- A letter to the Janus VR community - 11 February 2020
To the Janus VR community, Dissolution in 2019. I write to inform the broader community of our intent to dissolve the corporation, Janus VR, Inc., at the end of Q4 2019. It is no longer feasible to maintain our corporation status in Canada and the US given the expenses this will incur each year (as it relates to legal, accounting, patent/IP filings, etc.) Maintaining existing services. It's not all sad news. I remain committed to do all I can to maintain our existing services and underlying infrastructure that the community enjoys, such as our default presence server, build servers and our Vesta hosting service. While I would love to see a sub-community emerge around supporting essential Janus services such that it would be self-sufficient, with an appointed group of custodians, it is my intention to take this on as a personal expense in the interim. (Update: check out https://janusxr.o…
- Release 62.9 - glTF2 and DCL asset palette support - 15 March 2019
- Much improved glTF2 support (.gltf, .glb) https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F28276138%2F5b5a5ad498b3c0a6398f427efb5f992023fc8407.png - Support for importing JSON-formatted asset palettes from Decentraland https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F28276138%2F9c8d62c32e0c9083ae0accaf48fd6f6c26805a5b.png
- Release 62.1 - 12 December 2018
Minor update - bugfixes to animation on Windows and Linux (specifically FBX loaded files) https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F28276138%2F46cabfdf7de89b872e67873da8ade431e953340f.png
- Release 62.0 - 8 December 2018
Today marks the release of Janus VR 62.0, and a (now successfully deployed) launch release of our Linux build on Steam! Big changes in v62 include (1) the return of the spatial menu (press TAB, or pocketspace button on VR controllers), (2) integration with Vesta http://vesta.janusvr.com and its social features, and (3) the highly requested feature of a virtual keyboard to enable search while in VR. We are still alive and kicking, and always listening to user feedback! https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F28276138%2F395bae2828e0cab38fc97cb2515280033626f6ae.png https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F28276138%2Fd2cebd33f24fc648b1e9736f968c5b0638408eec.png https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F28276138%2Fd73af0c99168f01fd10ff0a9031e66f701baf321.png
- Release 59.8 - 3 January 2018
Faster performance, updated pocketspace, .js improvements and glTF 2.0 support! New features: Improved performance of rendering engine by refactoring out expensive ref counted pointers from the most used code path (upto 25% FPS increase depending on the room). Updated pocketspace with new design and bookmarks, including a new portal to our free hosting service, Vesta. Ctrl+V will paste any clipboard contents (e.g. press printscreen to capture desktop and paste directly into Janus with Ctrl+V). Fine-grained controller access via JS! You can now read the current state of the buttons of controllers (Vive, touch, Windows mixed reality (wmxr), Xbox) with JS - visit https://nazrin.net/Button/ for examples. room.loadNewAsset can now be used to create generative geometry, by being passed vertex and face lists as arrays. room.removeObject JS function now accepts optional second sync paramter, sy…
- Release 59.3 - 25 October 2017
Improved VR controller support, better stability, higher FPS Re-architected rendering to happen in a separate thread. Should yield large improvements in framerate and general smoothness (in both VR and non-VR rendering modes). In most cases users will see a doubling of FPS. Assimp updated to latest development version (improved glTF support, many other changes) Improvements to animations and bone processing Updated Oculus SDK to v1.19 Performance improvements to UI panels General shader optimizations Smoother particle emissions Ghost and userid bugfixes Refactored VR UI controls for simplicity (a return to an older control scheme that worked well) Backend improvements to portal system and navigation Faster loading of client Improvements to rendering performance in equi rendering modes New room attribute "grab_dist" allows specification of maximum distance at which objects can be grabbed…
- Release 59 - 3 August 2017
The changes in v59 represent a few months of work (the longest time between releases yet!) The most notable change in v59 is a UI rewrite. In this update, we broadly consider two major use cases: (1) a “user in VR”, potentially a novice, who expects basic functionality for navigation and interaction and (2) a “builder outside VR”, a creative person looking to create immersive web experiences using Janus who expects a user experience similar to traditional graphics software (e.g. Maya/3DSMax/Blender/Unity/Unreal). In the version 59 update, we take some major steps for addressing these two fundamental use cases. And there are also a pile of other specific features and additions we've made, many of which are major-release worthy on their own! More documentation to come, describing all the new functionality in more detail (we are also doing a lot of updates to the site to add new documentat…
- Release 58 - 30 April 2017
Big thank you to all the users who sent in bug reports, dropped by the Discord for a chat or sent us feature suggestions - we appreciate it a lot and have included as many changes as we could in this update, more improvements to come, we have only just begun. FEATURES AssImp A fantastic library that abstracts so many geometric formats, providing us a generic intermediate data structure. We hugely broaden our geometric format support to a much wider variety of formats! (And like us, they too could have picked a better name. They are German though and apologise for the name for this reason - all of us at Janus speak English and have no excuse!) We now support glTF 1.0 through this lib, and are looking forward to (and would be happy to contribute to) 2.0 support! Geometry transmission standards for the web - YES! COMMON INTERCHANGE FORMATS Autodesk ( .fbx ) Collada ( .dae ) glTF ( .gltf, .…
- Version 57.2 - 7 April 2017
Thank you to all the Steam users for the bug reports and suggestions for improving JanusVR. Updated controls on Vive so index trigger is used as primary interact button instead of the trackpad button. Updated controls on Vive so that trackpads perform translation and rotation. Bugfix: websurfaces with an image_id set. Bugfix: pocketspace screen when leaving, closing portal, and returning. Bugfix: portals appearing pressing F5 in pocketspace. Bugfix: do not save out global tutorial URL in room code . Bugfix: drag and drop Sound elements from webpages . Bugfix: in "2D" render mode, do not do comfort mode snap rotations. New Feature: room.preventDefault() . Call this to suppress default interact/webspace functionality in the room. functions if you need custom behaviour (note: experimental as we converge on optimal controls/UI).
- Version 57.1 - 7 April 2017
Release 57.1: Bugfix: have websurfaces only make request with server once (instead of repeatedly polling until loaded) Bugfix for Oculus Touch users and walking "sticking" after text Bugfix: no more tooltips hanging around after clicking e.g. the pocketspace button in 2DUI with mouse Improvements to virtual keyboard so it can be used two-handed Minor bugfix to set tex_linear, etc for non-OBJ types Bugfix: fixed avatar animation "jitter" bug, alternating between idle and jump animations Middle click for drag+drop, drag and dropping of PDF files Linux build now attempts to initialize/use OpenVR (until Vulkan support is ready - your mileage may vary!) PDF support - Link to a PDF in an assetwebsurface to use
