https://player.vimeo.com/video/412377556
In Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality News
April 28, 2020 – Mozilla Mixed Reality group has today announced its latest product offering, Hubs Cloud, which allows companies and organizations to create their own private, social spaces that work with desktop, mobile, and VR headsets.
Hubs Cloud contains the underlying architecture that runs hubs.mozilla.com, and is being offered in Early Access on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With Hubs Cloud, it is now possible for external organizations to deploy, customize and configure their own unique instances of the Hubs platform.
Mozilla states that when building Hubs, it aimed to create an online platform that could be adopted and deployed by organizations to suit their own needs and build their own social applications that worked on both 2D and on VR devices. With that in mind, the Mozilla Mixed Reality team set out to build a set of collaboration tools with versatile web frameworks that could lay the foundation of a platform that provides private rooms, customizable avatars, and the power of virtual reality to connect people regardless of whether or not they were in a shared physical location.
The company states that over the past several months, it has done a lot of work to provide a way for external development teams to stand up private instances of its Hubs infrastructure on an organizational AWS account. Hubs Cloud instances are compatible with the same avatars and scenes that are published on the main hubs.mozilla.com site, or users can choose to create their own content, unique to their application.
Furthermore, Hubs Cloud offers access to an administrator panel that allows users to customize the branding for a site, approve scenes and avatars that are submitted, import default environments and set platform-wide room settings, and use their own domain names. Plus, since the deployment is done through an organization’s own AWS account, it is organizations themselves that are able to control account access and data for individual instances.
Current use cases include IEEE, which last month deployed a custom Hubs Cloud instance to host an online experience for its VR conference, and brought viewing parties, poster sessions, and breakout sessions into shared virtual spaces. Companies have also begun deploying custom instances of Hubs for industry-specific verticals, according to Mozilla, bringing the power of collaborative 3D computing to their existing workflows in areas such as accident visualization and reconstruction.
Hubs Cloud is available in Personal and Enterprise editions. For both editions, billing is based on hourly metering and the instance sizes used. On the AWS Marketplace page, there is a cost estimation calculator to help estimate these ahead of time, and are dependent on the concurrency expected, uptime for the system, data, and storage costs. Both Personal and Enterprise offer the same platform features, but Personal is configured to use a smaller instance size at lower costs and has limits on system-wide scalability.
In the coming months, Mozilla states that it will be working on bringing Hubs Cloud to additional providers, with Digital Ocean as its next target platform.
For more information, and to get started with deploying Hubs Cloud visit hubs.mozilla.com/cloud.
Video credit: Mozilla Mixed Reality/Mozilla Hubs/Vimeo
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About the author
Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.