. However, he would listen, and often a week later, we would see an update build announced on his webpage with the new feature and example code. Two weeks after that, Mozilla would have it in their WebVR. Again, the blog post would be received with hundreds of Reddit upvotes. Parallel invention, as one developer called it, was a fine excuse. I’m a bit misanthropic in my theories. Every feature, in lockstep, Mozilla would also release: Leap Motion support, particle systems, in-world browsers, extension of their eerily similar A-frame scripting language, etc. In time, we almost expected the posts. One injury was being overshadowed when we knew we had more to offer even if we were less glamorous. The deepest cuts were hearing the praise of Mozilla breaking new ground with their invention of the web based Metaverse. It felt like all our work was being written out of history. This phase of VR was leaving the realm of scrappy individuals vying for the market share of the bleeding edge to larger, well-connected, entities looking for promise of a return on a hefty investment. VR was soon going to go from the oily foreheads of enthusiast engineers to the manicured hands of those too coif to wear such things, but also were all too happy to make money off of it.

Now, JanusVR is JanusXR. It is loving curated by enthusiasts and slowly growing, like a bonsai tree. But in the end, it never really made any money. The native browser Windows 10 application has long been deprecated and development continues on the Elation Engine nestled inside all the popular browsers, including Firefox. Mozilla is on hard times with staffing as of writing, and who knows the future of WebXR? Whispers of the Spatial Web still abound, particularly on the lips of 5G proponents. The manicured hands are setting down the boxy VR goggles and reaching for sleek Apple glasses, ever clawing at that return on investment. For now, it’s still vapor. What I have learned from my experience is this: The Metaverse is no longer being made for the plucky individual—it is made for the few that want to control it all.

Session 5: That Fox is Following Us

Daniel D Meeks 2020