I enjoy playing around with new social VR platforms. Mozilla Hubs continues to interest me because of its capability to be launched in a browser. I’ve talked about Mozilla Hubs in the past. Since then, I’ve played around with their world creation tools and learned more about it.

Creating a Room

Making a room in Hubs is similar to making a room anywhere else. I first start with building it in blender. I modeled out a small amphitheater world. To move the mesh to hubs, you have to use their world editing program called Spoke. There are a couple ways to move meshes into Spoke. You can upload the mesh to Sketchfab and use a Sketchfab link or you can drag a GLB file into the program. GLB files save more information than most 3D file formats and to work with Hubs, you must export a GLB file. Sketchfab will convert your file to GLB automatically, which is why it works.

Mozilla offers a Blender addon to help with exporting glb files for Hubs. You can find that tool here.

Using Spoke

Spoke is the game engine that helps you create rooms. The engine works in the browser. I am most familiar with using Unity as a game engine, and I found Spoke tools more or less intuitive. Its a simple engine and starting scenes are easy to understand. Since all aspects of Hubs works in the browser, I try to create a very optimized project. I make sacrifices to poly count, and compress textures before exporting the file.

Publishing

You can publish your spaces directly from Spoke. The process from importing the file to visiting the room was very quick. So far my experience with Hubs has been very good. I enjoy how easy it is to create a room. The controls in game can get confusing for new players. Overall, I really like this platform and I plan to continue to build on it.

This is just a quick post to showcase some of the things I’ve been testing. When looking at new platforms, I like to try and understand the limits of that platform. I don’t think you’ll get a lot of organic visits to spaces in Hubs, but I think it can be great if you want to showcase a VR environment to people who have never used social VR.

Visit this room in hubs