The Interledger Community 🌱: Rabimba Karanjai

Immersive Web — Grant Report #2

Rabimba Karanjai — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 09:42:55 +0000

Project Update

This project was a roller coaster of struggles to get things done on time and keeping in line with the goal.

First an update to what we have achieved:

Enabling Integration and First Prototype: The first experiment ensures that VR assets can be run in a WebVR environment. As it turns out it is relatively simple to enable web monetization in a simple webvr page and host it. And it's also fairly easy to add conditional's to the page too. For example to

<script defer src="cdn.coil.com/monetized-classes.js"></script>
<style id="wm-stylesheet">
.wm-if-monetized { display: none; }
.wm-if-not-monetized { display: none; }
</style>

This enables web monetization on those elements.

Or we can have a whole scene hidden. As you can see in this demo: https://webm-roomscale.glitch.me/
Enabling it in a WebAR environment: Using the same concept this can be enabled in an Augmented Reality Environment. The same glitch code detects when it is in an Augmented Reality environment instead of a VR environment and can enable monetization for those elements.

Limitation:
This concept is dependent on the coil extension. And for mobile devices even though Firefox is there and has add-on support. It still doesn't support all add-ons, notably, it doesn't support Coil. So any content that is made available part of Augmented Reality will be locked down in mobile devices. Unless we specifically determine the device and unlock that content. Doing that client-side opens up the concept for attacks on desktop devices to unlock content too.

How to use it for different contents: Due to the nature of how web pages are built this works on different parts of the elements of a webpage. To enable differential web monetization, the tags should be enabled on those elements. It works for VR assets as well as AR assets.

A detailed overview is available at: https://blog.rabimba.com/2022/01/immersive-payment-second-update.html

Progress on objectives

The original objective of the project has been to see if we can have a way to have web monetization in webxr contents and how can that be evolved into a marketplace.

We have explored that and see it can be enabled and used as a effective way to monetize mixed reality assets. Albeit with limitations (which are detailed in the blog).

However while exploring them, we had additional questions like can the transactions be anonymous. Can this same concept be applied for event based transactions.
For example can the following scenario somehow be supported by design:

In a VR scene some items are monetized
Based on certain interaction, these will be unlocked. Can these interactions itself trigger different kind of unlock mechanism?

In short can there be even based transaction?
Also can these be anonymized?
Some of these were explored as open research questions seperately.

Key activities

When I started this project, I was situated in India, and getting a hardware to actually run this was the first huge task. It was incredibly hard to get a good graphics card and a machine setup in India for this. Partially due to the unreasonable GPU demand in the market and the availability (or the lack of it).

Later covid ensured a lot of timeline struggles.

Communications and marketing

This was a very low-key work till now, mostly because of the highly delayed first prototype and how developers can actually use the application.
This has however been tried and tested by the following groups

Invention & Innovation in Computing for Sustainable Development (I2C) lab at University Houston. Also for the prospect of web monetization and event driven aspect of the transactions
Rice CS (Rice University CS Club) members.

There also is a proposed upcoming talk for the following in GDG Dehi.

What’s next?

We strongly feel there can be a lot more work that can be done, specially in monetization model as well as exploring if NFT can play a role into the marketplace model. So this project eventually aims to explore that.

What community support would benefit your project?

This project will benefit immensely from developers and users testing the project as well as giving feedback and ideas on how to make this more useful to the community.
This I think is the pivotal piece missing from the project.

Immersive Payment — Grant Report #1

Rabimba Karanjai — Tue, 04 May 2021 21:32:07 +0000

Project Update

It has been more than 6 months now that I have had the Immersive Payments, Spark Grant. Since then I have worked on realizing the scope of the project and finally, I am here to give an update.

The project aimed to solve the following facets of distributed payment in the space of webvr.
Can we have micro-payment enabled for small micro assets?
Can we have a way for content and asset creators to define a way to have these transactions as part of a self-hosted (or managed) marketplace
The initial concept was simple. Starting with 3d assets and models which a creator normally creates for making a virtual reality or even augmented reality scenes. Instead of having to buy them, can a creator benefit from the audience having more control over having added third-party assets.

Initial Prototype:

The initial prototype for the project depends on Spoke and creating scenes for mozilla hubs. We wanted to see if we can have extended portions of these scene where some characters can be Monitezied using Web monitized while others are still under a free domain.
For the initial experiments, we wanted to see if a whole web page running a simple aframe webVR scene can be monited or not.
As it turns out it is relatively simple to enable web monetization in a simple webvr page and host it. And it's also fairly easy to add conditional's to the page too. For example to

 <script defer src="cdn.coil.com/monetized-classes.js"></script>
  <style id="wm-stylesheet">
    .wm-if-monetized { display: none; }
    .wm-if-not-monetized { display: none; }
  </style>

This enables web monetization on those elements.

Or we can have a whole scene hidden. As you can see in this demo: https://webm-roomscale.glitch.me/

As you can see the browser first tries to verify if there is already a subscription attached to the coil account and enables the WebVR scene based on that. (caveat: you will need coil extension installed and logged-in in your browser if you want to test the URL)

Our next step was to see how can we have this implemented in individual elements of the scene. If you want to know more about adding web monetization to specific elements on your website. You can read the excellent guide here.

As a next step, we start by using spoke for creating the vr scenes for integrating into Mozilla Hubs. The goal here is to have monetization enabled for separate assets inside the scene.

Progress on objectives

Progress till now:

We can now enable selective web monetization for specific webvr assets
Separate 3d assets can be monetized

Ongoing:

Have a centralized place where we can allow asset creators to highlight alternate story paths associated with exclusive assets
Have a way of enabling alternate story paths for webvr relates stories (this is enabled by creating alternate paths for the story to end/expand. However the present challenge is to see how can the implementation be done so that it doesn't cripple the rest of the scene)

Planned:

I was fortunate to get an extension of the deadline. With that in mind, we have plans to actually contribute to the underlying protocol and have a proposal for conditional interactions. Based on our recently accepted work at ICBC which can be accessed here. Under the name "On Conditional Cryptocurrency with Privacy"

Key activities

The project had two separate aspects going side by side One was the initial scope of the project to have a easy way of integarting web monetization in WebVR and WebAR scenes. But another aspect became how to make the protocol more anonymous and also at the same time have user deployable way of having a payment protocol. That inspired work on condition coin which was presented in ICBC.

Communications and marketing

This is the weakest point in the project till now. Only my advisor and a few other friends know about this project. However, just on 4th May, this has been mentioned in our work at IEEE ICBC and we have had a healthy dose of interest and questions regarding this.
In future I plan to publish a blog weekly on the updates of the project and how early adopters can play with the code and provide feedback.

This concludes the very short initial update of the project. Some personal health issues along with the present Covid surge in my home country India, where I am right now made periodic updates to the project pretty difficult. A difficulty which I plan to address in the next few weeks.

What’s next?

Two follow-up blog post will follow this post detailing some of our design choices, codes, and how you, if you want right now, can test some of the features. I would love to have your feedback and directions on the same.