Let's talk about good content on the internet, and the current/future of virtual reality applications

Let's talk about good content on the internet, and the current/future of virtual reality applications.

>VRchat
Still seems to be going strong thanks to actual live socialization as opposed to the facebook/twitter norms and user creativity

>Stumbleupon
Has unfortunately died without my knowledge in the last year. It's been replaced by 'mix.com' which seems to be a vastly inferior attempt at forcing users into a social media platform rather than an internet discovery engine. For those unaware, stumbleupon was both a website and firefox browser addon popular in the 2000s that used a 'stumble' button to browse to a random website in a huge user created library within specific categories like 'art' 'music' 'history' 'science' etc. It was special in that it wasn't governed by google's search algorithms.

>JanusVR
youtu.be/4Ynck-x1iEI
Something I followed a few years ago, unsure of its popularity. It's an application that attempts to visualize the web, where every link is a doorway, and every website is a room. It has its own markup language, and 'sites' can be just about anything. Unfortunately the default, at least during my time with it, was a square room with the site content on the walls. I assume VRchat has adopted much of the same functionality. It's worth a look if you have a decent computer and enjoy exploring. Look for the 'VRsites' room that looks like a big stacked mall full of doors. Some of the user sites were quite interesting.

So what interesting things have you found lately? Any cool sites to share?

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Other urls found in this thread:

fauux.neocities.org/
streak.club
write.as
keb.now.sh
web.archive.org/web/20050205103303/http://www.mpogd.com:80/games/name.asp
youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw
youtube.com/watch?v=CBBdOFZPoIw
internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Is tonight too busy a night to have a discussion?

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No but its about bideogaymes so no one here cares

This is actually a good thread but it's too late here.. bump

Bump up for interesting thread

I guess you could consider VR applications a kind of video game. But then your browser would also be a video game.

This thread though, is more of a general discussion of interesting web content and web discovery. As its very hard these days to find unique content that isn't streamed through the social media pipelines. It's up to users now to create and share their lists. My focus on VR in the OP is due to it being interesting, and a good means of content discovery.

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Why are you hex maniac avatarfagging?

He's image dumping, this was common pre 2007

There's a nice Lain fansite here: fauux.neocities.org/
One of the scenes makes my monitor emit a fairly loud high-frequency tone.

I really like the aesthetic. I've never seen lain, the first time it was ever recommended to me was during the height or Ragnarok online's popularity, so it must have aged very well to still be talked about today. Have you found any other good sites on neocities?

You know, I guess I never thought about it, but finding good websites is an actual problem, as much as content discovery is on each individual website. However, usually how I find any sites or content that might interest me is by browsing Jow Forums, Reddit, Youtube, etc. I've found that that has satisfied me sufficiently.

As far as innovations go, VR-AR is quite interesting to me, and I do believe it'll be the primary way we access the web in the future. Not necessarily through physical rooms or whatever, but simply by using the headset to set up virtual windows/monitors. However, webs page may augment themselves with 3D elements and 3D content, which is a welcome addition especially when content creation in 3D (live captured or 3DCG) becomes much easier in the future, along with faster internet speeds.

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The web previously was made up of many projects of individuals without as much business involvement. Businesses later took over and dissolved the web into the big sites we know today like google, facebook, youtube etc. Its very difficult for content to survive outside of that system.

I have faith in VR at the moment, since they haven't been successfully infiltrated by advertising and businesses yet. So its very similar to the old internet of discovery I know and love.

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Is it just me or is everybody suddenly talking about VR? I just bought an Oculus a few days ago.

>saving the sample

>suddenly
Not really, though there might be a bit more that came along with Black Friday sales.

I recently severed all connections with my real world self to my online "anonymous" profiles. in doing so, I also deleted my social network profiles, and began using FOSS/federated social networks. two of which I like are:

streak.club
>social site where you can host creative streaks. by the creator of itch.io and MoonScript

write.as
>minimalist, federated blogging platform that is FOSS and you can host your own instance

let me know if you guys know any other cool user-driven sites like these that don't try to track me

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Itch.io seems like a really good site. I've checked out lots of free games there, though the paid stuff is an uncomfortable addition, maybe it helps them keep it afloat. Also LOTS of tumblr visual novels cluttering the good games. I will check out these other sites.

I need to go through my Hex folder sometime.

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There has been a bit of a VR boom in the last couple of years. I don't think it has as much support as it needs, but I think if it remains a niche it still has a lot of creative potential. Remember that this place too, was a niche at its greatest times of content creation.

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let me know if you like em. my personal page is keb.now.sh if anyone cares

I always thought a VR was a meme but I've been fucking blown away. God I hope research continues. If they can get the resolution up, increase the FOV, and fix the white-bloom, it would be fucking amazing.

I mean a really simple test for success is to make a well established idea like the .hack series MMOrpg 'the world'. Users in that game were just using controllers and simple VR headsets, i'm sure a fanmade proof of concept or clone is very possible with current technology.

With occulus dk2 back when I first tried it, the 'screen door effect' where your eyes are so close to the tiny screens that you can see that you're looking at tiny little cubes rather than your environment was very jarring. Im not sure if that is still the case. I tried a Vive demo recently and didnt notice it, but wasn't specifically looking for it.

There is definitely great potential with VR just in terms of immersion. Being able to load up a visual of an area and move around in it is very engrossing, it doesn't need to look like real life, we just need more interaction with surroundings.

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I have the latest Oculus, not sure what model that is. I can definitely see the edges if I look for them. Maybe I should've bought a Vive, I heard that it has a larger FOV.

I'm pretty sure the deciding factor is the resolution of the screens, though I don't consider it a huge problem since I can forget about the room just looking at a monitor in the dark long enough. Though it definitely helps. According to their respective websites, the occulus is 1080x1200 while the vive is 2160x1200

>The web previously was made up of many projects of individuals without as much business involvement. Businesses later took over and dissolved the web into the big sites we know today like google, facebook, youtube etc. Its very difficult for content to survive outside of that system.
You nailed exactly how I feel. Fuck, I have no idea what happened to fan forums and IRC channels and all that great shit. It feels like now, everything's just a Reddit page, like all the other Reddit pages. I have no fucking clue where to find cool communities any more. I can't even find fucking Discord servers that aren't just homogeneous, 18000k-user ones like all the others. I feel like there's gotta still be shit like that which existed in the good old days out there. I'll be damned as to where to find it, though.

Well, IRC is still around, and there are some smaller discord servers, but most of them are still serving up the same content as everywhere else, kind of like how Jow Forums is everywhere as much as the latest imgur or reddit frontpage item is everywhere.

But this is what these threads are for, discovering and sharing new content and tools. Maybe I should turn it into a semi weekly general or something? We had a lot of good discussion all the others times, but I'm not sure what abbreviation would be good to help people find it.

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Sure, a recurring thread sounds like it'd be pretty great. This one is already damn comfy, despite (because of?) the low post count. I also think that VR's probably the future for internet communities, especially now that meme-loving 13-year-olds have moved on from that Ugandan Knuckles fad to the next meme craze. One thing that unnerves me is that VRChat is completely centralized, being a centrally-managed application rather than a decentralized protocol. Hopefully this becomes rectified in the future, but I can only see the problem getting worse.

As for my inability to find communities, I suppose that these small comfy Discord servers do exist, but I feel as if they're unicorns, or pots of gold at the end of rainbows. I hear about them all the time, but they might as well be mythical. Simply using search engines to find servers related to my interests tends to yield nothing. Oh well, that's mainly my problem. Maybe you've experienced something similar, maybe not.

Stumble upon dying really marks the end of that era of the internet being the wild west. Consider that back then there were hundreds of sites people would frequent on a daily basis. Now the majority of the internet is just 20 or so sites, with some niche groups here and there.

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I don't really mind VRchat being centralized long as those managing it aren't messing with the content, but you're right, down the road it could be the same problem. We need to make sure there's a way for anyone to have a site and connect it. Even if all the most popular stuff was in the center, users would have the option of exploring the outskirts and finding unpopular niche content. It wouldnt be hidden like a standard search engine because it would all be visualized.

Oh it was more than just hundreds, thousands upon thousands. There were definitely popular outliers. At my school it was deviantart and fanart central since I was around a lot of art students. Also newgrounds which for me I discovered around 2003, that was my addition to my classmates who knew nothing about it.

In the days of tf2's popularity I saw lots of links to gamebanana for mods, as well as some forum offshoots to facepunch for generals that was kind of like somethingawful.

Flash sites were a huuuge thing in middle school. Most of my classmates went to neopets, joecartoon, albinoblacksheep, ebaumsworld, whoever hosted happytreefriends, I think mondo media? Also newgrounds for a few specific flash series. As well as "alfysworld" for a number of online flash games like Pang and some kind of galaga knockoff. Oh, and geocities and myspace. Lots and lots of unique sites that arent used much today

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i only clicked because of hex maniac

i just wanted you to know that op

I want to go back to those halcyon days. Finding new things was one of the most enjoyable parts of the internet growing up. I was so fascinated by a system that connected people that I ended up becoming a certified Network dude, even if I didn't get a job in that. Back when I was in school it was lots of DeviantArt and fanfiction.net around my group of Sonic OC making tard friends. Also lots of anime galleries and crappy MMOs.

I used to frequent mpogd.com I've yet to meet anyone else who knew of it besides my local friend. It doesn't seem to be up anymore but here's what it looked like in 05.
web.archive.org/web/20050205103303/http://www.mpogd.com:80/games/name.asp

It was basically an A-Z directory of online games that was kept up to date as they came out. I discovered all of those old mmos like Rakion, florensia, GunZ, Graal online, RO, Redmoon, Helbreath, Tibia, runescape, etc and so forth. My typical day if I wasn't playing anything would involve checking the directory A-Z looking through screenshots and game sites for new entries.

That's perfectly fine, have another.

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Question, do you think there is any way that someone could somehow diversify website traffic outside of those giants?

If youve worked on that for about an hour 30 mins then i give that site a 6 out of 10. Im bookmarking this though. We need more people with personal sites.

its like with everything

less technical backwards bullshit
more real content, please
more fluff, please
more real knowledge, please

things get more complicated and less complex
back in the day, things were less complicated but more complex

look at D&D after 2nd edition
look at web development: not semantic, more complicated, but less real information, more confusion, more lying, more typing, less wisdom

it's all smoke and mirrors, nothing is real anymore
words got empty, like peoples minds and hearts

the emperor is not wearing any clothes, everyone knows, no one says it

Just in case someone doesn't know about it:
>neocities.org
It has that old geocities vibe, and the frontpage also has a site index.
I've seen some interesting pages and discovered some music in them. Give it a go.

>The most followed site on the index

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>any way to diversify web traffic outside of giants
I'm not entirely sure, I think what stumbleupon was doing was a good alternative even if it required a lot of randoming to find something you liked. I actually discovered a lot of webcomics that way. Speaking of which, a lot of webcomics were all connected to the same advertising share, ans frequently networked and linked to each other without using google adwords. It's a good example of sites promoting each other. Plus a lot of artists would do guest comics to fill in when a regular artist was away, which often brought new traffic to their sites. I doubt their method made big bucks, but it was certainly more interesting. When I finish my programming course i'll be looking to impliment some means to network fringe sites, but i'm still brainstorming.

It is a lot harder to find straght answers. It used to be paywall and account barriers on links. I didnt mind registering for info, though it was annoying. But now you have to do that, get served ads, have ads in the article, and still get lied to!

I need to put more effort into my site and do some regular updates even if no one sees or reads them, its a good personal exercise in creativity and consistency, I would encourage everyone to give it a go too.

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Found some alarming news to go along with our topic. Remember that group advertising for webcomics I mentioned? I guess they closed down this year. Read their statement in pic related.

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I'm waiting for eye tracking before I buy a vr headset.
Eye tracking is going to open a completely new control interface in vr

>However, webs page may augment themselves with 3D elements and 3D content,
That is so unambitious. Your optical sensors are a bottleneck.

There was this one Sonic forum I used to go to like every day after school. It would play Sonic music anytime you went to it. I wish I still remembered what it was called but it's surely gone by now.

I would be interested in reading it. You certainly seem interesting to me.

This thread is comfy and I'm glad I started reading it, please let this continue past just a single iteration.

The fact OP mentioned .hack above at some point gives me hope.

I've been frustrated with being unable to join in with social VR experiences precisely because whenever I look at it I feel like I'm watching a brand new community forming that has yet to get the inevitable tarring of mainstream appeal.

I also realise my web consumption had stagnated over the years in terms of the site numbers I frequented. I guess it's normal.

I'd be interested in your site too, hexanon

I'm sure there must be some unofficial methods by now, as soon as you mentioned it this old video came to mind youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw
I mean if this guy was doing head tracking with wiimote sensors, surely some kind of bootleg eye tracking is possible by logging the positions of your pupils or something. It doesnt sound like it would need extra hardware to do.

I think most geocities and myspace pages could play music via a plugin. I remember gaia pages running them too. Funny that they've all disappeared, maybe it was prior to copyright really being enforced?

I would say get involved and explore, but don't tie yourself down to anything that might make you not want to come back. I've visited some 3D settings that look like Cave Story levels, or the firelink shrine and chatted with a few people and went on my way. I don't have any regular community I need to report back to.

I'm a bit of an introvert outside of these threads, but maybe i'll post a link sometime down the line when I feel I have something worth sharing. I think those interested in content discovery should make a neocities site, and network with fellow anons and share a link to each others sites in one of their sections, or at least interesting sites you've discovered so far.

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>I'm sure there must be some unofficial methods by now
There is, tobii eye tracking.
I was considering buying it, but apparently the quality is low. It's also very expensive.
I'm going to wait to an integrated device, especially because if I'm the only guy with eye tracking no software is going to use it.
here's a cool demo
youtube.com/watch?v=CBBdOFZPoIw

That's pretty interesting though as a proof of concept. I've always thought about how being able to guide something like an RTS with my eyes would help. Even something simple like controlling camera movement, or detecting thr general cluster of units to know which ones to quickly select would cut down heavily on mouse movements.

>I've always thought about how being able to guide something like an RTS with my eyes would help
I want a vr anime girl that blushes when I look under her skirt, but that too

I'm pretty sure that exists now even without eye tracking.

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>get involved and explore
Yeah I want to see all this stuff forming, I love watching things change and grow and I guess I'm just tired of seeing things get watered down, for lack of a better description.
I do know what you mean with no community to report back to though, independence of movement is nice.

>It wouldnt be hidden like a standard search engine because it would all be visualized
Yeah, this thread is for NPCs only.

That's a surprising conclusion, what makes you say that?

This thread is like when a girl complains about something and you try to figure out a solution but then they get angry at you because all they actually wanted was empathy. It's just an attention seeking circle jerk.

i like the show but pretentious teenagers make me wanna hate it
shit sucks man

Are there archives of most visited sites from 1995-2010 by each year? It would be interesting to see the old internet traffic and if any of these sites are still in operation today

I work at a VR company. We're doing virtual reality concerts and live events. Basically it's like VR chat for the Oculus Go/Rift but it's based around licensed music and events. We're in Series B funding and we're gonna be one of the first to get the Oculus Quest.
Ask me anything(im the lead Technical artist so I do all the GPU programming and optimized 8k(4k per eye) stereo video decoding and such using a proprietary bitrate optimization that only streams in parts of the 360 video that you are looking at. Primarily targeting the Oculus Go atm)

Some cool stuff I've been personally doing lately is having "raytraced" audio to simulate spacial reverb and such in real time. It's similar to Nvidia VR works but I recently got an rtx 2080ti and will be applying it to using a raymarching solution so that it will work on dynamic objects and actually simulate volumetrics very quickly . Which will add a lot of immersion in the space of real-time spacial VR audio.
I taught myself LaTeX for this

That's surprising that you guys decided to go with the oculus instead if the vive, is oculus providing funding?

To put it simply. The Oculus Go has hit hard with the normies and that's a part of our target demographic. The Oculus Go is somehow a really really big hit for the more casual users and while we don't have direct support from oculus yet we're planning to get a reseller license to be able to ship and sell branded(company branding or for a particular artist) Oculus Gos that come with a ticket or two for a show.We plan to hit other platforms though. We still have a stack of unopened PS4s and psvrs at work for when we finally go in and target it. At the moment everything is programmed in anticipation of being multiplatform and everything we have would work on the vive pretty out of the box. We recently started to implement some networking(photon) and voip stuff that spans across all platforms.

I'll probably make a neocities today actually. This thread had me find a lot of cool sites that I would have never heard of otherwise. I think we should make this a recurring thread where we just share things we find on the net. And post hex maniac

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>VRchat
I've wanted to commit suicide both times since I've been there. I've only started VRchat when drunk and bored, and every time I've felt embarrassed for several days after. Especially when I talk to people about how drunk I am.

Just make a new username and discard the old one. New identity every time. It's not like anyone remembers anything but a username anyway.

That's the plan. Just collect sites or interesting shit you found through the week, and share it with your fellow anons.

internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/