HFVRP Community Group Launched

With your support, the HFVRP Community Group has been launched:
  http://www.w3.org/community/hfvrp/

This group was originally proposed on 2020-11-09
by humbletim metaverse. The following people supported its
creation: 
      humbletim metaverse
      Caitlyn Meeks
      Le Vert
      Maki Deprez
      Dave K
      Martin Allerton
  
To join the group, please use:
 http://www.w3.org/community/hfvrp/join

Please note that supporting a group is different from joining
a group. Supporters must also enroll if they wish to participate.

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 This mission of this group is to help re-establish platform
interoperability between descendants of the original "High Fidelity
Virtual Reality Platform" (HFVRP) open source project. 

 The group will initially host discussions and coordinate volunteer
research efforts in order to identify relevant areas of common ground
across HFVRP projects. 

 For example, it was once possible to use the "interface" client from
one platform to connect to a "domain server" hosted on a similar, but
different platform. As these projects have continued to evolve, the
once-shared protocol version (for example) between them has fallen out
of sync, inadvertently breaking the possibility of cross-connections. 

 By gathering together common interest across multiple projects, this
group hopes to then help collectively estimate efforts and help champion
neutral sub-projects that can restore specific compatibilities. 

 It is suggested that neutral community sub-projects emerging from this
group adopt the permissive Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) open source
license. LGPL currently seems to align best with the mission at hand and
for these reasons: 
 
 interoperability across diverse projects is likely to be an ongoing,
multi-platform, community-driven effort -- adopting LGPL for these
components can help ensure the collective community effort remains
transparent and improvable across the entire project space 
 as degrees of interoperability are restored LGPL dependencies can be
version-managed and upgraded per each projects typical dependency update
schedules 
 LGPL is already an approved dependency license across HFVRP projects
(ie: all known platforms critically depend on Qt by way of the LGPL) --
by not introducing a new license for these shared efforts, existing open
source project audits can remain intact 
 
  
 This effort will hopefully span across diverse project politics,
technical minds, and social circles which can come together and approach
compatibility as a shared effort. 

 All platforms forked from the original HFVRP code base are welcome to
join forces this way and in particular contributing developers,
community members, and any others interested in helping broaden platform
interoperability. 

 Some of the low-level technology skills likely needed to restore
interoperability are: 
 
 familiarity with HFVRP networking protocols and versioning 
 "HFM" internal model formats and corresponding C++ structures 
 overall "Oven" asset baking tool and filesystem layouts 
 Baked asset structures (materials.json, ktx, modded FBX format w/draco
compression, etc.) 
 Entities "models.json.gz" world persistence format and "domain server"
archive formats 
 "Avatar.fst" and internal blendshape "de facto" standards 
 "Interface" client, "domain server," and "assignment client" JSON
configuration formats 
  (as common sub-projects emerge) help setting up multi-project
Continuous Integration systems 
 

 We think it will be easiest for volunteers in cases where interested
projects have remained open source, but all HFVRP projects (including
closed source ones) are welcome to join and suggest specific layers or
features they would nonetheless be interested in seeing reemerged as a
common open source dependency. 

 This group will not publish Specifications. 


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Thank you,

W3C Community Development Team

Received on Wednesday, 11 November 2020 14:33:47 UTC