Earlier this year Mozilla, creators of the Firefox web browser, announced its plans to make mixed reality (MR) more accessible by using WebVR to bring MR to a wider audience. The company are now planning on expanding this concept by bringing enabling social MR in a web browser.

Bringing a social aspect into virtual reality (VR) and MR has been the goal of several companies, including Valve and Facebook, aiming to dispel the idea of VR/MR an inherently isolating. Mozilla’s project, titled Social 3D Web, is aimed at allowing users to connect, socialise and collaborate without barriers.

Mozilla has long been critical of the ‘Walled Garden’ approach used by companies such as Facebook, and has presented the idea of a virtual space where connecting with another person is a simple and intuitive as sharing a link, regardless of what software or device involved.

A dedicated team has been formed to work on Mozilla’s Social Mixed Reality platform, which will be using the WebVR and A-Frame set of libraries and APIs in order to build a platform that allows users a consistent experience, letting the same avatar, settings and tools follow the user so they never have to learn a new user interface from scratch when engaging with Social 3D Web.

To support the creation of this platform, Mozilla are investing in open source components and services which will allow A-Frame developers to create rich Social MR experiences as a showcase of the platform’s capabilities.

Mozilla has opened up its Github repositories in order to invite the community to provide feedback to the process and begin contributing to the creation of this new platform. The specific areas that Mozilla is currently focussing on are:

Avatars and Identity

Communication

Entities

Tools

Search & Discovery

For those who are interested in getting involved, there is a Social channel on the WebVR Slash which is collaborating on these new features. There are also five Github repositories to browse which can be found below:

VRFocus will bring you further news on Social 3D Web as it becomes available.