This is a pretty impressive talk from Facebook's Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (a Linden Lab alum) showing off Replicated Redux (get on GitHub here), a new technology to help create interactive, physics-enabled multiuser, VR experiences for the web in React 360. Babbage being Babbage, the talk is deeply geeky, so if you're not a coder, scroll to about 22 minutes in, and see what Replicated Redux makes possible -- including a Boggle game his team built for Oculus Rooms.
Basically, Reactive Redux helps eliminate the lag of multiuser experiences, especially in 3D/VR:
"Most virtual worlds and online games run their game logic on a server so that the world can continue to exist after people disconnect and so people can’t cheat because the server can be trusted," as Jim explains. "Every time you interact with these games your input has to be sent over the network, processed by the server and then the results sent back to you before you can see what happens. This can take hundreds of milliseconds even in the perfect case when the only limit is the speed of light and so a lot of online games feel laggy."
Up until now, addressing this lag has been time-consuming for developers, he says:
"One way to remove this perceived lag is to locally predict the results of actions so that people can see the effects immediately, but the code to predict actions and then reconcile the predictions with the server results is normally complex, application specific and hard to test. The goal of Replicated Redux is to push a lot of the complexity in to the framework, so that web developers who are familiar with React can build networked VR applications with ReactVR without having to either accept lag or build and test complex prediction logic."
Right now, third party developers can only use Replicated Redux for React 360 applications. However, seeing as Facebook themselves are using this tech to build interactive experiences in Oculus Rooms, I strongly suspect the company will open up Rooms to third party apps soon.
More on Babbage's blog, btw.
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