God forbid we come together on WebVR instead of turning the VR space into yet another "monopolies punching eachother" not-invented-here pit fight.
VR is still a relatively high-performance 3D realtime application space. Those aren't generally adjectives I associate with either "JavaScript" or "Browser," so if I were trying to invest in an experience the average consumer will enjoy, I'd be extremely skittish about this tech stack unless I can see some successful high-performance demos.
WebVR advantages: open (not owned by a single entity), connected (travel from experience to experience without having to close and open), publish a web page in ten seconds vs. one month (six months for Oculus), no installs / downloads which is better suited for long-tail content, ability to be responsive / gracefully degrade (for better or worse).
No one is stopping you from running with your own WebVR platform, my guess is that it's not an easy thing to make money off of (which is what Google does).
Try using it for an hour or more. Keep a toilet handy.
> No one is stopping you from running with your own WebVR platform, my guess is that it's not an easy thing to make money off of (which is what Google does).
It's fun to pretend this is a passive thing that doesn't hurt the rest of the industry, but they've cannibalized talented people for this project that were previously working on WebVR. So I'm sorry if I'm not all that jazzed about torturing developers for the next 10 years with several shitty proprietary SDKs for doing VR development that won't work with eachother, when we could have a standard we can all come together and agree on and that runs on every device and platform with the same code. Have we seriously learned nothing from mobile phone competing SDKs and proprietary app stores nightmare?
I don't think that's quite fair. Some people might get nausea from using VR while others won't. Just like carsickness doesn't affect everyone, "VRsickness" doesn't either.
It's going to be a very long time before mobile phones are capable of refresh rates sufficient to prevent this issue. The fastest consumer graphics cards are barely capable of keeping up with this rate as-is. Aside from being yet-another proprietary SDK for VR development, Google VR is DoA regardless because it depends on a hardware platform that simply won't work well for what it's trying to do.
Please let's focus on WebVR. Please?
Lol can we keep junk science out of threads like these. Nobody knows enough about the tech yet to say things like this, especially with such vehemence. Let's start with the fact that the visual system definitely doesn't have some sort of unitary processing rate. It's incredibly context dependent, just like VR.
From personal experience I have never had VR sickness, and I use my Note 4 Gear VR every week on flights to watch multiple ~2hr movies and play timepass games with no ill effects. On the contrary it's pretty fun once you get off HN and actually try it...
This is a great example of how the hardware can differ but the software can be the same. Both Oculus and Vive work on WebVR, including the Vive controllers. Nobody had to throw away everything and start over just because of a hardware innovation.
If we start seeing special SDKs for each platform, this benefit goes away.
That's neither fair nor accurate. Google wants to do VR at Android scale and they're starting with their flagship phone. The claim about the display and vomiting just isn't true.
God forbid we come together on WebVR instead of turning the VR space into yet another "monopolies punching eachother" not-invented-here pit fight.
People are coming together on WebVR! Chrome, Edge, Firefox, the GearVR browser all have experimental support for it and the spec is working its way through the W3C review process.