The Mozilla Mixed Reality group has recently announced Hubs Cloud, a new offering that lets businesses create designated private social layouts that are compatible with mobile, desktop, and virtual reality (VR) headsets.
Hubs Cloud is an offering that features the fundamental architecture of hubs.mozilla.com. It is being presented as an Early Access on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. Hubs Cloud enables organizations to deploy, modify, and configure their instances on the platform.
According to a Mozilla statement, the Hubs development process was prioritized by the company as an opportunity for creating an online social platform that could be utilised by organisations to meet unique requirements. It enables companies to construct their applications for use with both VR and two-dimensional devices. Keeping this in mind, the Mozilla Mixed Reality development team started building several collaboration tools and feature-rich web frameworks for the project. It is a VR-based platform with private rooms, personalised avatars and virtual reality features to bring people together regardless of where they are located, at any time.
Mozilla revealed that it had put in several months of work for helping external development teams create private versions based on the Hubs infrastructure on an AWS account. Instances of Hub Clouds enjoy compatibility with the scenes and avatars featured on the hubs.mozilla.com website. Mozilla is also giving users the option to create original content based on their unique needs.
Additionally, Hubs Cloud also offers administrator panel access to let users personalise branding for a website, perform avatar and scene submission approvals, import default environments, and configure settings across the platform. Users also have an option for working with their domain names. The deployment is done through the AWS account of Mozilla, meaning that user organisations have full control over how they can control account access. The users are also able to control data access for particular instances.
Use cases of the platform encompass IEEE, which recently deployed a customised Hubs Cloud instance. IEEE utilised the Hubs platform for hosting an online experience for a virtual reality experience. It also incorporated elements like poster sessions, breakouts, and viewing parties within shared VR spaces. Mozilla has stated that several organisations have already started the deployment of custom Hubs instances based on designated industries. It has enabled these companies to harness the power of 3D computing for enhancing their current workflows, in domains such as reconstruct and accident visualisation.
The Hubs Cloud platform comes in two versions, namely Personal and Enterprise. Both of the editions feature hourly metering-based and instance size-based metering. The AWS Marketplace page features an expense estimation calculator to estimate metering in advance. These are also dependent on system uptime, data, storage costs, and expected concurrency. Both the Enterprise and Personal editions of the Hubs Cloud have the same set of features. The difference with Personal is that it can utilise smaller instance size configurations at reduced prices and limitations to scalability.
Mozilla has said that it is putting in efforts to expand the Hubs Cloud platform to more service providers.
