[benjaminha14]

Hi HN, we’re Ben and Alex, founders of Muse HQ (https://muse.place/). We help anyone build immersive 3D websites.

Alex and I started building 3D websites because we were bored of building the same old static websites that we have been contracted to do for the past 6 years since high school. Building websites sucked and was boring. Fortunately, Alex discovered the power of three.js. Between us, Alex was the first one to start building websites in 3D and frankly, I was jealous because I saw that the code for 3D websites was far too complicated for me to grasp quickly and I felt left behind. This is why Alex and I started Muse, to make the 3D internet accessible to everyone and easy to use so we don't have to keep building static websites.

The way we solved this problem was by first building an open-source framework called SpacesVR that made it very easy for React developers to start building 3D websites. Several months later, we built a no-code editor that works similar to Squarespace and Wix built around this framework. Using our framework, our team has built over 200 3D websites by hand. Since launching our no-code editor, we have seen over 40 websites published. Also, a crazy thing happened the other day when Alex was scrolling through Twitter. He stumbled upon a 3D website that used very similar control mechanisms to our websites. With a little bit of investigating, we found out that a virtual gallery project, 3XR, started using our framework to build virtual NFT galleries for all Mintbase stores!

It has been exciting to see our no-code editor and open-source framework grow. I encourage everyone here to build a 3D website, try it out, you may enjoy it! You can check out our open-source framework at https://www.npmjs.com/package/spacesvr or go to https://muse.place/to build a 3D website with no code. Have fun building!

[yunusabd]

This caught my interest because I've been dabbling with 3D graphics for the web lately. Some feedback: If your product is a no-code editor, why not make that the focus of your website? Squarespace for example doesn't take you to a generic website and asks you to sign up from there, they take you to their editor to start building your own site immediately. You could add examples somewhere else on the site.

Generally an interesting field to work in, lots of uncharted territory in terms of UI best practices and user expectations. Good luck!

[mkl]

I don't agree in this case. I don't want to start editing, I want to know what the heck a "3D website" is. Now I know, and it turns out it's not something I want to spend any time using.

[handrous]

I'm getting strong vibes of the work of indie game developer thecatamites from the site.

Not quite sure what sort of site, on which I was attempting to actually accomplish something, I'd be happy to find something like this on, but there's probably some use I'm not thinking of.

[mpeg]

I agree with this, when I look at the site I want to know how the editor works and what the pricing model is.

You can include a link to a demo and the showcase sites elsewhere.

It also feels what you're trying to sell is full 3D website templates, when in reality it would probably be more viable as an embed or a section of a bigger site.

An example of a successful site that is built on similar tech is decentraland

[benjaminha14]

agree, i have taken a shot and built a landing page here: https://muse.place/muse

[harrisreynolds]

I hate to complain but visiting this site made me feel completely trapped. I literally could not do anything and could not escape to even close the browser (mouse is 100% hijacked). I had to CMD-Q the whole browser just to get out of the site.

Surely there is some UX technique you guys can come up with to free the mouse and improve this.

Question for you... what is the best 3D website on the Internet? How do they solve this?

All the best to you guys!

[benjaminha14]

Thanks for the tip, we know we need to optimize for accessibility first. We have spent a lot of time optimizing our renderer for speed. To be honest, this is the first I am hearing about this bug so I would like to be able to learn more about your set up offline perhaps in an email. If you could email [e-mail] with your computer and browser setup that would be very helpful.

Also, one of our favorite websites have been https://nurtu.re/

It is built by Active Theory for Porter Robinson. I believe this could be the future. I guess they get away with it because they are in third person.

[Fission]

A tip for the Muse team: based on my experience with first-person 3D, a substantial portion of users don't understand pointerlock, and the built-in notification that browsers give usually are insufficient. It might be a good idea to put a persistent indicator that ESC can be used to get out of pointerlock.

[alexshortt]

yeah this isn't a bad idea. or maybe forcing the user to do the onboarding first?

[pedalpete]

I like to think we're one of the better ones https://ayvri.com

This is mostly just a side project now, after 6 years of work. We have our own 3D renderer, but are using our custom Cesium here.

[jlund-molfese]

Which browser do you use? Most seem to support pressing Esc to exit from this site, videos etc. I feel like that's more of a browser issue.

[benjaminha14]

Gotta be honest here, we only really build for Chrome right now on the laptop/desktop. Safari is pretty buggy on desktop but what's pretty funny is that we optimized for Safari for mobile devices.

[pionar]

Firefox at least tells you to use ESC to get the pointer back.

[a1369209993]

> I literally could not do anything and could not escape to even close the browser (mouse is 100% hijacked). I had to CMD-Q the whole browser just to get out of the site.

To be scrupulously fair, the fact that a site can do this, even on purpose, is both a browser bug and a operating system bug (denial-of-service security vulnerability in both).

[alexshortt]

browsers are pretty limiting on this functionality as is - pretty long timeouts, and firefox/safari have very big indicators explaining how to disable it

[sirianth]

How do we learn more about y'all? Do you have a company website with some background, blog posts, etc.? I just hopped in your discord. I basically build full stack vr worlds in babylonjs/threejs every day. Curious to learn more about your company and your team. You can take a look at my work here: https://delta.center/ and here: https://delta.center/gevurah

[Fission]

It seems like there are some major accessibility issues that are a result of embedding text/inputs/etc. within threejs itself. Have you considered using an HTML element and dynamically positioning it with CSS transforms (i.e. update style per useFrame call)? It's a little more work, but it should solve a large class of accessibility issues, and is performant to boot.

[benjaminha14]

interesting, we'll take a closer look into this

[podric]

Cool stuff! What are some great use cases that you'd like to see for 3D websites? Do the long load times of 3D websites relative to 2D ones affect search ranking?

[benjaminha14]

Because most of the site are not built with html, it is difficult for Google and search engines to crawl. That would affect search rankings the most. An idea to fix this is to automatically auto generate tags created by html that describe the 3D models and decorations/components added to the room.

[ctoth]

Hi, cool project!

Have you considered how you intend to provide accessibility on top of this model of interaction? I have some thoughts for possibilities involving HRTF audio for blind users, but the deafblind experience is going to be ... tricky. Of course you'll need to do similar work to expose the semantics of one of these experiences to search engines, so for once I am not just begging for accessibility merely for us poor blind folk.

I'm curious as to how you internally represent the scenes, and what sorts of research you've done into precursor technologies such as VRML.

If you have questions or would like some ideas of where to get started with accessibility, feel free to reach out! My email is in my profile.

[benjaminha14]

reaching out, we have thought about this. Would love your insight

[pototo666]

This is amazing!

I am building a Reddit for China. I can't help thinking about builidng a 3D version.

This is like, what can I say, muse!

[benjaminha14]

that would actually be crazy! We have a long ways to go with this build, but you can consider this website as an early prototype of what a news/blog site could look like: https://violetsummerzine.com/

[solidasparagus]

Why should someone want to build a 3D website? Or are you only targeting people who already know they want to build a 3d website?

[prox]

Came here with the same question. Who is the target demographic?

[benjaminha14]

target demographic are independent music artist - specifically music producers!

[mkl]

Your instructions initially say to use WASD to move, which is inconvenient for those of us with our pointing device on the left. But it turns out the arrow keys work as well, and the in-site instructions say so (when you manage to click the instructions button, which is quite hard with a trapped pointer).

[benjaminha14]

what browser were you on? Your mouse pointer should be replaced by our cursor if there were no bugs.

[mkl]

This was Chrome on Linux. I had a crosshair cursor in the centre of the screen, and the mouse was just doing looking, so I had to look in a direction that made the button move under the cursor (or something like that - I'm now elsewhere so can't check).

[shakna]

With Firefox's tracking protection on, the only thing I get for the homepage is a single line error message, as the WebGL context drops unexpectedly.

If you visit at least once without tracking protection, and then turn it back on, and visit (even with cleaning all caches), then the site loads correctly.

[benjaminha14]

thanks for the flag! we'll look into this

[shakna]

Considering the exact sequence of events to trigger it, I feel sorry that I found the bug. Seems like a really hard one to trace and debug. Almost feel like I should be apologising, rather than thanking you for taking a look!

[markdeloura]

Great work! I'm a big fan of this idea, and as others have mentioned, it's a little reminiscent of the promise of VRML back in the day. Or even of PlayStation Home or Second Life, but more accessible, since it's right there in your browser.

I've seen some comments about the performance, and I just wanted to comment that I just tried the site out on an old Chromebook Acer R11 (Celeron N3150) and while the perf on the opening environment is a little bit hitchy, the Balloonski room for example ran perfectly well. Little machines are capable of a whole heck of a lot these days! Even in the browser!

Nice work!

[benjaminha14]

Thank you!

[cdata]

This is neat. I love that you are fostering a publishing mindset, and not just showcasing a glitzy 3D magazine for folks to gawk at.

There is a steep hill to climb before a 3D web really lands in a way that fosters an ecosystem of content creators. I suspect that it will take a different breed of web browser to truly realize an XR web, one with built-in, high-level APIs for composing 3D content. Ultimately, you need many of the built-in features of the 2D web, and approximating those things via a canvas is tantamount to rebuilding a fair chunk of the browser.

[alexshortt]

Yeah a new browser is inevitable. Main bottleneck is currently getting the full power of the CPU, especially when there is no GPU present, as browsers have pretty high overhead that bottlenecks the application.

[fillskills]

Some feedback: - Its not clear how to get the mouse to be free. I was expecting to hold a key (ctrl/alt etc) to free the mouse and press it again to give control back. Now I see that 'esc' is the key to pause the program. Just needs to be highlighted more. - The calendly link seems to be broken: https://calendly.com/muse-3muse/muse-demo-call - Some sites require microphone access without telling why

[benjaminha14]

thanks for shouting that out - will fix that and got your notes on our pause menu!

My Calendly subscription ran out :) Here is our updated link: https://calendly.com/ben-792/userinterview

[pawelwentpawel]

I quite like this and my experience on your 3D website was very smooth. I wonder about the following points:

- Would creating a 3D website hurt my SEO?

- Would the content be somehow accessible for users who are entering the website on devices that don't support WebGL? Is there any fallback?

- A 3D website looks cool and creative but does it really engage users more than a standard one? Would it increase my conversion rates or keep people longer on the site (subtracting the time to figure out the controls)?

[benjaminha14]

- To be honest, not sure. I am not an SEO expert.

- Most of the end visitors, those that visit our creators websites, are actually mobile users and they have an average session duration of 50+ seconds and so far we have very high retention with our creators so I think there hasn't been to big of an issue with accessibility. I tested our website on a iPhone SE and it ran great on good wifi. All modern browsers support WebGL. Our fallback would probably be around bad wifi.

- We only use 3D web sites to run our funnels. I always tell people content is king at the end of the day so I guess you will have to just try it out and see how it goes. Right now, it is hard for us to share with you robust analytics via conversion rates and CTAs so I recommend using a service like BITLY and attaching bitly to the buttons so you can track clicks. Here is one of our funnels: https://www.muse.place/pandassaurus The funnel was built completely with builder tools, so you have the same tools I do. So at the very least I can tell you that our growth/marketing strategy at Muse is 100% reliant on our own product if that helps.

[benjaminha14]

If you do try it out, please keep me updated on the results. Very curious what your stats are. Happy to compare more analytics over email.

[mlok]

Hello, I am using Firefox on Ubuntu with an AZERTY keyboard. I couldn't move with (unnatural) WASD, nor (more natural) ZQSD, nor (most natural) arrow keys. I could look around using the mouse. A couple of empty white rectangles were in front of me. Suddenly became four empty white squares (like keys ?) when I clicked them. No idea what they are for. All this still need some UI polishing, I would say.

[benjaminha14]

any chance you can email us a screenshot? [e-mail], if not thanks for flagging this. We did a merge a pr recently for AZERTY keyboards: https://github.com/spacesvr/spacesvr/pull/51

[udia]

This is really cool but there are a few usability issues. I suggest to overly html DOM ontop of the canvas rather than having users enter form details within the experience as the only method of signing up. Other users who are trying to stand up can stand between my camera and the form itself, making it such that I can't see what the form is trying to ask me or what I am typing.

[onion2k]

Very cool indeed. react-three-fiber is a game-changer for how easy it makes building 3D websites. It's awesome to see a startup using it.

[alexshortt]

yeah it's especially useful for maintaining a large scale codebase! gotta love it

[arkitaip]

At least for now, you should consider a persistent overlay that explains that Esc breaks out of view mode and releases control over the mouse. Not being able to use the mouse as you usually do is very unpleasant.

I really like these fun alternatives to ordinary web sites even though the UX designer in me is having a heart attack because of the countless usability and accessability issues

[benjaminha14]

Our goal is to get there though. Thats the biggest tech problem we face, accessibility and usability and everyday that is what our team RNDs

[tarr11]

Glad that I could navigate this on my phone!

Reminds me of VRML.

[fourseventy]

Just add strafe jumping and a rocket launcher

[benjaminha14]

tf2 on the web!

[sirianth]

How can we find out more about y'all? Do you have a company website with the background? I just popped into the discord. I basically build babylonjs/threejs full stack worlds every day... I'd like to learn more.

[benjaminha14]

I'd check out our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/musehq/

I am working on building a company website right now with bg info which should come out later this week. Being built using builder tools!!!

[d--b]

I know I only have a $300 laptop, but this is _slow_

[benjaminha14]

would love to get more info on this, were tryna optimize for speed, if you could email [e-mail] with your device that will be very helpful for us

[chaostheory]

Works well with an iPhone 11 Pro. Can’t wait to try it with an Oculus Quest 2

[alexshortt]

not fully optimized for the quest just a heads up. best sites to try might be www.muse.place/balloonski and https://muse-place-2qc57fsgs-musehq.vercel.app/alto. we're not targeting quest users fully yet, but on my free time i'm slowly adding improvements :)