Show HN: Browse Reddit in 3D

How to use it Desktop: Click to start, WASD and mouse to move<p>Mobile: Dragging on left half of screen is move, right have is look<p>Append any subreddit to the url to switch subreddits<p>Tech stack - Babylon.js for the 3d rendering engine<p>- Google Cloud Function which queries Reddit Api and then transforms the data depending on the data type<p>- For images: Transform and serve through <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.weserv.nl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.weserv.nl</a><p>- For videos (try &#x2F;r&#x2F;gifs, experimental) gets a url which can be played through a &lt;video&gt; tag, which is later copied frame by frame to a texture<p>- For websites, use puppeteer to take a screenshot<p>- For multiplayer (you can see other people in the same subreddit as you) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colyseus.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colyseus.io&#x2F;</a> and App Engine Flexible<p>- For chat, Firestore<p>Also, apologies for only having one avatar option! I wanted to add different genders, characters etc but didn&#x27;t have time for the MVP!<p>Discord for more discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;nrxQnT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discord.gg&#x2F;nrxQnT</a>

Love this. Was much better than I expected since you also showed other users, what they were looking at, and let us have personalities like looking at each other and nodding yes&#x2F;no which kept cracking me up.<p>A few people were at the Game of Thrones Cosplay submission (an image of two cute women in costumes) looking at each other and nodding. Some people formed a conga line.<p>It&#x27;s easy to imagine stopping this project when you have the basic rendering + WASD working, but the multiplayer aspect was simple and fun.

Amazing! I might just use this as my go-to reddit app moving forward...<p>A couple suggestions: any chance movement could be a bit faster? I&#x27;d rather run through the museum if given the chance, just as I can scroll quickly through reddit. Maybe I&#x27;m just too used to playing CSGO and expect my character to move a bit faster<p>I kinda wish it included some slight head bobbing to, but I guess that&#x27;s a matter of preference.

I made a similar (single-player) version a bunch of years ago when Mozilla first released WebVR or whatever they called it back then! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mrspeaker&#x2F;InternetExplorer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mrspeaker&#x2F;InternetExplorer</a> - The controls were weird (they were ok in VR): wsad + arrows, and &quot;enter&quot; loaded any linked subreddits.<p>Surprisingly it seems like it still works (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrspeaker.github.io&#x2F;InternetExplorer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrspeaker.github.io&#x2F;InternetExplorer&#x2F;</a> - though it seems that only certain image formats are loading now)

That is good fun. What&#x27;s interesting is the amount of thought I&#x27;m willing to give something that&#x27;s virtually hanging on a wall over an onscreen sentence in a list.<p>On a different note, one of the images from a Bloomberg post was simply showing &quot;We&#x27;ve detected unusual activity from your computer network&quot; and the usual reCaptcha &quot;I&#x27;m not a robot&quot; box.<p>Please join me in condemning such hostile behaviour of web sites. Of course it&#x27;s &#x27;unusual activity&#x27;, it&#x27;s unusually creative, and it&#x27;s what the Internet used to be about.

Thanks, I hate it?<p>Seriously, great job, supremely disorienting - it almost felt like the Internet again.

Rendering quality would be greatly improved by generating mipmaps for your rendered text [1]. It&#x27;s unclear how you&#x27;re rendering text in Babylon, but you might have to use a slightly different approach to improve quality.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;WebGLRenderingContext&#x2F;generateMipmap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;WebGLRender...</a>

This is brilliant!<p>Really make yourself feel at home:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dforreddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;art" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dforreddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;art</a>

Dear devs, please `return false` from your keypress handlers (or preventDefault, stopPropagation, any of them!)<p>Otherwise my browser doesn&#x27;t know you do something important with them, and uses keyboard for its own navigation and shortcuts, which fucks up your page.

This is glorious. It&#x27;s a less good &#x27;user experience&#x27; than browsing reddit itself, but it&#x27;s also better in every way.

Some subreddits work really well with this ambiance. E.g., <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dforreddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;villageporn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dforreddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;villageporn</a> :).

Love it. I propose a &#x27;fire&#x27; keybinding to downvote, like Doom process management.

This is insane! You could kind of see Epic ripping this off and browsing a Reddit museum with your Fortnite character. It reminds me of Playstation Home too.. but the fact it&#x27;s so easy to jump in really alters how this could work.

Amazing, this is clearly a glimpse into a future of internet content being less like a document and more like a virtual world.<p>Suggestion: the enter key should focus the chat box (like a FPS game) so you don&#x27;t have to hit escape then click on it.

Great idea and the implementation is pretty good for v1. The v2 can index reddit and render that index as a fancy 3d structure that gives a 10,000 feet view on what&#x27;s going on in reddit: relationship between subreddits, topics, comments, users. Perhaps this structure can look like a forest where heavy subreddits look like big branchy trees and users look like bees adding comments. Big plus if this is rendered in real time, at least with 1 fps. It&#x27;s not entirely impossible that this idea may be good enough for a little startup (afaik, YC offers 150k for 7% if the idea seems worth exploring).

Congrats on shipping it! It worked nicely on my first try. I think this might be the feature for visualizing data, when VR&#x2F;AR become mainstream.<p>Imagine this but with stylized graphics that respond to real-time data: you could see a popular post like some sort of concert with tons of people (the website visitors). Every comment made on the post can be also read from them in real time.<p>It&#x27;s a way I wanted to browse the web for a long time.

It looks neat, but I can&#x27;t use it because it keeps looking up as if I were moving my mouse (I&#x27;m not). Running it on Firefox 69 on Linux.

Neat stuff! Why is it always yawing to the left? Sometimes I can get it to stop but as soon as I move the mouse again it continues to spin.

You really should not use this old-school QuickTime VR reverse-drag scrolling on a mobile device. That is not what anyone who&#x27;s used a touch device in the last ten years expects.<p>When someone drags on a touch device, they expect to be dragging the thing they see. You touch something on the screen, move it around, and that thing follows your touch. Whatever you touched, it follows your finger around.<p>This site does just the opposite. When you drag on the screen, things move in the <i>opposite</i> direction. That&#x27;s how QuickTime VR worked, but no one who is used to modern touch devices will be able to use this without being confused.<p>Or desktop devices for that matter. There is a simple solution: just study how Google Street view works on both mobile and desktop devices, and do that.<p>This could be a great site, and I would love to try it again if this one fundamental bit of navigation is fixed.

As soon as I move the mouse, it makes me &quot;look at the ceiling&quot; and I can&#x27;t get out of there :(

Nice. D (right) doesn&#x27;t seem to work for me though. Also - are the black plaques meant to show anything?

lmao this is pretty funny. It would be cool if it was a sort of infinite hallway that kept loading...

One step closer to the Metaverse, I suppose<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Metaverse#Stephenson&#x27;s_Metaverse_in_Snow_Crash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Metaverse#Stephenson&#x27;s_Metaver...</a>

Fantastic! Simple concept, but the effect is amazing. I felt like I was in a museum, except I was browsing reddit. This gives me a lot of really fun ideas regarding the future of the internet! I keep wondering where VR is going to go!

This is glorious, I just found a friend and we nodded at each other for a good while. Then I walked through the next best wall and lured others out, since they can still see the beam indicating the direction of my view.<p>Thanks for this!

It should be called 3ddit.com

This is a really neat concept! I love how you can see other people and their literal sightlines.<p>Some people have said that they wish movement was faster; I completely agree with that.<p>I also wish that more of the interface were integrated into the &quot;museum&quot; -- it would be nice to be able to go to other subreddits from within the museum itself rather than having to leave and go to the address bar.<p>I&#x27;d also like to be able to see comments somehow, since that&#x27;s 80% of the experience of reddit for me!<p>The movement speed is definitely a dealbreaker though.

I think I read a John Grisham book that had something like this in it.... they had to find and destroy a file or something, but this is exactly how I pictured it.

When I was a kid and my Uncle described Amazon as a &#x27;new virtual bookstore,&#x27; this is almost exactly what I pictured. Very cool.

I remember VRML being a thing and me wanting it be something usable :) Thanks for making this.<p>Feature request: I&#x27;d like to run holding shift

Great job! Thank you for creating this and sharing this.<p>I can see people creating their own subreddit just for their own mini virtual exhibits.

Cool... this reminds me of what &quot;cyberspace&quot; was supposed to be in the fever-dreams of cyberpunk fiction.

this is an absolute gem to experience. my question: do you shard it off to different servers or some such thing? i only ask because trying to connect on both my mobile and my laptop, i can&#x27;t seem to ever end up in the same apparent room as myself. but that&#x27;s no but deal, just a minor curiosity.

Is it just me or do all other avatars freeze in place after a few minutes?<p>Loving this honestly, although I must say I saw another comment about visiting &#x2F;r&#x2F;gonewild. I must have been living under a rock because I did not know it was THAT kind of subreddit. Assumed it was hiking photographs.

Browsing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dforreddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;earthporn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dforreddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;earthporn</a> in this really feels like going to an art gallery

How about when you visit certain subreddits it turns into a game of Doom?

I&#x27;m not into games at all, but this really captures my imagination. I can imagine enjoying interacting with the web this way. Maybe even coding this way if possible. Thanks!

Needs to add the option to grab a gun and start shooting down ads.

Well that is just neat. Took a little time to adjust to movement on mobile but super fun when you get the hang of it. Really smooth. Thank&#x27;s for sharing.

The movement on a touch screen is unintuitive. Dragging the screen moves it in the direction opposite to what you expect generally, when you scroll.<p>Great job, nonetheless

Now do Hacker News ;)

It reminds me of the Dk “eye whiteness” tapes my parents played for us as kids (except with slightly less insightful content.)<p>The multiplayer thing is awesome!!

This is rad! Is there an existing way to show adult content? Looks like the backend needs to click &quot;I&#x27;m over 18&quot; button.

Tip: after a few minutes of wondering why it didn&#x27;t work, make sure Caps Lock isn&#x27;t on or it won&#x27;t register WASD

Despite being a 3d app, it doesn&#x27;t make my laptop fans spinning fast like the current js-heavy Reddit web app. Kudos :)

This is like one of those mirror funhouses that you think will be fun, then turns into a nightmare after about 8 minutes.

Where are the couches, what about more rooms?

<i>allows Apple Watch Series 5 to offer all-day 18-hour battery life</i><p>How is 18 hours considered &quot;all day&quot;!?!?<p>I retired my previous fitness watch (Polar M600) when its battery life got that bad, and moved to a Garmin 645M with almost a week of battery life. Being able to to travel on business without worrying about carrying (and loosing) the charger is very nice. The watch is &quot;always on&quot;, does notifications, music, etc.

This is amazing! It makes Reddit much more fun, especially with the other random people floating around.

Neat, although Youtube thumbs are showing the prestitial ads instead, which is a little weird.

I&#x27;ve been thinking about building something like this for ages now. Very well done.

PLEASE someone (masterspy7 ?) make this into a proper VR app!<p>I&#x27;d love to do this in my VR headset.

Actually much more interesting than i thought it would be. Great effort! :)

It&#x27;s the UI from the film Hackers that we&#x27;ve all been waiting for.

This is surprisingly fun.

Disappointed. This would work better as a first person shooter.

Adding simple emoji signalling for avatars would be hilarious.

Good work man. What technology stack did you build this with?

May I suggest . . .<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dforreddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;shitHNSays" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3dforreddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;shitHNSays</a><p>(I know, I know. But it is kind of funny to jump from HN to a museum of HN comments in 3D)

Pretty neet! I recall an imageboard with a similar design.

I was surprised how usable it was on my iPhone, great job!

Doesn&#x27;t work in Firefox. Will not open Chromium.

I am not seeing any pictures, using Firefox 60

I want music similar to Doom to go with this!

Impressive and terrible at the same time.

This is pretty cool&#x2F;fun! Thanks!

great, but what the site needs is mostly a HN-esque text interface

So many possibilities!

This doesn&#x27;t work at all for me in Safari tech preview on Mac, just has weird blue background and some white lines. Normal safari seems to load a visual, but I can&#x27;t seem to do anything with it. TL;DR- I don&#x27;t get it, but thanks for sharing.

Awww . I miss VRML

How do you jump?

real nice; I love how we see other people.

Pretty cool!

Very cool!

LOVE IT :D

Now do VR!

No thanks. I prefer the old Reddit, and by old Reddit, I actually mean the OLD reddit. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redesign&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;redesign&#x2F;</a>