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Mozilla: VR, SpiderMonkey and RustConf 2020

By Roy Schestowitz Created 29/08/2020 - 2:44am Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 29th of August 2020 02:44:41 AM Filed under Moz/FF [1]

Mozilla VR Blog: Why Researchers Should Conduct User Testing Sessions in Virtual Reality (VR): On Using Hubs by Mozilla for Immersive, Embodied User Feedback [2]

Amidst the pandemic, our research team from Mozilla and The Extended Mind performed user testing research entirely in a remote 3D virtual space where participants had to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). This research aimed to test security concepts that could help users feel safe traversing links in the immersive web, the results of which are forthcoming in 2021. By utilizing a virtual space, we were able to get more intimate knowledge of how users would interact with these security concepts because they were immersed in a 3D environment.

The purpose of this article is to persuade you that Hubs, and other VR platforms offer unique affordances for qualitative research. In this blog post, I?ll discuss the three key benefits of using VR platforms for research, namely the ability to perform immersive and embodied research across distances, with global participants, and the ability to test out concepts prior to implementation. Additionally, I will discuss the unique accessibility of Hubs as a VR platform and the benefits it provided us in our research.

SpiderMonkey Newsletter 6 (Firefox 80-81) [3]

SpiderMonkey is the JavaScript engine used in Mozilla Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the JavaScript and WebAssembly work we?ve done as part of the Firefox 80 and 81 Nightly release cycles. If you like these newsletters, you may also enjoy Yulia?s Compiler Compiler live stream.

With the recent changes at Mozilla, some may be worried about what this means for SpiderMonkey. The team continues to remain strong, supported and is excited to show off a lot of cool things this year and into the future.

Will Kahn-Greene: RustConf 2020 thoughts [4]

Last year, I went to RustConf 2019 in Portland. It was a lovely conference. Everyone I saw was so exuberantly happy to be there--it was just remarkable. It was my first RustConf. Plus while I've been sort-of learning Rust for a while and cursorily related to Rust things (I work on crash ingestion and debug symbols things), I haven't really done any Rust work. Still, it was a remarkable and very exciting conference.

RustConf 2020 was entirely online. I'm in UTC-4, so it occurred during my afternoon and evening. I spent the entire time watching the RustConf 2020 stream and skimming the channels on Discord. Everyone I saw on the channels were so exuberantly happy to be there and supportive of one another--it was just remarkable. Again! Even virtually!

I missed the in-person aspect of a conference a bit. I've still got this thing about conferences that I'm getting over, so I liked that it was virtual because of that and also it meant I didn't have to travel to go.

Moz/FF

Source URL: http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/141499

Links: [1] http://www.tuxmachines.org/taxonomy/term/118 [2] https://blog.mozvr.com/hubs-by-mozilla-for-immersive-embodied-user-feedback/ [3] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/2020/08/28/newsletter-6.html [4] https://bluesock.org/~willkg/blog/dev/rustconf_2020_thoughts.html