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Metaverse Hackerspace

A project log for Metaverse Lab

Experiments with Decentralized VR/AR Infrastructure, Neural Networks, and 3D Internet.

alusionalusion 04/15/2015 at 00:550 Comments

This weekend I competed in a major hackathon called Bitcamp and was testing how far I could expand the resolution of my display from inside VR. I was excited that the websurfaces inside Janus could scale up to 4K resolution, although it carried some noticable lag with the virtual machine guest was bridged over Ethernet to my host.

The hackerspace we built inside Janus serves as a space that encourages people to collaborate together and explore the metaverse. I decorated it with some cyberpunk wall art and added into it an internet radio connected Jukebox.

On the right hallway is a hall of doors with a giant portal that connects to the classy music room. There's a ghost of Gaben the Hype Train going back and forth and you can clone your avatar by ctrl right clicking on the train. The doors connect to various cool rooms inside Janus and is a nice touch to go from hacking and working on a cool project to get lost in the metaverse for a bit.

The hackerspace will be hosted on github for others to view and contribute towards. You can actually directly connect into the hackerspace by following the raw html file hosted on git. Contributions can be made on the spot from within the Virtual environment. I plan to fix it up to serve as a "template" for others to create personal creative environments.

The music room looks beautiful. The photosphere in the middle has some javascript running that makes the sphere "breathe" and it as a really interested effect when viewed within. I also found that having colored photospheres inside black & white rooms really makes the 360 picture pop out. It's really nice to dive into the colorful immersive world and I plan to experiment more with batch editing the texture files to spin up different versions of the same space.

Just for comparison, here is how the room looks WITHOUT the textures baked on.

I'm pleased overall but there's plenty of work to be done. I want the room to have a cybergoth IDM theme to it, and I also need to add in a skybox and ground to it as well. My friend Source did some lighting to the arches and added in a cool sand scape we found on blendswap, it looks really sweet but I want to change the middle arches to RGB [in that order].

Livestreaming is close to working as well. I talked to the dev behind vrhost.us and we'll be fixing the bugs. Livestream videos on youtube carry the same standard youtube ID so I feel like they will surely work. I will try to attempt to grab the session ID token and through trial and error find a way to make it work. It seems like my tests with how Vimeo serves video might lead somewhere with youtube. For the moment, it's just a blank screen.

Here's some inspiration on how I want the hackerspace office to look like:

Everyone will have their own office in separate portals. I could even implement iptables to add a layer of security to allow only certain connections. Atleast I know that when one enters a room, the terminal sessions are by default secure and will reset to the login prompt when you walk out of the room. I tested Wemux with a friend and found that it worked beautifully, opening the path towards collaborative multi-user terminal sessions in the same way that google docs has collaboration. We can code side by side in Vim or just do sysadmin activities through shared tmux sessions:

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