Open, Accessible & Delightful: building the Mozilla Hubs community during COVID-19
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McLaren, Elgin-Skye
2020 was an isolating year. During a time of travel restrictions and social distancing, Mozilla Hubs (hubs.mozilla.com) provided a safe place for people to come together virtually. This open source project allows users to quickly create custom 3D spaces, and invite others to join using only a link. It is browser-based, and works across a wide variety of devices - no downloads required. From conferences, to weddings, to art galleries and even windsurfing lessons, over the last year we’ve seen a huge variety of creative applications that our team had never imagined. In this talk I showcase exciting work created by the Hubs community, and share specific insights learned while managing Hubs’ rapidly growing user-base. Attendees will discover how to foster an open, accessible & delightful community.
 Hi, everyone, and thank you so much for joining me today for my presentation, Open, Accessible, and Delightful, Building the Mozilla Hubs Community During COVID-19. My name is Elgin, and I'm the Community Manager for Mozilla Hubs. If you see me at work, I'll probably be looking a little something like this. I'm coming to you today from inside of Hubs to give you a sense of what it's like to use. Here's a photo of me to prove that I'm not a robot, although I'm pretty sure that that's exactly what a robot would say to you. In this talk, I'm going to introduce you to Hubs, what it is, and how to get started using it. Then I'd like to showcase some of the amazing projects our community created during this wild year of working from home, social distancing, and travel restrictions. Being part of this community and seeing the innovative ways that people are using this technology has truly brought me joy during this difficult year. Our team could never have imagined some of the ways that people are using Hubs to connect. At the same time, we've also faced new challenges this year. As a Community Manager for a project that's adapting to a new world, I've worked hard to maintain a community that remains open, accessible, and delightful. I'm going to conclude this talk with some recommendations of things I've learned over this past year while managing the transition from being small and experimental to being a bustling open source community. I'm hoping that by the end of this talk, you might be convinced to give Hubs a try. And then hopefully you'll also have some strategies to bring to your own growing communities to keep them vibrant and healthy. But before I go any further, some of you may be wondering what the heck is Hubs? Hubs is an open source project by Mozilla, and with Hubs you can easily create virtual spaces called rooms to get together with others. How easy is it to get started? All you have to do is go to hubs.mozilla.com, press create a room, and with just a few clicks you'll have your very own private virtual space that you can invite others to join you in. And how you use it is up to you. You can teach a class, collaborate with your team, or host an event. Maybe you might want to get together with a bunch of friends to discuss your favorite dog breed, the majestic silken windhound. Well, that's mine at least. But getting started on a new platform can be painful. How many times have you gone to meet with someone and then you've got to download and install new software first? Before you could even get in, you're being prompted to set up an account, sign up for some mailing list, and all you really want to do is just talk about your dog. Well, to enter into Hubs your guests just have to visit a URL. There's no software to download, there's no accounts required, and it's free to use. And what happens if most silken windhound fanciers are already at the dog park and need to come in from their mobile phone instead of their desktop computer? Well, that's not a problem either, because Hubs runs in a browser. So it can be used across devices. You can come into Hubs on your desktop computer, your mobile phone, or even your VR headset for an immersive experience. So you might be wondering, is it like a video chat platform? Well, not quite. Hubs has a lot of benefits over many video chat platforms. First of all, you don't need to be on camera. Sure, you can share your webcam if you want, but the default is to use avatars, which means you don't have to worry about the way that you look that day or the environment that you're in. Also, it gives you additional privacy when meeting with people you might not know super well and might not feel comfortable being on a video call with. Next, you're co-present in a shared virtual space. You can bring in objects like PDFs, images, videos, 3D models, and screen shares, and explore them together. Since you can organize information spatially, we've seen a lot of cool examples from our community of folks creating things like memory palaces and hubs. The final important feature that I'll mention that differentiates hubs from video calls is that there's spatialized audio in the room. And this is a big one. This means that the closer someone is to you, the louder they sound, and conversely, the farther someone is from you, the quieter they sound. And this makes interacting with other folks in hubs a lot more like meeting with people in real life. So while video chat lets one speaker talk to the group at a time, in hubs you can have multiple conversations happening in different parts of the space at the same time. And you can move effortlessly between them. So these are a few of the main differences between hubs and video chat platforms. We've heard from our community that using hubs can be delightful. And we use hubs almost exclusively on our team, and we find it so much more playful than traditional video chat. This is in large part because of the customizable nature of the avatars and the environments and the room media. So to inspire creative expression in hubs, we not only have thousands of community-created scenes available for use, but if you wanted to create your own scenes or avatars, you can totally do so. We have an environment editor that runs in the browser called Spoke, which you can visit hubs.mazilla.com. And you can use this to build out a personalized scene. And if you do 3D modeling, then you can upload custom GLB assets to be either your scene or your avatar. And so here are some examples of community-made avatars that we've seen in the last little while. So hubs is designed for fairly intimate experiences. The recommended default is to have 25 people in the room, but you can increase it to as many as 50 in the room settings. And given the nature of this conference, many of you are likely wondering what sorts of technology is hubs built on top of? We certainly didn't build hubs from scratch all by ourselves. We're standing on the shoulder of giants. Hubs is powered by browser-based technology and a ton of open source projects. So for example, 3JS and networked A-frame. So if you want to take a closer look at our code base and learn more about the other projects that are involved, you can check out our GitHub at github.com.mazilla.hubs. Now, while hubs is built entirely using open source software, setting it up on your own system or your own server can be a little bit of a finicky process. There's just a lot of moving parts. So it can be a little bit complicated and troublesome to set up from scratch. So last year, one of our big initiatives was launching a product called Hubs Cloud. And what Hubs Cloud does is it makes the process of taking the code from hubs.mazilla.com and self-hosting your very own version on a server easier. So this is a paid service and it's offered on AWS. And the cost is relative to the size of the servers that you use. And a portion of this cost comes back to continue our open source work on hubs. And there's a lot of different benefits to using Hubs Cloud. And you've got ownership over all the data that goes through. You can do deeper customizations and it can live at your own domain as well. And there's more than that as well, but those are some of the big ones that come up all the time. So the ability to do really deep customization to the code base. So I hope that this gives you a better understanding of what Hubs is. Now I'd like to switch to talking a little bit more about our community. So Hubs itself is open. It's an open source project. It's accessible. It can be used across different platforms regardless of the type of device you have. And it's delightful to use. It's fun and it's creative. And we try to reflect this in the way that we cultivate our community. We want our community to feel welcoming, have a low barrier to entry and participation, and allow users to discover and create experiences that are fun and playful. So as a community manager, I feel super fortunate to get to work with so many amazing folks. A project like Hubs gathers a very eclectic group of users. Our most active community members are not only developers, but also 3D modeling professionals, DIY artists, educators, community organizers, and more. And our community's contributions to Hubs are by no means limited to coding. We work closely with our users. We're building for our community alongside our community. So we do our work out in the open in Discord and GitHub. Our Discord server is super active. And we not only have people sharing information about Hubs generally, their upcoming events, and maybe their most recent creations, we also have development channels there where community members are welcome to participate in our design and development conversations. Our community is also super unique in that we are ourselves a meeting platform. So we organize frequent events for people to drop in and meet our team. So we host a drop in meetup every Friday. And this meetup originated as a time to kind of kick the tires on new features. But as our community has grown, it's become a time for folks to give feedback to the team, ask questions, and my very, very favorite part is showcase their own work. So we often spend this time traveling to other people's Hubs faces that they've created to learn more about what they're working on. This is not only super fun for us as a development team, it's also really helpful for us to better understand our users' needs and it informs our product roadmap. I can't count the number of times that we've gotten new feature ideas from these casual conversations at our meetups. When I first joined Hubs in August 2019, our community was small but passionate. Hubs' user base was growing steadily and as we added more features, more people would join. Little did we know at the time the important role that remote communication would play in 2020. In my job as community manager, I was in frequent communication with many of the folks using Hubs. I was very tapped into what the community was doing and I had a good understanding of most of the events taking place in Hubs. In early 2020, we were working hard to prepare Hubs Cloud, the AWS service for self-hosting Hubs. To prepare for the launch, we were working with a major academic VR conference, IEEE VR, to run a virtual track for their in-person event. This would be the very first Hubs Cloud website in production and we were planning for it to be a nice low stakes testing ground to ensure that everything was working smoothly before we released Hubs Cloud to the public. There was going to be some poster sessions and networking events for folks who couldn't attend the real world event. We had hosted similar conference events on Hubs.Mazilla.com previously and so it didn't feel like it was going to be a really big stretch. Then when we were leading into the event, which was scheduled to start on March 22nd, you can probably imagine what happened. This was the time of year when things were just starting to shut down, travel was being cancelled globally and so with only two weeks to go until the event, the conference moved to being online only with Hubs as the main venue for this conference with as many as 2,000 attendees. So with very little time to plan, we jumped into action along with the team from IEEE VR. We scaled up our server capacity. We created additional rooms. We trained volunteers and troubleshooted last minute bugs and we were building out brand new features that would be critical to the success of the event up to the very last minute. It was an enormous effort and a tremendous shout out needs to go to all the conference organizers and their incredible team of volunteers. The event was a success. While we were in the start of a global pandemic, a time when no one could travel and things were honestly really scary, researchers were still able to come together to network and showcase their work at a prestigious academic conference. It was such a relief that this event could still take place. We ended up taking Hubs Cloud live in April and around this time was a real turning point for me as a community manager. I could no longer keep track of the community events happening in Hubs. We were often learning about gatherings in Hubs through posts on social media after the fact. And only a few short weeks after the launch of Hubs Cloud, we happened to come across an event advertised on Twitter. It wasn't even in our Discord and we were not even tagged in it. But it appeared to be an art gallery in Hubs. So we decided as a team to go check it out. And I don't know if it was the exhaustion or the stress of lockdown or just the surprise of being able to go to a social event in an art gallery with friends. But let me tell you, it was incredible. I was so emotional afterwards. So the space I'm talking about was called the Apart Poster Gallery and it was designed by a team at Paradovsky. They had had some time available between projects. They decided to do a fundraiser for the WHO by selling posters by artists that reflected the impact of social distancing on their lives. So to showcase the work, the Paradovsky team created a virtual gallery in a customized version of Hubs. So the Apart Poster Gallery is still live if you want to go check it out at apartposters.com. But if you've got... But I've also got a short video to show you that's got an overview of the different spaces that they had there. Let's go in for them. Hello hydropldriven guide. And so just as a reminder, this is all just running in the web browser. This is exactly what we had in mind when we built out hubs and hubs cloud to be customizable. Not that we imagined someone making this exact gallery, of course, but we wanted to make it so that people could use our technology and make it truly their own. And this was just one of many groups that was organizing events to bring people together during this difficult year. I'd like to take a few minutes now to showcase some of the other examples to give you a sense of how other people were using these virtual spaces. So we saw many artists using hubs as a platform for self-expression and for connecting with audiences. For example, St. Motel, a super catchy and very tech savvy band, built a customized world to represent their most recent album. In this virtual motel, each room was customized to match the theme of a different song. In this space, they organized intimate concerts and fan meet and greet since touring wasn't possible at this time. Brendan Bradley created a virtual theater called Future Stages and collaborated with other actors to produce a play in hubs. They used a really clever combination of green screens, live streams, and VR headsets to create an immersive theater experience. So the actors in this video are not actually in the same space as each other. They're all being kind of merged together using OBS and then projected into the hub space. So they were doing some really innovative, cool stuff. We've also seen lots of artists, both professional and people who are hobby artists, creating exhibits of their work. So this is one cool example I wanted to showcase that was created by a community member, Matt Cool, and it was commissioned by an Instagram user, Brain the Greatest, and it features work by other artists, including this piece by Marco Doodles. Macro Doodles. I'm sorry. Macro Doodles. So I wish I had like two more hours to continue going through cool art examples that people have shared with us, either through social media and through our meetups. Doodles has been a place to celebrate. We've seen a marriage in hubs, there have been countless birthday parties, and we've seen people create special photo galleries to send to each other as gifts. It's also been a place to remember. We were all moved when we saw this space by Rem5VR that lays bare the lives lost to COVID-19 in a single day in the United States. A research team called VR Past and Present, led by Dr. David Hickson and Dr. Jeffrey Vidalha, are working on a virtual recreation of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, so people from around the world are able to experience it, even if they can't travel to Washington, D.C. They led guided tours on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Teachers have remembered loved ones while remaining physically distant inside of hubs. The innovation ed tech team from Tech de Monterey created a special place to come together this year for Diaz de Mortis. There are lots of educators using hubs in all sorts of ways. Many educators are using it as a teaching tool, a way to provide instruction to students. One example I totally love is Powell from UCAM University shared how he taught a group of students how to get started when surfing in VR using hubs. Another really exciting example of an educator using hubs for teaching is Greg Dorsenville at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He's using giant 3D models to teach classes about human physiology. He leads students through virtual sessions and uses drawing tools and labels to help them understand the way that different parts of the body connect. Hubs has also been a place that educators have used for showcasing students' work. In these images from George Washington University's Festival of Animation, students displayed their research findings in an environment based off of their real-world campus. Following the poster session, students were invited to attend an awards ceremony organized by faculty. And there's been no shortage of special events happening in hubs. Virtual and augmented reality world conference and expo did an amazing job of moving their event online in a very short period of time. They created a number of gorgeous spaces for their event, which took part over the course of a month last June. And part of the event involved a series of collaborative machinima sessions, where a team of creatives used hubs for acting out and recording short films. Beyond this, we've seen conferences, corporate events, and even a craft fair. Craft-like city helped local artisans sell their work online. They created special hub spaces to display art to virtual visitors. And there were links to all the pieces on display in a room so that visitors could easily go to the online shop and purchase them. So these are just a taste of some of the ways that people have come together safely in hubs during the pandemic. And there are so many more examples. As our community adapted to the online first world, our team was adapting to the influx of new community members and growing interest in hubs. With this, I want to finish my presentation with a summary of three things I found helpful for building an open, accessible, and delightful community during my time as community manager in 2020. First, make it easy on your community. Making it easy for other folks to find what they need takes more work up front, but it will make life easier for you in the long run. We were answering community questions on Discord, which worked super well in the early days of hubs. But as we scaled, this soon became impossible to maintain. Search isn't great on Discord, and we were finding ourselves having to answer the same questions again and again. We worked hard to improve our documentation this year, and we added search to our Docs site. We slowly moved our support off of Discord and over to GitHub discussions, which we found to be a very helpful tool for managing our Q&A. And we even went so far as to copy and paste questions from our Discord chats into the GitHub discussions so that we can answer them there. It was more work for us at the time, but it meant it would be easier for folks to find going forward. These efforts reduced our community workload significantly, allowing us to focus our efforts on other work. We had to set up these new processes while adapting to everything else going on in the world. For your own communities, if possible, try to remove frictions for users so you can make life easier for yourself in the future. We waited until the pandemic to do this, but you might find it helpful to set up robust information searching systems before you need them. Second, keep your community welcoming by being proactive with moderation. The job of moderating content is difficult and requires constant learning and adapting. You'll expect trolley and spammy behavior in any online community, but there's also a gray area of behavior that it might be difficult to determine whether it's really against the community guidelines or not. A community manager I admire once told me, your community becomes what the worst behavior you're willing to walk by and say nothing about. Through this lens, it makes it easier to decide when to take action on questionable behavior. As a community manager, an open source maintainer, or an active participant in an online community, it's up to you to set the tone. So this year I found it really helpful to revise our community guidelines to make it easier to identify behavior that didn't uphold our values and the standards of our community. And I also made sure to keep really good notes on any issues that did come up and the actions that our team took. So though as new things came up, as new issues arose, we could escalate them quickly and fairly, and this could be done by anyone on our team, not just myself. Finally, be part of your community. On our team, we have an authentic connection with our community. We've heard from many folks that they feel like they're part of our team. We make ourselves available. I hold office hours twice per week for people to ask questions. And our team attends a weekly meetup that is open to the public so we can chat with our community face to face or avatar to avatar in this case. And we hold special events and field trips to explore our community spaces and celebrate them. This helps us learn more about the work they're doing and helps us build a better hubs. Our team is truly inspired by the work that our community creates. Does this scale? Well, there is a trade-off between time spent working on the product and engaging with the community. We've got kind of like a feedback loop happening in ours where we build features and then we learn how folks are using them and then we use that knowledge to be able to iterate on those features and build new ones. We've definitely found it worthwhile. Mozilla is a very data privacy-oriented organization and we gather very little information about how our users are using hubs. So meeting with people that are actually using the product is great and it's a fully transparent way to find out how they're using hubs without collecting more data than we need. Now to help our team build out the product and reduce information overload for new users, we've recently added some sensible defaults for new users in Discord to make the development channels viewable by opt-in only. Now most of our users don't need to see the development channels but they might want to check them out and participate. So all they have to do is use an emoji reaction in Discord to reveal them. In conclusion, hubs is a great way to bring your community together safely even when you need to be physically distant. It runs in the browser and it works across devices with no installation or downloads required and it's free to use on hubs.mozilla.com. With the world going remote in 2020, we saw a huge increase in interest in hubs and an unprecedented number of folks joining our own community. To help manage this, I found it really helpful to make information more easy to find, to be proactive with our moderation and to continue being actively engaged with our community. I hope that seeing some of these incredible examples may have inspired you to give hubs a try and maybe even bring it to your own communities. Perhaps you might want to host your own silken windhound or a golden retriever or labradoodle meetup. So if you do want to give it a try, to get started, just go to hubs.mozilla.com and if you want to join our community, definitely check out the community button on our website. That will take you to our Discord server. Thank you so much for your time today and if you've got questions or want to follow up with me, you can reach me at emaclaren.mozilla.com or reach out to me on Twitter at either the Mozilla Hubs handle which is at Mozilla Hubs or you can reach me at my own personal handle which is at Elgin Sky. Have a good one and enjoy the rest of the conference. Oh, hi. Am I on video now? You are and the sound is clear. Okay, great. It says live, right? You need to say recording before you answer any questions if you want things to be recorded in the Q&A session and be live on the video.puzzle.org starting next week. Okay, how do I go about adding the recording button? There's no need to. It's automatic. Okay, perfect. Just answer questions if people show up. Know your life. Okay, great. Yeah, sorry, I didn't realize. So we have at most 35 minutes for Q&A. Okay, perfect. Well, thank you folks for joining me today. It's super early here. I'm over in Pacific Time, Canada and I'm super happy to answer any questions that you folks might have. The Q&A hasn't started yet. So my Q&A hasn't started yet. There's no people in the room. Oh, okay. No, it's like the previous talk. The Q&A is happening in the main hall. Okay, good. It's a bit confusing. In terms of answering the questions, I see that in the main hall there is or like the Mozilla Deverem, there's some questions coming in. I'll just kind of go through them one second. Just trying to get caught up on some of this. Okay, so I hope that I'm not missing any at the start. I'm going to kind of start by someone was asking about the shortest path to integrate some stuff based on A-frame and hubs. So A-frame is part of the tools that we use for building out hubs. It's not super easy to incorporate your own A-frame code. So being able to inject code is something that we'd like to look at in the future. But for the time being, if you did want to add your own custom A-frame, you'd need to run your own custom version of hubs, which you can do either through creating like a fork on GitHub and then we've got instructions on how to do that there. But Hubs Cloud is probably the best way. And Hubs Cloud lets you self-host your own version of hubs. And so you can have like your own stack and you can make all the changes that you want to it. I would add a little warning though that if you start making changes to Hubs Cloud, if you're self-hosting, then one thing that can come up is that then if we create updates to hubs and then push them out to the Hubs Cloud stacks, it can make it kind of a nightmare to integrate the changes because if you've like modified the stack and if we'd like changed some things. But there are ways of doing this in a way that are not as painful as others. So I just wanted to add that warning there. Can you record a meeting in Mozilla Hubs? That is not something that's possible at the moment. What we do for recording meetings in Mozilla Hubs is using OBS. So we just use recording software on our computer. This is something that I would love to see us add in the future, but it's kind of technically challenging due to the fact that like you don't know which viewpoint you should be recording from. But I definitely will take note of your interest in that because it's something that I would love to see as a feature at some point in the long-term future. I see a question about diaporama applications, so LibreOffice presentations. So you can import media into the room. You can bring in PDFs and images and videos and sounds, but you can't bring in like PowerPoint or presentations of file formats that are not necessarily like websites. So anything that can load really easily on a website can come into Hubs pretty easily. But for a LibreOffice presentation, what you could do is you could either screen share it in or you could export it as a PDF and bring it in. Yeah. Kyra. Kyra, that's a really good thing that you're mentioning. We actually, we just finished like doing a hack week where we just kind of did some like fiddling around with different sorts of just kind of not personal projects, but like things that the community has asked for that we have not built out yet. And setting up a camera inside of the Hubs space was one of the things that we explored just to see like if we could. And we were doing some like explorations into like sending videos straight to Zoom and whatnot. So you could always just be an avatar in a virtual world. Anyways, we'll be sharing more information about that. We're going to do a live stream talking about what we came up with in our hack week in the near future. But definitely like, yeah, having a camera position in the space could be a good option for that. Yeah. So a question about it becoming another second life. That's a really, really good question. So one thing that kind of differentiates Hubs from a lot of other platforms like for example, there's different VR platforms like All Space VR as well, VR chat. Hubs has kind of intentionally been designed to be used for small communities and small events. So it's meant to be a place for you to get together with people that you already are familiar with or in a community with yourself. So like you're not going in necessarily to meet with like total strangers or like explore a ton of virtual worlds. It's more to like create your own private spaces. So I think in that sense that it's quite different than a lot of the other like virtual worlds tools that are out there. Someone was asking about iframes. I will add a little caveat, watch for our live stream of what we're doing during a hack week this week. Iframes don't work at the moment, but conceptually it might be something that's possible. Okay yeah, so Kyra asked a really great question. What are the restrictions on amounts of objects and triangles in an environment when also wanting to get 10 plus people meeting in there? So exactly. So avatar and scene objects sum up in dragging down performance at some point. So basically you have a budget and that budget is sort of based on the type of devices people come in on. So one of the things that's a bit challenging about Hubs is that because it's super accessible across devices, so you can come in on a VR headset or a mobile phone or on a desktop computer. You also have like a lot of different processing power in those three different types of devices. So a desktop computer will be able to handle a lot more stuff in the room than for example like an old smartphone. However, that being said, what we do is we recommend people not having more than like 25 people in the room because once you get above that it starts to be maybe a bit challenging for people on mobile phones, although you can push it higher. But as you mentioned of all the avatar and scene objects, they all add up to be like part of the budget. So there are, we kind of as a guideline, we suggest that like scenes should be no bigger than like 20 megabytes. And if possible, keep avatars to 10 megabytes if you're bringing in like custom avatars and to keep the number of triangles in the scene down to about 20,000, which is a little bit hard to do. But like, you know, if you want to have a really performant environment, then keeping it to about 20,000 triangles is really, really helpful. But you can push it way further than that, you just have to recognize that you might not get 25 people in there if you've got a really complex photogrammetry model like that Martin 15 when I showed earlier. And then there's questions about desktop application. So we are not planning on doing a desktop app at the moment. We really want it to be like browser based and have everything, yeah, just running through the browser. That being said, that does sound like a pretty bad amount of latency. So I'm not sure exactly why that's happening. It could be the room that got loaded automatically or it might just be like maybe the browser that you're using also can make a big difference. But I would definitely, if you do find that there's really poor performance on your laptop, like I would absolutely love to know. It can also matter what your Wi-Fi connection is like as well. So if you do have any trouble when you're going in there, you can email us at hubsatmazzilla.com if you find that it's pretty bad and with a little bit more information about your, like, what's going on because, you know, we use it often on our own computers and we don't see any problems because we're obviously developing with like our nice modern computers and like good internet connections and whatnot. So it's definitely helpful to hear back if people are having performance issues just so we can help troubleshoot it. Just trying to catch up on the chat. Thanks all. Yeah. Someone asked about simplifying avatars to being like colored floating spheres with names about them. Yes, totally. In fact, that was the original design for hubs where just these like blogs with smiley faces on them and they're actually really cute. So, I don't know how to say that you use any of that but Geo Isco, are there any applications in Mozilla Hubs? I saw a camera for making photos in the 3D environment, something else. So just to make sure I understand, are you asking about like things to do inside of the space? So if you are, there's a few different things inside of hubs. You can use the camera. There's also a pen tool if you want to do some drawing and we find that people, they often bring their own kinds of stuff to do inside of these spaces. So our team, for example, when we go in, we will bring in gifts. Well, like we have all of our meetings and hubs, first of all, and like every time we've got a meeting and like, you know, it ends in like a little bit of social time at the end and like we'll bring in gifts or like show off videos that we found online or, you know, just kind of bring in materials to kind of laugh about and joke about. We, again, as I mentioned earlier, like we've got some things that we're thinking about doing in the future. One of the things that our community asks for quite a bit, which we have not had a chance to work on yet, but hopefully will be added in the future is the ability to add some basic scripting. So again, this is not something that's coming anytime in the immediate future. But once you can add your own custom elements in there, it makes playing games and stuff inside of hubs potentially possible. So this is something that hopefully we'll be able to build out in the future so people can take it and like, you know, build their own extensions and, you know, do other fun stuff with it. So again, this doesn't exist yet, but I appreciate you asking about like what there is to do in there. And, you know, it's just, it's something that we see a lot of possibility for in the future. But for the time being, hang out, draw things, bring in media, have meetings, hang out. Yeah, so we've had musicians who have been using it. Typically when we've had musicians playing in hubs, they usually will be in the same physical place just to present latency. Like if they're playing, you know, proper like rhythmic music. However, we have seen a lot of users using it for cool stuff remotely where it's not as, I don't know what the word would be for this, but like where it's a little bit more ambient sort of sound. So we've seen a lot of musicians who come in with different avatars and they each play their own little section, but all the sections don't have to be perfectly timed because there is a little bit of a delay in between, you know, just like when you're using Zoom or whatever, it's hard for musicians to sing or perform over Zoom because there's that little bit of a latency. But we've seen a lot of artists doing some really cool stuff with this. In fact, there's an audio art show that's happening concurrently to this. I'm going to be popping over there after this is done. That was organized by a group in Montreal. How long does a room exist? That's a really good question. So a room at the moment, rooms that are created, they exist forever. So if you create a room, you can always come back as long as you remember the URL. If you did want to close it, then there is a button for closing down your room, but that's permanent and so no one will be able to come back to it. But yeah, you can create a room and then come back anytime in the future. Oh yeah, there have been people playing with bot creation. There's been some really neat stuff with like there was a group that did some performances inside of hubs recently with bots. And so like in their room, every 15 minutes, there'd be a dance performance of like a recording of people in VR doing this dance together. And it was really, really cool. So we're just starting to like scratch the surface of what people can do. There's a lot of potential and I'm just so excited to see more artists using it for creating full spaces. Kyro, that's a really great question. I don't know. Utopia, you did something kind of similar to that, didn't you? Were you? Yeah, yeah, you did. But I don't quite remember exactly how you set that up and how intense of that was. Yeah, Kyro actually, Utopia's video that he shared will probably go a long way in answering that because that's exactly what he did. Let's see if artist work can ask. Yeah, please do let me know if you do have any other questions. I'm super happy to answer them. Thank you so much for coming to my talk today. It was really fun to prepare. I had a blast going through all the old community stuff that had been taking place in the last little while. Well, thank you for giving the talk. It was really, really nice. And thank you for getting up so early to answer the questions. So thank you. Oh, anytime. Well, actually, no, I don't know if I want to make a habit of giving up at 7 or 6 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday morning. Yes, I don't recommend doing that long time. But it was worth it and good questions as well. And also, I really wanted to say that I appreciate the feedback that I got from folks about usability concerns and issues. This is definitely something that I would want to play for our design team as we start to do a lot more research on kind of like the usability of hubs going forward. So super, super appreciate that. Thank you. I cause my email. And loving the confetti as it comes up. Yeah, that's a great question. So if too many people come into a space, it doesn't like block anyone from coming in. Oh my gosh, it's snowing in the chat. So it doesn't block anyone from coming in, but basically you have a limited number of people that can appear in the room as an avatar. And so once you get to the 25 person max, for example, if that's what your maximum is anyone further who comes in will like be able to watch from outside of the room, but they won't have a microphone connected and they won't have an avatar inside of the space so they can just watch from outside. Oh, that's a really good questions. What should the community do to most help hubs. Okay, so from a selfish standpoint, I want people to be building out cool stuff. The work that utopia has been doing to build out cool examples of like possibilities of things you can do with hubs has been super super helpful. So just creating neat things that are weird and artistic that we can share. And if you do create them. We have Twitter handle at mazala hubs that I keep a close eye on. So I definitely we watch everything that comes in there we like and retweet things and we do keep a record of it. And we often get people coming to ask, you know, what can you do with hubs and like it's so cool to be able to just bombard them with a fire hose of like amazing cool. And like we're different stuff that people are doing inside of the space. If you are interested more from like getting involved we are working. There's not like if you put a tear emoji is it going to make the screen cry in the chat. But if you want to get more involved than that or involve differently we're working on localization at the moment so that's something it's not launched yet but in the near future we're hoping to get different languages posted and shared so we're going to be looking for help with that. And then we also, you know, if you are a person who's, you know, wanting to make an open source contribution. We have a lot of bugs that can that could be fixed so you know you can check out our GitHub page we've got issues listed there. And if you do have questions you can email me at hubs at mazala.com. But yeah there's there's all sorts of ways just creating cool stuff to if you are a 3D modeler. If you are interested in creating models for hubs like avatars that use our skeleton would be super helpful, because you know it just having new, like new cool stuff coming through is great keeps our product looking fresh. Can we have matrix integration into hubs. Yeah, that's a good question. There is a discord integration basically that lets you have authentication into your hub space based on being a discord server. I don't know if there's going to be any work on doing one for matrix in the near future it's something that we talked about a little while ago but I don't actually know where things landed with that. So we were doing some exploration into other bots a little while ago but we didn't move forward with it so I would have to get back to you on that. I'm trying to think where that landed. It's definitely possible and like all of our code is out there. Folks wanted to build their own, but it does not. There does not exist one at the moment. We've been putting a lot of our work into hubs cloud recently to versus the discord integration bot and other bots. Yeah, thank you for sharing that link utopia there we have done some like prototypes of using it with slack as well just based on like popular demands so we do have a version of it. And I think that we've created but we have not tested out particularly so I think there are still some limitations with the code that we've got for the slack integration but I do know that it is possible to take that discord bot code and bridge with potentially with some modifications to different platforms so possibly with matrix. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that that Twitter posts from the M3 group. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to jump out of the video call right now but I'm going to hang out in the Mozilla dev room for a while. So feel free to ask any questions that you might have. Thank you for joining us. And see you later. Thank you again for waking up so early. No problem this was really fun. Bye. Bye. So this was our last talk, a really, really nice closing talk and a lot of fun. And we hope to see a lot of you next year. And we hope to see you like physically. So with a COVID vaccine for everyone and you know, so if you want to keep discussing on the channels, feel free to have fun and drink a beer thinking about next year. See you. Thank you.
 Hi, everyone, and thank you so much for joining me today for my presentation, Open, Accessible,  and Delightful, Building the Mozilla Hubs Community During COVID-19.  My name is Elgin, and I'm the Community Manager for Mozilla Hubs.  If you see me at work, I'll probably be looking a little something like this.  I'm coming to you today from inside of Hubs to give you a sense of what it's like to use.  Here's a photo of me to prove that I'm not a robot, although I'm pretty sure that that's  exactly what a robot would say to you.  In this talk, I'm going to introduce you to Hubs, what it is, and how to get started using it.  Then I'd like to showcase some of the amazing projects our community created during this  wild year of working from home, social distancing, and travel restrictions.  Being part of this community and seeing the innovative ways that people are using this  technology has truly brought me joy during this difficult year.  Our team could never have imagined some of the ways that people are using Hubs to connect.  At the same time, we've also faced new challenges this year.  As a Community Manager for a project that's adapting to a new world, I've worked hard  to maintain a community that remains open, accessible, and delightful.  I'm going to conclude this talk with some recommendations of things I've learned over  this past year while managing the transition from being small and experimental to being  a bustling open source community.  I'm hoping that by the end of this talk, you might be convinced to give Hubs a try.  And then hopefully you'll also have some strategies to bring to your own growing communities to  keep them vibrant and healthy.  But before I go any further, some of you may be wondering what the heck is Hubs?  Hubs is an open source project by Mozilla, and with Hubs you can easily create virtual  spaces called rooms to get together with others.  How easy is it to get started?  All you have to do is go to hubs.mozilla.com, press create a room, and with just a few  clicks you'll have your very own private virtual space that you can invite others to  join you in.  And how you use it is up to you.  You can teach a class, collaborate with your team, or host an event.  Maybe you might want to get together with a bunch of friends to discuss your favorite  dog breed, the majestic silken windhound.  Well, that's mine at least.  But getting started on a new platform can be painful.  How many times have you gone to meet with someone and then you've got to download and  install new software first?  Before you could even get in, you're being prompted to set up an account, sign up for  some mailing list, and all you really want to do is just talk about your dog.  Well, to enter into Hubs your guests just have to visit a URL.  There's no software to download, there's no accounts required, and it's free to use.  And what happens if most silken windhound fanciers are already at the dog park and need  to come in from their mobile phone instead of their desktop computer?  Well, that's not a problem either, because Hubs runs in a browser.  So it can be used across devices.  You can come into Hubs on your desktop computer, your mobile phone, or even your VR headset  for an immersive experience.  So you might be wondering, is it like a video chat platform?  Well, not quite.  Hubs has a lot of benefits over many video chat platforms.  First of all, you don't need to be on camera.  Sure, you can share your webcam if you want, but the default is to use avatars, which means  you don't have to worry about the way that you look that day or the environment that  you're in.  Also, it gives you additional privacy when meeting with people you might not know super  well and might not feel comfortable being on a video call with.  Next, you're co-present in a shared virtual space.  You can bring in objects like PDFs, images, videos, 3D models, and screen shares, and  explore them together.  Since you can organize information spatially, we've seen a lot of cool examples from our  community of folks creating things like memory palaces and hubs.  The final important feature that I'll mention that differentiates hubs from video calls  is that there's spatialized audio in the room.  And this is a big one.  This means that the closer someone is to you, the louder they sound, and conversely, the  farther someone is from you, the quieter they sound.  And this makes interacting with other folks in hubs a lot more like meeting with people  in real life.  So while video chat lets one speaker talk to the group at a time, in hubs you can have  multiple conversations happening in different parts of the space at the same time.  And you can move effortlessly between them.  So these are a few of the main differences between hubs and video chat platforms.  We've heard from our community that using hubs can be delightful.  And we use hubs almost exclusively on our team, and we find it so much more playful than traditional  video chat.  This is in large part because of the customizable nature of the avatars and the environments  and the room media.  So to inspire creative expression in hubs, we not only have thousands of community-created  scenes available for use, but if you wanted to create your own scenes or avatars, you  can totally do so.  We have an environment editor that runs in the browser called Spoke, which you can visit  hubs.mazilla.com.  And you can use this to build out a personalized scene.  And if you do 3D modeling, then you can upload custom GLB assets to be either your scene  or your avatar.  And so here are some examples of community-made avatars that we've seen in the last little  while.  So hubs is designed for fairly intimate experiences.  The recommended default is to have 25 people in the room, but you can increase it to as  many as 50 in the room settings.  And given the nature of this conference, many of you are likely wondering what sorts of  technology is hubs built on top of?  We certainly didn't build hubs from scratch all by ourselves.  We're standing on the shoulder of giants.  Hubs is powered by browser-based technology and a ton of open source projects.  So for example, 3JS and networked A-frame.  So if you want to take a closer look at our code base and learn more about the other projects  that are involved, you can check out our GitHub at github.com.mazilla.hubs.  Now, while hubs is built entirely using open source software, setting it up on your own  system or your own server can be a little bit of a finicky process.  There's just a lot of moving parts.  So it can be a little bit complicated and troublesome to set up from scratch.  So last year, one of our big initiatives was launching a product called Hubs Cloud.  And what Hubs Cloud does is it makes the process of taking the code from hubs.mazilla.com and  self-hosting your very own version on a server easier.  So this is a paid service and it's offered on AWS.  And the cost is relative to the size of the servers that you use.  And a portion of this cost comes back to continue our open source work on hubs.  And there's a lot of different benefits to using Hubs Cloud.  And you've got ownership over all the data that goes through.  You can do deeper customizations and it can live at your own domain as well.  And there's more than that as well, but those are some of the big ones that come up all  the time.  So the ability to do really deep customization to the code base.  So I hope that this gives you a better understanding of what Hubs is.  Now I'd like to switch to talking a little bit more about our community.  So Hubs itself is open.  It's an open source project.  It's accessible.  It can be used across different platforms regardless of the type of device you have.  And it's delightful to use.  It's fun and it's creative.  And we try to reflect this in the way that we cultivate our community.  We want our community to feel welcoming, have a low barrier to entry and participation,  and allow users to discover and create experiences that are fun and playful.  So as a community manager, I feel super fortunate to get to work with so many amazing folks.  A project like Hubs gathers a very eclectic group of users.  Our most active community members are not only developers, but also 3D modeling professionals,  DIY artists, educators, community organizers, and more.  And our community's contributions to Hubs are by no means limited to coding.  We work closely with our users.  We're building for our community alongside our community.  So we do our work out in the open in Discord and GitHub.  Our Discord server is super active.  And we not only have people sharing information about Hubs generally, their upcoming events,  and maybe their most recent creations, we also have development channels there where  community members are welcome to participate in our design and development conversations.  Our community is also super unique in that we are ourselves a meeting platform.  So we organize frequent events for people to drop in and meet our team.  So we host a drop in meetup every Friday.  And this meetup originated as a time to kind of kick the tires on new features.  But as our community has grown, it's become a time for folks to give feedback to the team,  ask questions, and my very, very favorite part is showcase their own work.  So we often spend this time traveling to other people's Hubs faces that they've created  to learn more about what they're working on.  This is not only super fun for us as a development team, it's also really helpful for us to better  understand our users' needs and it informs our product roadmap.  I can't count the number of times that we've gotten new feature ideas from these casual  conversations at our meetups.  When I first joined Hubs in August 2019, our community was small but passionate.  Hubs' user base was growing steadily and as we added more features, more people would  join.  Little did we know at the time the important role that remote communication would play  in 2020.  In my job as community manager, I was in frequent communication with many of the folks using  Hubs.  I was very tapped into what the community was doing and I had a good understanding of  most of the events taking place in Hubs.  In early 2020, we were working hard to prepare Hubs Cloud, the AWS service for self-hosting  Hubs.  To prepare for the launch, we were working with a major academic VR conference, IEEE  VR, to run a virtual track for their in-person event.  This would be the very first Hubs Cloud website in production and we were planning for it  to be a nice low stakes testing ground to ensure that everything was working smoothly  before we released Hubs Cloud to the public.  There was going to be some poster sessions and networking events for folks who couldn't  attend the real world event.  We had hosted similar conference events on Hubs.Mazilla.com previously and so it didn't  feel like it was going to be a really big stretch.  Then when we were leading into the event, which was scheduled to start on March 22nd,  you can probably imagine what happened.  This was the time of year when things were just starting to shut down, travel was being  cancelled globally and so with only two weeks to go until the event, the conference moved  to being online only with Hubs as the main venue for this conference with as many as  2,000 attendees.  So with very little time to plan, we jumped into action along with the team from IEEE  VR.  We scaled up our server capacity.  We created additional rooms.  We trained volunteers and troubleshooted last minute bugs and we were building out brand  new features that would be critical to the success of the event up to the very last minute.  It was an enormous effort and a tremendous shout out needs to go to all the conference  organizers and their incredible team of volunteers.  The event was a success.  While we were in the start of a global pandemic, a time when no one could travel and things  were honestly really scary, researchers were still able to come together to network and  showcase their work at a prestigious academic conference.  It was such a relief that this event could still take place.  We ended up taking Hubs Cloud live in April and around this time was a real turning point  for me as a community manager.  I could no longer keep track of the community events happening in Hubs.  We were often learning about gatherings in Hubs through posts on social media after the  fact.  And only a few short weeks after the launch of Hubs Cloud, we happened to come across  an event advertised on Twitter.  It wasn't even in our Discord and we were not even tagged in it.  But it appeared to be an art gallery in Hubs.  So we decided as a team to go check it out.  And I don't know if it was the exhaustion or the stress of lockdown or just the surprise  of being able to go to a social event in an art gallery with friends.  But let me tell you, it was incredible.  I was so emotional afterwards.  So the space I'm talking about was called the Apart Poster Gallery and it was designed  by a team at Paradovsky.  They had had some time available between projects.  They decided to do a fundraiser for the WHO by selling posters by artists that reflected  the impact of social distancing on their lives.  So to showcase the work, the Paradovsky team created a virtual gallery in a customized version  of Hubs.  So the Apart Poster Gallery is still live if you want to go check it out at apartposters.com.  But if you've got...  But I've also got a short video to show you that's got an overview of the different spaces  that they had there.  Let's go in for them.  Hello hydropldriven guide.  And so just as a reminder, this is all just running in the web browser.  This is exactly what we had in mind when we built out hubs and hubs cloud to be customizable.  Not that we imagined someone making this exact gallery, of course, but we wanted to make it  so that people could use our technology and make it truly their own.  And this was just one of many groups that was organizing events to bring people together  during this difficult year.  I'd like to take a few minutes now to showcase some of the other examples to give you a sense  of how other people were using these virtual spaces.  So we saw many artists using hubs as a platform for self-expression and for connecting with  audiences.  For example, St. Motel, a super catchy and very tech savvy band, built a customized world  to represent their most recent album.  In this virtual motel, each room was customized to match the theme of a different song.  In this space, they organized intimate concerts and fan meet and greet since touring wasn't  possible at this time.  Brendan Bradley created a virtual theater called Future Stages and collaborated with other  actors to produce a play in hubs.  They used a really clever combination of green screens, live streams, and VR headsets to create  an immersive theater experience.  So the actors in this video are not actually in the same space as each other.  They're all being kind of merged together using OBS and then projected into the hub  space.  So they were doing some really innovative, cool stuff.  We've also seen lots of artists, both professional and people who are hobby artists, creating  exhibits of their work.  So this is one cool example I wanted to showcase that was created by a community member, Matt  Cool, and it was commissioned by an Instagram user, Brain the Greatest, and it features  work by other artists, including this piece by Marco Doodles.  Macro Doodles.  I'm sorry.  Macro Doodles.  So I wish I had like two more hours to continue going through cool art examples that people  have shared with us, either through social media and through our meetups.  Doodles has been a place to celebrate.  We've seen a marriage in hubs, there have been countless birthday parties, and we've  seen people create special photo galleries to send to each other as gifts.  It's also been a place to remember.  We were all moved when we saw this space by Rem5VR that lays bare the lives lost to COVID-19  in a single day in the United States.  A research team called VR Past and Present, led by Dr. David Hickson and Dr. Jeffrey Vidalha,  are working on a virtual recreation of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, so people  from around the world are able to experience it, even if they can't travel to Washington,  D.C. They led guided tours on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Teachers have remembered loved ones while remaining physically distant inside of hubs.  The innovation ed tech team from Tech de Monterey created a special place to come together  this year for Diaz de Mortis.  There are lots of educators using hubs in all sorts of ways.  Many educators are using it as a teaching tool, a way to provide instruction to students.  One example I totally love is Powell from UCAM University shared how he taught a group  of students how to get started when surfing in VR using hubs.  Another really exciting example of an educator using hubs for teaching is Greg Dorsenville  at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.  He's using giant 3D models to teach classes about human physiology.  He leads students through virtual sessions and uses drawing tools and labels to help  them understand the way that different parts of the body connect.  Hubs has also been a place that educators have used for showcasing students' work.  In these images from George Washington University's Festival of Animation, students displayed  their research findings in an environment based off of their real-world campus.  Following the poster session, students were invited to attend an awards ceremony organized  by faculty.  And there's been no shortage of special events happening in hubs.  Virtual and augmented reality world conference and expo did an amazing job of moving their  event online in a very short period of time.  They created a number of gorgeous spaces for their event, which took part over the course  of a month last June.  And part of the event involved a series of collaborative machinima sessions, where a  team of creatives used hubs for acting out and recording short films.  Beyond this, we've seen conferences, corporate events, and even a craft fair.  Craft-like city helped local artisans sell their work online.  They created special hub spaces to display art to virtual visitors.  And there were links to all the pieces on display in a room so that visitors could easily  go to the online shop and purchase them.  So these are just a taste of some of the ways that people have come together safely in hubs  during the pandemic.  And there are so many more examples.  As our community adapted to the online first world, our team was adapting to the influx  of new community members and growing interest in hubs.  With this, I want to finish my presentation with a summary of three things I found helpful  for building an open, accessible, and delightful community during my time as community manager  in 2020.  First, make it easy on your community.  Making it easy for other folks to find what they need takes more work up front, but it  will make life easier for you in the long run.  We were answering community questions on Discord, which worked super well in the early days of  hubs.  But as we scaled, this soon became impossible to maintain.  Search isn't great on Discord, and we were finding ourselves having to answer the same  questions again and again.  We worked hard to improve our documentation this year, and we added search to our Docs  site.  We slowly moved our support off of Discord and over to GitHub discussions, which we  found to be a very helpful tool for managing our Q&A.  And we even went so far as to copy and paste questions from our Discord chats into the  GitHub discussions so that we can answer them there.  It was more work for us at the time, but it meant it would be easier for folks to find  going forward.  These efforts reduced our community workload significantly, allowing us to focus our efforts  on other work.  We had to set up these new processes while adapting to everything else going on in the  world.  For your own communities, if possible, try to remove frictions for users so you can  make life easier for yourself in the future.  We waited until the pandemic to do this, but you might find it helpful to set up robust  information searching systems before you need them.  Second, keep your community welcoming by being proactive with moderation.  The job of moderating content is difficult and requires constant learning and adapting.  You'll expect trolley and spammy behavior in any online community, but there's also  a gray area of behavior that it might be difficult to determine whether it's really  against the community guidelines or not.  A community manager I admire once told me, your community becomes what the worst behavior  you're willing to walk by and say nothing about.  Through this lens, it makes it easier to decide when to take action on questionable behavior.  As a community manager, an open source maintainer, or an active participant in an online community,  it's up to you to set the tone.  So this year I found it really helpful to revise our community guidelines to make it  easier to identify behavior that didn't uphold our values and the standards of our community.  And I also made sure to keep really good notes on any issues that did come up and the actions  that our team took.  So though as new things came up, as new issues arose, we could escalate them quickly and fairly,  and this could be done by anyone on our team, not just myself.  Finally, be part of your community.  On our team, we have an authentic connection with our community.  We've heard from many folks that they feel like they're part of our team.  We make ourselves available.  I hold office hours twice per week for people to ask questions.  And our team attends a weekly meetup that is open to the public so we can chat with  our community face to face or avatar to avatar in this case.  And we hold special events and field trips to explore our community spaces and celebrate  them.  This helps us learn more about the work they're doing and helps us build a better hubs.  Our team is truly inspired by the work that our community creates.  Does this scale?  Well, there is a trade-off between time spent working on the product and engaging with the  community.  We've got kind of like a feedback loop happening in ours where we build features and then we  learn how folks are using them and then we use that knowledge to be able to iterate on  those features and build new ones.  We've definitely found it worthwhile.  Mozilla is a very data privacy-oriented organization and we gather very little information about  how our users are using hubs.  So meeting with people that are actually using the product is great and it's a fully transparent  way to find out how they're using hubs without collecting more data than we need.  Now to help our team build out the product and reduce information overload for new users,  we've recently added some sensible defaults for new users in Discord to make the development  channels viewable by opt-in only.  Now most of our users don't need to see the development channels but they might want to  check them out and participate.  So all they have to do is use an emoji reaction in Discord to reveal them.  In conclusion, hubs is a great way to bring your community together safely even when you  need to be physically distant.  It runs in the browser and it works across devices with no installation or downloads required  and it's free to use on hubs.mozilla.com.  With the world going remote in 2020, we saw a huge increase in interest in hubs and an  unprecedented number of folks joining our own community.  To help manage this, I found it really helpful to make information more easy to find, to  be proactive with our moderation and to continue being actively engaged with our community.  I hope that seeing some of these incredible examples may have inspired you to give hubs  a try and maybe even bring it to your own communities.  Perhaps you might want to host your own silken windhound or a golden retriever or labradoodle  meetup.  So if you do want to give it a try, to get started, just go to hubs.mozilla.com and if  you want to join our community, definitely check out the community button on our website.  That will take you to our Discord server.  Thank you so much for your time today and if you've got questions or want to follow up  with me, you can reach me at emaclaren.mozilla.com or reach out to me on Twitter at either the  Mozilla Hubs handle which is at Mozilla Hubs or you can reach me at my own personal handle  which is at Elgin Sky.  Have a good one and enjoy the rest of the conference.  Oh, hi.  Am I on video now?  You are and the sound is clear.  Okay, great.  It says live, right?  You need to say recording before you answer any questions if you want things to be recorded  in the Q&A session and be live on the video.puzzle.org starting next week.  Okay, how do I go about adding the recording button?  There's no need to.  It's automatic.  Okay, perfect.  Just answer questions if people show up.  Know your life.  Okay, great.  Yeah, sorry, I didn't realize.  So we have at most 35 minutes for Q&A.  Okay, perfect.  Well, thank you folks for joining me today.  It's super early here.  I'm over in Pacific Time, Canada and I'm super happy to answer any questions that you folks  might have.  The Q&A hasn't started yet.  So my Q&A hasn't started yet.  There's no people in the room.  Oh, okay.  No, it's like the previous talk.  The Q&A is happening in the main hall.  Okay, good.  It's a bit confusing.  In terms of answering the questions, I see that in the main hall there is or like the  Mozilla Deverem, there's some questions coming in.  I'll just kind of go through them one second.  Just trying to get caught up on some of this.  Okay, so I hope that I'm not missing any at the start.  I'm going to kind of start by someone was asking about the shortest path to integrate some  stuff based on A-frame and hubs.  So A-frame is part of the tools that we use for building out hubs.  It's not super easy to incorporate your own A-frame code.  So being able to inject code is something that we'd like to look at in the future.  But for the time being, if you did want to add your own custom A-frame, you'd need to  run your own custom version of hubs, which you can do either through creating like a  fork on GitHub and then we've got instructions on how to do that there.  But Hubs Cloud is probably the best way.  And Hubs Cloud lets you self-host your own version of hubs.  And so you can have like your own stack and you can make all the changes that you want  to it.  I would add a little warning though that if you start making changes to Hubs Cloud, if  you're self-hosting, then one thing that can come up is that then if we create updates  to hubs and then push them out to the Hubs Cloud stacks, it can make it kind of a nightmare  to integrate the changes because if you've like modified the stack and if we'd like  changed some things.  But there are ways of doing this in a way that are not as painful as others.  So I just wanted to add that warning there.  Can you record a meeting in Mozilla Hubs?  That is not something that's possible at the moment.  What we do for recording meetings in Mozilla Hubs is using OBS.  So we just use recording software on our computer.  This is something that I would love to see us add in the future, but it's kind of technically  challenging due to the fact that like you don't know which viewpoint you should be recording  from.  But I definitely will take note of your interest in that because it's something that I would  love to see as a feature at some point in the long-term future.  I see a question about diaporama applications, so LibreOffice presentations.  So you can import media into the room.  You can bring in PDFs and images and videos and sounds, but you can't bring in like PowerPoint  or presentations of file formats that are not necessarily like websites.  So anything that can load really easily on a website can come into Hubs pretty easily.  But for a LibreOffice presentation, what you could do is you could either screen share  it in or you could export it as a PDF and bring it in.  Yeah.  Kyra.  Kyra, that's a really good thing that you're mentioning.  We actually, we just finished like doing a hack week where we just kind of did some  like fiddling around with different sorts of just kind of not personal projects, but  like things that the community has asked for that we have not built out yet.  And setting up a camera inside of the Hubs space was one of the things that we explored  just to see like if we could.  And we were doing some like explorations into like sending videos straight to Zoom and whatnot.  So you could always just be an avatar in a virtual world.  Anyways, we'll be sharing more information about that.  We're going to do a live stream talking about what we came up with in our hack week in the  near future.  But definitely like, yeah, having a camera position in the space could be a good option  for that.  Yeah.  So a question about it becoming another second life.  That's a really, really good question.  So one thing that kind of differentiates Hubs from a lot of other platforms like for  example, there's different VR platforms like All Space VR as well, VR chat.  Hubs has kind of intentionally been designed to be used for small communities and small  events.  So it's meant to be a place for you to get together with people that you already are  familiar with or in a community with yourself.  So like you're not going in necessarily to meet with like total strangers or like explore  a ton of virtual worlds.  It's more to like create your own private spaces.  So I think in that sense that it's quite different than a lot of the other like virtual  worlds tools that are out there.  Someone was asking about iframes.  I will add a little caveat, watch for our live stream of what we're doing during a hack week  this week.  Iframes don't work at the moment, but conceptually it might be something that's possible.  Okay yeah, so Kyra asked a really great question.  What are the restrictions on amounts of objects and triangles in an environment when also  wanting to get 10 plus people meeting in there?  So exactly.  So avatar and scene objects sum up in dragging down performance at some point.  So basically you have a budget and that budget is sort of based on the type of devices people  come in on.  So one of the things that's a bit challenging about Hubs is that because it's super accessible  across devices, so you can come in on a VR headset or a mobile phone or on a desktop computer.  You also have like a lot of different processing power in those three different types of devices.  So a desktop computer will be able to handle a lot more stuff in the room than for example  like an old smartphone.  However, that being said, what we do is we recommend people not having more than like  25 people in the room because once you get above that it starts to be maybe a bit challenging  for people on mobile phones, although you can push it higher.  But as you mentioned of all the avatar and scene objects, they all add up to be like  part of the budget.  So there are, we kind of as a guideline, we suggest that like scenes should be no bigger  than like 20 megabytes.  And if possible, keep avatars to 10 megabytes if you're bringing in like custom avatars  and to keep the number of triangles in the scene down to about 20,000, which is a little  bit hard to do.  But like, you know, if you want to have a really performant environment, then keeping  it to about 20,000 triangles is really, really helpful.  But you can push it way further than that, you just have to recognize that you might  not get 25 people in there if you've got a really complex photogrammetry model like  that Martin 15 when I showed earlier.  And then there's questions about desktop application.  So we are not planning on doing a desktop app at the moment.  We really want it to be like browser based and have everything, yeah, just running through  the browser.  That being said, that does sound like a pretty bad amount of latency.  So I'm not sure exactly why that's happening.  It could be the room that got loaded automatically or it might just be like maybe the browser  that you're using also can make a big difference.  But I would definitely, if you do find that there's really poor performance on your laptop,  like I would absolutely love to know.  It can also matter what your Wi-Fi connection is like as well.  So if you do have any trouble when you're going in there, you can email us at hubsatmazzilla.com  if you find that it's pretty bad and with a little bit more information about your, like,  what's going on because, you know, we use it often on our own computers and we don't  see any problems because we're obviously developing with like our nice modern computers  and like good internet connections and whatnot.  So it's definitely helpful to hear back if people are having performance issues just  so we can help troubleshoot it.  Just trying to catch up on the chat.  Thanks all.  Yeah.  Someone asked about simplifying avatars to being like colored floating spheres with names  about them.  Yes, totally.  In fact, that was the original design for hubs where just these like blogs with smiley  faces on them and they're actually really cute.  So, I don't know how to say that you use any of that but Geo Isco, are there any applications  in Mozilla Hubs?  I saw a camera for making photos in the 3D environment, something else.  So just to make sure I understand, are you asking about like things to do inside of the  space?  So if you are, there's a few different things inside of hubs.  You can use the camera.  There's also a pen tool if you want to do some drawing and we find that people, they  often bring their own kinds of stuff to do inside of these spaces.  So our team, for example, when we go in, we will bring in gifts.  Well, like we have all of our meetings and hubs, first of all, and like every time we've  got a meeting and like, you know, it ends in like a little bit of social time at the  end and like we'll bring in gifts or like show off videos that we found online or, you  know, just kind of bring in materials to kind of laugh about and joke about.  We, again, as I mentioned earlier, like we've got some things that we're thinking about  doing in the future.  One of the things that our community asks for quite a bit, which we have not had a chance  to work on yet, but hopefully will be added in the future is the ability to add some basic  scripting.  So again, this is not something that's coming anytime in the immediate future.  But once you can add your own custom elements in there, it makes playing games and stuff  inside of hubs potentially possible.  So this is something that hopefully we'll be able to build out in the future so people  can take it and like, you know, build their own extensions and, you know, do other fun  stuff with it.  So again, this doesn't exist yet, but I appreciate you asking about like what there is to do  in there.  And, you know, it's just, it's something that we see a lot of possibility for in the future.  But for the time being, hang out, draw things, bring in media, have meetings, hang out.  Yeah, so we've had musicians who have been using it.  Typically when we've had musicians playing in hubs, they usually will be in the same  physical place just to present latency.  Like if they're playing, you know, proper like rhythmic music.  However, we have seen a lot of users using it for cool stuff remotely where it's not  as, I don't know what the word would be for this, but like where it's a little bit more  ambient sort of sound.  So we've seen a lot of musicians who come in with different avatars and they each play  their own little section, but all the sections don't have to be perfectly timed because there  is a little bit of a delay in between, you know, just like when you're using Zoom or  whatever, it's hard for musicians to sing or perform over Zoom because there's that little  bit of a latency.  But we've seen a lot of artists doing some really cool stuff with this.  In fact, there's an audio art show that's happening concurrently to this.  I'm going to be popping over there after this is done.  That was organized by a group in Montreal.  How long does a room exist?  That's a really good question.  So a room at the moment, rooms that are created, they exist forever.  So if you create a room, you can always come back as long as you remember the URL.  If you did want to close it, then there is a button for closing down your room, but that's  permanent and so no one will be able to come back to it.  But yeah, you can create a room and then come back anytime in the future.  Oh yeah, there have been people playing with bot creation.  There's been some really neat stuff with like there was a group that did some performances  inside of hubs recently with bots.  And so like in their room, every 15 minutes, there'd be a dance performance of like a recording  of people in VR doing this dance together.  And it was really, really cool.  So we're just starting to like scratch the surface of what people can do.  There's a lot of potential and I'm just so excited to see more artists using it for creating  full spaces.  Kyro, that's a really great question.  I don't know.  Utopia, you did something kind of similar to that, didn't you?  Were you?  Yeah, yeah, you did.  But I don't quite remember exactly how you set that up and how intense of that was.  Yeah, Kyro actually, Utopia's video that he shared will probably go a long way in answering  that because that's exactly what he did.  Let's see if artist work can ask.  Yeah, please do let me know if you do have any other questions.  I'm super happy to answer them.  Thank you so much for coming to my talk today.  It was really fun to prepare.  I had a blast going through all the old community stuff that had been taking place in the last  little while.  Well, thank you for giving the talk.  It was really, really nice.  And thank you for getting up so early to answer the questions.  So thank you.  Oh, anytime.  Well, actually, no, I don't know if I want to make a habit of giving up at 7 or 6 o'clock  in the morning on a Saturday morning.  Yes, I don't recommend doing that long time.  But it was worth it and good questions as well.  And also, I really wanted to say that I appreciate the feedback that I got from folks about usability  concerns and issues.  This is definitely something that I would want to play for our design team as we start  to do a lot more research on kind of like the usability of hubs going forward.  So super, super appreciate that.  Thank you.  I cause my email.  And loving the confetti as it comes up.  Yeah, that's a great question.  So if too many people come into a space, it doesn't like block anyone from coming in.  Oh my gosh, it's snowing in the chat.  So it doesn't block anyone from coming in, but basically you have a limited number of people that can appear in the room as an avatar.  And so once you get to the 25 person max, for example, if that's what your maximum is anyone further who comes in will like be able to watch from outside of the room, but they won't have a microphone connected and they won't have an avatar inside of the space so they can just watch from outside.  Oh, that's a really good questions. What should the community do to most help hubs.  Okay, so from a selfish standpoint, I want people to be building out cool stuff. The work that utopia has been doing to build out cool examples of like possibilities of things you can do with hubs has been super super helpful.  So just creating neat things that are weird and artistic that we can share. And if you do create them. We have Twitter handle at mazala hubs that I keep a close eye on.  So I definitely we watch everything that comes in there we like and retweet things and we do keep a record of it. And we often get people coming to ask, you know, what can you do with hubs and like it's so cool to be able to just bombard them with a fire hose of like amazing cool.  And like we're different stuff that people are doing inside of the space.  If you are interested more from like getting involved we are working.  There's not like if you put a tear emoji is it going to make the screen cry in the chat.  But if you want to get more involved than that or involve differently we're working on localization at the moment so that's something it's not launched yet but in the near future we're hoping to get different languages posted and shared so we're going to be looking for help with that.  And then we also, you know, if you are a person who's, you know, wanting to make an open source contribution. We have a lot of bugs that can that could be fixed so you know you can check out our GitHub page we've got issues listed there.  And if you do have questions you can email me at hubs at mazala.com.  But yeah there's there's all sorts of ways just creating cool stuff to if you are a 3D modeler.  If you are interested in creating models for hubs like avatars that use our skeleton would be super helpful, because you know it just having new, like new cool stuff coming through is great keeps our product looking fresh.  Can we have matrix integration into hubs.  Yeah, that's a good question.  There is a discord integration basically that lets you have authentication into your hub space based on being a discord server.  I don't know if there's going to be any work on doing one for matrix in the near future it's something that we talked about a little while ago but I don't actually know where things landed with that.  So we were doing some exploration into other bots a little while ago but we didn't move forward with it so I would have to get back to you on that.  I'm trying to think where that landed.  It's definitely possible and like all of our code is out there.  Folks wanted to build their own, but it does not. There does not exist one at the moment.  We've been putting a lot of our work into hubs cloud recently to versus the discord integration bot and other bots.  Yeah, thank you for sharing that link utopia there we have done some like prototypes of using it with slack as well just based on like popular demands so we do have a version of it.  And I think that we've created but we have not tested out particularly so I think there are still some limitations with the code that we've got for the slack integration but I do know that it is possible to take that discord bot code and bridge with potentially with some modifications to different platforms so possibly with matrix.  Yeah.  Yeah.  It's interesting that that Twitter posts from the M3 group.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Okay, I'm going to jump out of the video call right now but I'm going to hang out in the Mozilla dev room for a while. So feel free to ask any questions that you might have.  Thank you for joining us.  And see you later.  Thank you again for waking up so early. No problem this was really fun.  Bye.  Bye.  So this was our last talk, a really, really nice closing talk and a lot of fun. And we hope to see a lot of you next year. And we hope to see you like physically.  So with a COVID vaccine for everyone and you know, so if you want to keep discussing on the channels, feel free to have fun and drink a beer thinking about next year.  See you.  Thank you.
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