Events have taken a dramatic turn since I published an article last September on how WebVR, the JavaScript API that allows immersive VR experiences to be played straight from your web browser, will make virtual reality massively available.
Back then the only big player that was generating some appreciable degree of buzz was the pioneer itself, Mozilla, with their WebVR open source library, A-Frame. But in the past several months news began to roll out from the likes of Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and Oculus, each giant announcing advances in powering up their browsers with WebVR.
“We are now capable of creating VR content that is available on the most widespread medium in existence by simply sharing a URL,” Diego Gonzalez, Developer Advocate for Samsung Internet told me.
Last month Google announced that Chrome now supports WebVR on Daydream-ready Android devices and that they’re in the process of broadening that access to include desktop operating systems, which will be a huge stepping stone for companies interested in leveraging VR on the web.
Google’s UX Lead for WebVR Josh Carpenter explained the company’s motivation: “Volume of content matters. The ability for anyone to create and publish their vision matters. We view the web as a complement to native virtual reality, helping create new types of content, with wide distribution, and no-friction consumption.”
Other WebVR-friendly browsers include Samsung’s Internet browser, available on its Gear VR headset, Microsoft’s preview version for its Edge browser, and the Firefox Nightly browser. Oculus is building its own native WebVR browser, coined Carmel, which is available in the developer preview — we’ll surely hear more about as we approach the F8 developer conference coming up next month.
“We believe WebVR is one of the crucial ways to drive adoption for VR because it promises to exponentially increase the number of developers building great content,” Oculus’ WebVR product manager Andrew Mo told me. “And the cross-platform nature of WebVR enables users to easily share and connect with their friends outside VR and show them what they are missing.”
Holding true to the nature of the web as a garden without walls or fences, there are a variety of WebVR frameworks that developers can work with aside from A-Frame. Vizor, PlayCanvas, and BabylonJSor are popular along with VR developer engines like PrimroseVR and Zeovr. Oculus’ own open source library, ReactVR, is available as a pre-release.
“The beauty of WebVR is that it works on many platforms now with many more on the way, and tools like A-Frame mean that creative self-expression has been opened up to more people around the globe. Sharing is as fast and simple as sharing a web page, and it’s open to anybody,” Mozilla SVP of Emerging Technologies Sean White told me via email. “Now that others have joined in, we hope they will develop their tools and applications in such a way that will ensure they remain relatively easy to standardize and can be supported…