WebVR Experiments
blog.google
blog.google
While the web is an amazing platform and I do wish it grows beyond what any app store and I think that we need to fundamentally rethink some parts of it to make it better and allow more streamlined clients to operate on top of it.
Luckily WebVR is just a client API which should not be hard to mirror in streamlined clients but I do not see yet the adoption of such approach and I think that will be awesome in terms of performance and in order to make it more portable/emendable into all kinds of devices.
That being said, having a VR experience provided on a web site like Amazon, Google, Facebook or Youtube could be interesting but I am not sure if the adoption will be wide and I do not think this is due to the technology itself but the fact that VR obstructs your entire view - it is immersive for sure - but you need to be comfortable to use it where you are sitting and most people are out and about and not exactly in their safe surroundings of their home.
This is why AR in my opinion will have a much wider adoption.
I think it could be a super cool way to deliver minor time-wasters like flash games, (what with flash dying off and everything,) especially if you could quickly pause/resume them while keeping the heavy overhead confined within a browser tab.
This doesn't look quite performant enough for that, but baby steps.
That's why browser-based VR also makes a lot of sense, because all those phones have browsers and writing a VR app just means targeting the widest and most mature platforms out there.
A Cardboard experience won't match a mature HMD but that's alright. It allows people who wouldn't have any VR at least some rudimentary experience.
Why? Processing?
I cut out a hole for my phone's camera in my cardboard, was hoping to have the ability to "minimize" VR like minimizing a window and seeing your desktop background except it would be the camera so you could see someone without taking off your headset.
With AR in general, one would want to place virtual objects onto particular real-world locations. This requires depth-vision and mapping this into a (simplified) 3d-world. For interactive use it needs to be done real-time, requiring quite a lot of compute. The single camera available on standard smartphones is not enough hardware for this.
Maybe we will get stereo-cameras by standard. The megapixel race is over, the high-FPS/slowmo fight is happening now, maybe stereo/depth/3d will be next.
I get your point about one camera versus 2. It's probably cost maybe? Why they use spinning LiDAR's versus phased array (non-spinning). Though even if it phased you'd still need something that was like 360 anyway to get around.
The cycle repeats.
This is why the browser as a medium makes perfect sense for OS and I think this is why ChromeOS makes a lot of sense although we see it is not massively adopted - maybe not yet.
But yes, everything you just said is like strange dejavu.
It points out how despite being ridiculous, there are good reasons why an approach like that has performance benefits.
Seriously though, has everybody forgotten VRML? It's weird to see the last VR hype cycle repeating itself in such detail.
And I think you're right about the hype, but wrong on the number of potential users. You didn't need special hardware for vrml.
Also, VRML took the approach of trying to build all kinds of special-purpose functionality into the platform (see e.g. http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Eve... or http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Int...). This is similar to what old-fashioned fixed-function OpenGL used to look like. Over the years, graphics APIs have evolved to become more general-purpose and programmable. And we've seen a similar trend with browser APIs: consider how Service Workers have replaced the old AppCache, or how MediaSource has replaced proprietary video streaming plugins. The design of WebGL/WebVR is a lot more flexible, and better suited to the modern web, than VRML was.
Obviously this doesn't mean that VR is going to be a huge success this time around, but it's also not fair to assume that nothing has changed in the last 20 years.
For its time it was incredible, far beyond the graphics for any multiplayer world I'd seen up til then - especially considering it was in the browser. It was essentially 3D chat in common map areas, with your own home like Geocities. You could upload your own assets for your avatar, including your appearance and the somewhat annoying but awesome and little-known functionality to have a sound (wav file if I recall correctly) to play to other players based on your proximity to them. I went all-in with a ghost avatar, and a funny/spooky ghost sound. The hours I spent roaming just to get the "what was that sound?!" reaction from other players was priceless.
I will remember that experience fondly for as long as I live. I was a gentle phantasm gleefully haunting a 3D world. Great memories, though more specific details are a faint whisper.
VR, VMs & cloud computing, automation "taking all our jobs". We've been running the same course since at least the 1960s. Everything that's new is old already.
Even the space race has been restarted. Maybe this should be a new Olympic Games category - "Set foot on the moon, by starting from first principals."
Either way, I'd back that category in a heartbeat, though not sure if it could be completed in the duration of a normal games cycle... In a way it's been started already with the google lunar x prize [o] though that's been running a little longer than your typical games...
Sure it was about VR, even though it didn't require the (then extraordinarily expensive) goggles and gloves; it was about a declarative means of specifying VR content. That the common clients for it were limited to fishtank interaction with monitor, mouse, and keyboard is irrelevant to what it was about.
> VRML failed but 3D for the web has been solved.
WebGL doesn't actually solve the problem VRML existed to solve (though it underlies many modern solutions, like X3DOM implementations.)
Declarative VR content on the web has a lot better infrastructure across the board now; the context is not much like 1995.
I don't have my cardboard on hand, but this sounds headache-inducing in VR.
[0]: https://www.webvrexperiments.com/experiment/mass-migrations
Unable to select text after bringing up the right-click context menu.
This counteracts how I browse the internet for more information on a topic I've just read about. Try it, try to select some text in the article then right-click it and see it happen.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,oculus,ht...
VR won't hit critical mass until movie-style "holograms" are implemented (check out the video game in Her for an interesting example [0]), just as tablets didn't catch on until they looked and functioned just like the thin slates that had been dreamed of in sci-fi.
[0; NSFW] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MgbMI5zhw Example pulled from YouTube. Very NSFW language.
And any AR headset that can pass the bar of "functional but also not looking weird"
I don't think this indicates any lack of interest in the technology.
Anyway the forest one the head tracking wasn't working for me. Should report that bug on GitHub
One of them headset not found. I think it's that NFC tag or "magnet?" on the cardboard cover.
Thanks for posting this I heard about webvr in a pod cast and open source code! Want to be Ed from Cowboy Bebop and dive into the web.
I know we're still a far way away, but this is definitely a step in the right direction - great job Google!
Maybe you weren't joking. That's the even more scary thing.
Personally I like to hop on my bicycle and meet real people in the real world.
I don't even know what to think about VR at this point. :/
It's one thing to look at old pictures, it's another to be able to stand in your old house the day after you moved in, to be able to go back to the beach where you went on vacation a few years ago, to be able to stand outside your old house in the woods in the dead middle of fall.
It instantly brought me back to those times in a way that normal photos or videos ever could, and when I made those photospheres I had no idea that I would be able to one day view them in a VR headset!