Hack Week is a chance for the Hubs team to work on any ideas they would like to pursue for a whole week. These ideas can involve a new tool or technology to explore, a new feature, a process improvement, or anything else that has the potential to improve Hubs.
Ideas are pitched within the team and groups spend the week working towards making the idea a reality. All ideas that get selected end with a deliverable: a design artifact, proof of concept, or something we can continue to build from. Below we will take a look at a few of the ideas pitched and some of the results of the Hubs Team Hack Week.
Demos and designs are unfinished works in progress and not necessarily a part of the Hubs roadmap.
Idea Pitches
We saw a wide variety of ideas pitched from motion-sickness-friendly third-person modes, AI integrations, avatar visual fidelity controls, to Hubs Discord integrations and more.
Results
After the week was up, the various groups briefly demonstrated what they had worked on.
Here is what the team came up with...
Large Event Auto Load Balancing
Create the logic for balancing participants between rooms which have been manually generated and specified by an event host with only one event URL.
Portals
The 3D web allows us to make this experience more natural and immersive so why not walk through a portal instead of clicking on an image? Make traveling across worlds a more interesting and pleasant experience.
Audio Accessibility Improvements
Make sound-sensitive users comfortable with better control discovery and new UI.
SlimeVR Body Tracker Proof of Concept
Get data streaming into Hubs and drive some basic avatar bones using SlimeVR, a set of open hardware sensors and open-source software that provides a low-cost solution to Full Body Tracking in VR.
Camera Animation System
System/add-on for capturing smooth screen captures in Hubs and defining animation paths.
Pets
Bring joy to the hearts of Hubs users and allow them to interact with their own virtual pets.
Hubs Calendar Scheduler
Integrations and extensions for popular browser-based calendars that makes setting up a quick meeting in Hubs easy.
Sound Effects Refresh
Designing and creating new original sounds for Hubs. Rethinking and documenting our current sound effects.
WebXR Emulator Improvements
Work to ensure the webXR emulator extension is compatible with the Hubs client and explore hand tracking more.
Enhancements to 3D Object Browser
Explore potential UX improvements to our model explorer including rethinking what are valuable categories, improving the pagination to provide clues as to the amount of objects in the list, and a traffic light system can be used to indicate which objects are "lightweight" and which will impact peoples performance.
Anything here you're excited about possibly seeing in Hubs one day? Have another idea in mind for Hubs? Let us know!
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