State of WebVR — January, 2017
I have to be honest. As a Unity3D developer, I had not been paying much attention to WebVR. Run VR in a browser? That’s crazy talk! It wasn’t until the OC3 (Oculus Connect 3 Conference) keynote that I started to seriously consider the possibilities of WebVR. At OC3, Nate Mitchel announced that the Oculus team is working on a new browser (codenamed Carmel) that supports WebVR. If Oculus is investing in WebVR, it’s worthwhile learning a bit more, and that’s what I did.
Look, there will always be a place for high-fidelity, native VR. This is what made me fall in love with VR and is where I really enjoy spending my time — creating high-quality, immersive experiences that transports users. It’s easy to see why WebVR has been overlooked. WebVR promises a lower fidelity experience being delivered over the web compared to native applications. Wait a sec… Where have I heard this argument before? I am old enough to remember a time where many developers thought that the Web had no place for applications — the desktop ran applications and the web was for “lightweight stuff”. Obviously, we all learned a lesson that there IS value in applications delivered through a web-browser. Even in the case where the web application is less performant than their desktop counterparts.
I believe that WebVR is a lot like the early days of Web 2.0. Josh Carpenter (previously with Mozilla, now with Google) compares WebVR and native to Netflix and Blu-ray. “If we were to just look at graphic fidelity as the ultimate measure of performance and value, then we all would be watching movies on Blu-Ray discs rather than on Netflix. But there’s lower friction and instant gratification with Netflix, even though the graphic and audio fidelity isn’t as good. ” The question really is: Does WebVR provide value to end-users? I believe the answer is “Yes”.
If you are going to get into WebVR, eventually you are going to stumble onto a framework called A-Frame. As far as web frameworks goes, I found A-Frame to be a real pleasure to use and it’s exactly what developers need to get a taste for the potential of WebVR. I embarked on the journey to build a small prototype of a virtual tour using A-Frame. The code was not much different than one of the examples that is provided on their website, but I did load in some 360 Images I took with my Ricoh Theta S.
The current state of WebVR puts developers in an interesting position. If you do not have a Samsung phone or the Samsung Gear VR, you don’t have access to any “stable” browser. On desktop, you need to use the experimental build of Chrome or the nightly build of Firefox. My prototype showed that WebVR isn’t quite finished cooking yet. Using the latest nightly build of Firefox and the Oculus Rift, I saw some odd artifacts when moving between rooms.
Out of curiosity, I loaded the tour on my Daydream device using the stable version of mobile Chrome. When I activated VR mode, I was pleasantly surprised that I got the stereo view indicating it was ready for a headset. I was pretty excited! I then loaded it onto the Daydream headset and regretted it. The latency was too high and it immediately made me nauseous.
Google has announced that they are working on a version of mobile Chrome with WebVR support . The original timeline was January 2017, but last I heard was Q1 of 2017. One of my next tests will be to try the prototype on Chrome Dev. I will update this post with any new findings.
While WebVR is not ready, that’s okay. I am still very excited about the opportunities that comes with a low-friction VR platform that easily works on a variety of hardware.
