Google Chrome and the future of Virtual Reality | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome and the future of Virtual Reality

wemo.io

66 pointslurchpop11 comments

The article says "That’s where Brandon Jones comes in. He is the one (and only) person at Google working on VR support for Google Chrome." This doesn't seem right, that google only has 1 person working on VR for Chrome. You'd think there would be an entire team working on such an important technology. They should move the Glass Team over to help out.

Not really. It isn't going to be that important until the hardware is both affordable and ubiquitous. So they can afford to take the software development side slowly.

Even then it won't be important until it's actually useful. VR hasn't actually proven to have demand beyond the enthusiast crowd. Right now it's just a solution looking for a problem, some gimmick that companies are jumping on to look ready for the next thing. Let alone the fact that 3D content hadn't exactly exploded on the web yet.

I've used Google cardboard, and while it's true most of the apps are a gimmick, the youtube VR app is downright awesome.

If I had a VR unit with an elastic head strap (cardboard has none) I would watch youtube with that over any other medium of consumption.

It makes me wish I could code in that interface too. Rather than buying three expensive monitors, you can have six or sixty in front of you at any moment.

A big team doesn't mean faster progress or better results, and history shows that a single coder hacking away at his vision until a certain stage is reached is better then bringing a whole team, roadmaps and processes in right from the beginning. I think VR in the browser is currently in the same state as WebGL was in 2006/2007. A single guy (Vladimir Vukićević), hacking away at bringing OpenGL into the browser. And look where WebGL is now. In a way, moving the OpenGL API to JS was 'less ambitious' then the previous pompous attempts to bring 3D to the web (for instance VRML), but it worked out. Hopefully, a small number of coders hacking away at WebVR will have the same breakthrough result a few years down the road.

For context, Mozilla has two people working on their VR implementation. It's really early days for this stuff, and it's very experimental. Publicly available hardware (Oculus DK2) is still immature (low resolution, low refresh rate, very buggy SDK) and consumer-level VR is still years away.

And one of them is Vladimir that already created WebGL. So I'm kind of confident that will work!

Are there any popular (as popular as it could be) building blocks for 3d webpages? It seems like right now I would need to use canvas?

Actually, that is something I'm actively working on: https://github.com/capnmidnight/Psychologist.js

CSS¹ should somewhat work in Firefox at least. Sorta related, RiftSketch² is worth a look if you don't already know of it.

1: http://blog.bitops.com/blog/2014/07/31/css-and-vr-integratio...

2: https://github.com/brianpeiris/RiftSketch

I feel pretty confident we will see a re-distribution of resources at google towards VR as more commercially-facing devices get released. The Gear VR is the first product and we will see a relatively large number of mobile and thethered devices come out in 2015.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com