One-click Virtual Meeting Rooms That Work for All Devices

Imagine a place where you can interact with readers and there is no big corporation controlling what you do. No third parties are around gathering personal information about you to sell. Imagine being able to invite fans to your space, introducing them to your characters and exploring your story worlds with them. What you see above is a demo of such a place. I figured out how to edit the scene in five minutes to replace one of the paintings with a cover from one of my books. This museum was built for Mozilla’s A-Frame project. You can use the visual inspector to modify the scene yourself. If you do, please share pics.

If you’re new to the virtual web and all that seems a bit much to pull off, there is a one-click tool from Mozilla that lets you create your own virtual space.

This is a meeting room I made with a click. You can visit here.

This is my castle playground. You can visit here.

You can make your own right here. And quoting directly from Mozilla: “All with no app downloads, walled gardens, or content gatekeepers, and on any device you wish — and most importantly, through open source software that respects your privacy and is built on web standards.”

This is an early stage project. Mozilla plans to add the ability to customize rooms and avatars. I’m excited to see the new possibilities VR creates for authors and readers. While these hubs are virtual scenes, you don’t need a special device to participate. Everyone can interact with the technology of their choice, be it phone, or tablet, or headset, or desktop. I have always wanted an easy-to-use tool that would let me bring my story worlds and characters to readers. Something like these hubs, that I could customize, would be a good start. They are very simplistic so they will run on the lowest end devices, but maybe I can tweak that a little when the new tools are released. As a fun playground to hang out with book nerds, it’ll do. We might try having our weekly Nook meeting at the Nook Castle this week–Wednesday at 11:30 am Pacific Time.

Meantime, I do think I will dig into customizing that museum build to showcase my work.