JSAR: Browser engine designed for the spatial Web | Hacker News Reader

JSAR: Browser engine designed for the spatial Web

github.com

1 pointyorkie5 comments

A new browser engine is beyond amusing too me.

Can you explain a sample use case ?

What are the long term goals, is this meant to replace webkit one day?

p.s. The website has issues on mobile with graphics overlapping text etc.

Thank you for your interest! First, I’ve written a brief background post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WebXR/comments/1ldwwcs/from_the_dec...

In short, JSAR is designed for XR devices like Apple Vision Pro and Quest (though it currently only supports AOSP devices, with a simulator available for macOS). Its most important feature is rendering multiple WebXR applications in the same scene while coexisting with the host environment (e.g., Unity or Unreal Engine). Each WebXR app can use different tech stacks like Three.js or Babylon.js.

Additionally, JSAR implements spatialized HTML and CSS, rendering each DOM element as a 3D object rather than flattening everything into a single 2D texture. This opens up new possibilities for web developers.

Yes, I do want JSAR to progressively align with web standards and improve WPT compatibility (to match engines like WebKit), but that’s not the primary goal. For JSAR, the focus is enabling web developers to incrementally build spatial web applications—smoothly, like how Apple developers work with SwiftUI.

As for the website, it hasn’t been updated in a while and was never optimized for mobile (since this is largely a solo project, and my priority is coding). I’ve moved the documentation to the repo: https://github.com/M-CreativeLab/jsar-runtime/blob/main/docs..., you can browse it directly on GitHub mobile.

Overall the project is solid, youre doing good stuff! Last question for now, is it dependent on current browsers implementing it as standard or can it be dynamically used?

JSAR itself is a browser engine, so it doesn't depend on other browsers' implementations (JSAR follows backward-compatible design principles, meaning it won't modify any existing Web standard implementations but rather extends capabilities based on current standards). I've personally integrated it into an AOSP + Unity environment (with underlying GLES rendering), and anyone can also port JSAR to other GLES-based scenarios.

You can use JSAR to mix-render different modern Web 2D and 3D contents inside GLES-based engines like Unity, Unreal and others.

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