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Stereoscopic Rendering in WebVR

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31 pointscpeterso12 comments

Happy to answer any questions folks might have!

I know it's been done before, but I can't wait for the return of hyperlinked VR content :)

:-X Will have more to say on that, stay tuned.

Could you please say more about "permissionless content creation". Distributed content creation and management is a concept I have been intrigued with for 10 years. Not sure if those are the same thing or not.

There's no gatekeepers on the web. You want to distribute your content? Connect a box to the net.

This is in opposition to having to get your "app" approved by either Apple or Google or Microsoft.

Can you elaborate on what you see as the differences you see between distributed content creation and distributed content management?

Note: you do have to pay an ISP for a connection to the net (not the web) and having a domain name is nice (but not required, also more net than web), so I think it's safe to say there are gatekeepers to the net, but not the web.

Do you think teams will be able to leverage the same spatial visual information to provide or pair with technologies for spatial audio?

A lot of the game libraries assume and need 3d rendering in order to provide proper sound blocking (from objects) and in scene spatial depth. Having that concept considered in these experiments would perhaps provide for novel and consistent ways for people who are blind or low vision to gain awareness of the scenes (if audio can be attached by design or even by user preference) and augment or improve usability (end-user enjoyment?) if provided.

I've very very recently implemented some positional audio. Combined with animated elements, it's very convincing.

One thing I think might be problematic is the idea of constraining audio to enclosed spaces such as rooms.

For example, with web Audio, it's trivial to make the sound fade off equally in all directions in a circular area around the emitter. How you "contain" sound to a quadrilateral space is something I'm not able to visualize how I would implement.

If anyone has any prior art or recommended reading, I'd happily digest.

Oculus's docs on "Introduction to Virtual Reality Audio" may be of some use[1], specifically the section on environmental modeling[2].

The general idea is to model reverberations and reflections given the distance of a point sound source to the nearest flat surface, giving the impression of a "contained" sound.

[1]: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/audiosdk/latest/c...

[2]: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/audiosdk/latest/c...

Really looking forward to the the stereo rendering of non-WebGL content, HTML+CSS, which the Mozilla team is working on. More challenging path to figuring out but will open a lot of possibilities.

In particular, we have some ideas for preserving depth information between CSS and WebGL. Imagine, Z Fighting between something rendered in WebGL and something else positioned with CSS. Or I think a more compelling use case: correctly positioning an Iframe in a WebGL scene.

It's something we're looking into, but will take a significant amount of investment in platform (two very different parts of the rendering engine suddenly have to communicate).

For now, it's very low hanging fruits for content creators or engine developers to work with WebGL. It also doesn't hurt that it's much more performant.

On the other hand, it hurts accessibility.

Yes ideally they'd be able to be composited together at the depth buffer level. But even separate I can see a ton of devs making some very cool more UI-centric applications just with CSS mode. Can't wait to see the webdev community understand what can be done with VR and the webstack in 2016.

http://tridiv.com/ looks sick, but I'm not sure what feature they need that's missing from Firefox.

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