Recap of September's Open Source Developer Discussion for High Fidelity's Platform

Want to contribute to High Fidelity's open source code base? The Open Source Developer Discussion is a great place for developers to bring their ideas to High Fidelity's leadership team.

Submit your proposals and PRs ahead of time for our development team to review.

Here is a recap of proposals and submitted PRs that were discussed and merged.

Recently Merged PRs + Completed Open Source Project Proposals

Kasen Plugin Infrastructure v½ Codename "Modkit Mini"

Submitted by @kasenvr
From Proposal: Open Source Modkit, Submitted by @RevoFire

This PR will easily enable other open source projects to be worked on, and has been merged for Beta Release 85. 

Open Pull Requests (PRs)

JSDoc fixes

Submitted by @makitsune
Feedback: Greenlit by @ZappoMan; @makitsune just needs to make a few fixes.

We are ready to merge this PR once @makitsune makes the necessary improvements and fixes that @ctrlaltdavid has noted.

Open Source Project Proposals

Qt WebView integration for Quest and Android

Submitted by @GeorgeDeac
Feedback: @GeorgeDeac was not present to discuss the proposal in depth.

This implementation will allow web browsing on Android and Quest platforms. Otherwise, QTWebEngine is not available on mobile platforms. This PR uses native APIs when possible to provide a way to display web content in a QML application without necessarily including a full web browser stack.

Speech recognition STT integration

Submitted by @GeorgeDeac
Feedback: @PhilipRosedale and @ZappoMan fully support this proposal, although @GeorgeDeac was not present to discuss it.

By implementing a text-to-speech application in High Fidelity, the community could benefit from language learning, transcription of presentations, translation, and more. @GeorgeDeac’s proposal suggests using free, open source toolkits like CMUSphinx to code this PR.

@PhilipRosedale and @ZappoMan agree there is a lot of value in adding mechanisms for more inclusion and fully support the idea, but the challenge will be it requires a lot of compute power.

New Ideas

Testing the Vive Pro tracking

@PhilipRosedale mentions we are testing the Vive Pro’s eye and hand tracking, and while the hand tracking SDK doesn’t adequately track fingers yet, the eye tracking is outstanding.

@FluffyJenkins wrote their own input plugin for High Fidelity to use finger tracking; it does SteamVR calls, although they have not opened up a PR to officially add it to the codebase.

Steam controllers to use 2.0 SDK

@ZappoMan notes if someone opened up a PR to change High Fidelity’s Steam controllers to use the 2.0 SDK, we would try to get that merged as soon as possible. 

Creating a tool to modify the graph of avatar animations

This would be a fairly complex logical problem to work on if variations are involved, but modifying the graph of avatar animations is something @ZappoMan says is a good idea and we would welcome as a contribution to the community.

General Updates

- Our team works every day in our virtual workplace together.

- We're continuing to work on low-end machine and stability improvements.

- There were many updates to our avatar animation engine in Beta Release 84.

- We're working on a new version of the third-person camera to allow head pivoting prior to shoulders and body.

Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to our last meeting. High Fidelity's next Open Source Project Proposals Meeting will be on October 9, 2019 from 1-2 p.m. PDT / 8-9 p.m. UTC. We look forward to reviewing and discussing the submitted proposals and PRs.