Massive congratulations to the team! I’ve been excitedly following their progress since this all kicked off in May 2014.
Do you think we will see a declarative standard for WebVR eventually develop out of A-Frame and similar frameworks?
When I was first involved in the 3D web in 2009 I managed to build a 3D web application using existing web frameworks and an X3D browser plugin. I joined the Web3D Consortium and presented my work at the Web3D Symposium in Darmstadt that year (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1559791). My biggest takeaway from that work was that there needed to be much more collaboration between the Web3D Consortium and browser vendors (http://tola.me.uk/blog/2009/03/29/call_for_collaboration_between_web3d_consortium_and_browser_vendors/) to get native support for the 3D web in browsers.
Today we have native support for 3D content in the browser using WebGL, a thin layer of abstraction on top of OpenGL. Because this is a very unfriendly API for humans to use, we’ve seen A-Frame be a huge success by essentially creating a polyfill for a 3D web markup language, much like VRML and its successor X3D.
Do you think WebGL (in conjunction with the new WebVR API) will remain the standard layer of abstraction for 3D content on the web, or might we eventually see a standard 3D declarative markup language in the descriptive realm of the content creator rather than the logical realm of the software developer?
I’m envisaging something like HTML which has a standard set of primitive object types and native 3D hyperlinks, styleable through a 3D CSS and extensible through Web Components. I know from conversations with Josh (now at Google) that he is keen on this idea and Tony Parisi’s latest effort in this direction is GLAM (https://tparisi.github.io/glam/).
Is a standard 3D markup language on the roadmap, or is A-Frame expected to (poly)fill that hole forever?
