The Future of webVR: Josh Carpenter
CODAME is bringing their VR artists to Mozilla HQ November 21st because Mozilla has just released VR enabled builds of Firefox. Why is Mozilla getting into VR?
VR is very tricky. If you don’t get it just right, the user does not experience “presence”, the sense of being genuinely transported into a virtual world. For web VR to be able to induce presence while also providing backwards compatibility with existing web content, and supporting the wide range of new VR devices we expect to hit the market in the next few years, browser vendors like Mozilla will need to tackle difficult technical challenges. At Mozilla, we love those challenges. They motivate us like nothing else to push the platform forward.
Fortunately, we’re also not starting from scratch. One of the reasons we’re bullish on web VR is because the web has gotten much more powerful in the past few years. Technologies like WebGL and ASM give developers better tools than ever for creating 3D immersive experiences.
What do you think is the importance of a VR browser?
You can’t design the road without considering the cars that will run it, or vice versa. Platform and user experience are symbiotic, and so as we tackle the technical challenges of VR, we also think deeply about how we will use it. What will navigation for the VR web look like? What systems will it run on? I believe we need to do what the Mobile Safari team did for the first iPhone: to transport content and conventions from an existing computing paradigm to a new one by creating smart adaptations like multi touch, pinch-to-zoom, etc. And then we in the web community will need to figure out what VR-native sites look like.
Johnny Mnemonic, (1995)
What are the practical future uses of webVR?
We try to get away from thinking of the web in terms of flat planes, and focus instead of the jobs we “hire” it to do for us. For example, I hire the web to connect me with far off friends, to access obscure bits of knowledge instantly, to make me aware of what is happening in the rest of the world, etc. None of those jobs need to be limited to flat planes in a desktop or mobile browser, any more than news dissemination needs to be limited to town criers. We believe that many of these functions will in fact be dramatically enhanced by virtual reality’s ability to transport us anywhere, with anyone. The trick for the web will be focusing our creative firepower on the intersection of what the web is good at, and VR is good at.
When you first approached me at codame DANCE:HACK about this event, you said VR research had 20 years of science fiction to mine, referencing works like Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash and concepts like “the Metaverse.” How close are we to science fiction?
We’re living it already! And it seems like we are about to fall deeper down the rabbit hole. I look at VR and and can’t help but see a logical progression in the ergonomics of computing. From devices that could not have been any less human or inviting by any metric, to devices like the iPad that are so intuitive my 82 year old stepdad can happily master an iPad, to virtual reality, which represents — in a sense — a merging of user and computer, with the former stepping into the later. It’s fascinating!
