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Comment by hammerandtongs | Hacker News Reader

So in looking forward to a time when people actually want a VR focused browsing experience and just for WebVR/WebGL there is this HUGE gap missing.

Where is the "HTMLTexture" support (the hacks for it are janky and not viable in my experience)?

I think WebVR will not take off if it doesn't have a clean way to experience the web's existing 2d elements, not to mention even VR needs a way to do 2d layout.

Any thoughts? I know Chrome guys were experimenting a few months back and there was some talk of it being in WebXR...

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Yeah, HTML in VR has been a big ask from a lot of the Web community. There is plenty of action happening there across the vendors. They are doing lots of thinking around security and such.

At the moment, we're not focused on the 2D Web in VR. We want to bring the best of the Web to VR, providing more content to VR users and allowing VR developers to easily publish. Looking more towards visually appealing and fully interactive content.

Layout in VR is feasible or perhaps even better without HTML/CSS, as is done in many of today's real-time experiences. We'll probably need to tweak the thinking around and create more tools for layout specifically for VR.

Given the state of text tools do you think it would it be viable to pipe a Readability Redux scrape into Aframe?

Yeah, I think so? Like parse the HTML and present it in a nice way in VR? That might be interesting for us to show VR content stand-in for non-VR sites (like Wikipedia) from our browser.

It should be totally possible. You should be able to fetch the HTML, process it (as Reliability seems to do) and define your own render logic in an A-Frame component.

I couldn't find a reference for Reliability? Is there source?

-I don't know how the FF reader mode is coded-

Edit-- https://github.com/mozilla/readability

You answered your own question. I'm more excited about your approach of alternative ways to render existing Web content over a DOM to texture API. VR is an exciting space to experiment.

I understand that viewpoint but I think the WebVR will be isolating(the normal web doesn't work) and lack uptake until, for example, github.com can be used directly within VR.

I don't believe github themselves will make a native client any time soon, and we shouldn't expect any other websites either.

Thus HTMLTexture seems critical.

I totally agree. We will be pursuing both approaches. HTMLTexture requires consensus and coordination with other browser vendors to come up with a sensible standard and it will take a bit of time. Alternative ways to render page information using WebGL can be explored today.

Hey all, I am a product manager of the LesnVR browser (https://lensreality.com/). We are thinking more in the direction you mention - enabling 2D content to be transformed into a VR content through CSS. We've done some experiments I posted about on my blog: https://productmanageronthego.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/vr-we...

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