It Takes a Village
After all this time, VR really is the Web’s Next Big Thing. A two-day workshop brought the Web’s best and brightest together to define the future of the medium.
TL;DR: The web community’s next big push on browser technology puts VR and AR front and center. The Immersive Web is going to happen, and sooner than we think. It will take vision, hard work, compromise, and lots of really smart people.
The New Normal
I’m not really sure how it happened, but within two years WebVR — the technology that connects web browsers to virtual reality hardware — has gone from a wacky idea to the new normal.
WebVR was hatched a few years back by WebGL creator Vlad Vukićević of Mozilla, collaborating with Google Chrome hotshot Brandon Jones, and publicly demoed for the first time at our San Francisco WebGL meetup in the summer of 2014. The demos were crude, and the tracking sucked, but it was a start, and we were excited by the possibilities.
In the year that followed, WebVR was greeted with blank stares by the VR hipster elite and outright derision by industry players. We heard familiar arguments: bad performance, because JavaScript; too much bureaucracy with standards groups; and anyway, why would you want to do something like that? To be fair, folks had a lot on their plate, and most people didn’t have the mental bandwidth think about something as abstract and forward-looking as WebVR.
But over the past year, something changed. Seed-stage investors started asking me about WebVR, wanting to know the lay of the land. VentureBeat sang its praises and touted the benefits. Microsoft announced support for WebVR in Edge and contributed to the spec to make it suitable for AR. And in a penny-drop moment, a team at Oculus approached me with their plan to get into the WebVR game in a big way. This led to WebVR being featured in the keynote at Oculus Connect 3, with a demo by my fledgling startup and WebVR prominently placed in the Oculus Developer Portal.
It appears that WebVR has arrived. In a previous post I went into some detail about why I think the timing is now. But that only covers the why. How we are going get there has been by no means clear, till now.
The Final Frontier
While all this WebVR goodness was brewing, a group from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the people that brought you the Web, organized a Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality. The workshop, hosted by Samsung in San Jose, CA on October 19th and 20th, brought together browser makers, content creators, application developers, and technical experts to discuss enabling technologies and standards for an open VR infrastructure.
The very existence of this meeting showed that the powers-that-be in W3C understand the importance of VR as the new frontier of web development. That’s a big win, in and of itself. But the reality of the event went beyond that. The technical quality of the presentations, the concrete plans shared by product vendors, and the positive energy and spirit of collaboration showed how seriously the industry is taking this initiative. In my view, this workshop was another watershed, in a watershed month for VR that included Daydream View, PlayStation VR and Oculus Connect 3.
The W3C Workshop covered broad ground and when it could, went deep. After two days of lightning talks, panel sessions and breakouts, my ears were fairly bleeding from the information overload. I am sure the organizers will post full meeting notes soon. (See the schedule page for the detailed list of speakers and topics.) In the meantime, here are some highlights.
- Sean White keynote. An old friend from the VRML days, now VP of Technology Strategy at Mozilla, Sean White delivered a homey keynote that hearkened back to early VR and the collaboration that built the web, setting the tone for the rest of the workshop.
- WebVR API Update and Browser Support. There are more tweaks coming in the WebVR APIs, leading to a likely 1.2 version before broad adoption. Google, Mozilla, Samsung and Oculus shared concrete plans and expected ship dates for desktop and mobile VR browsers.
- Lightning talks. A barrage of 5-minute lightning talks covered UI design, accessibility, 360 video formats and metadata, immersive audio, multi-user networking, and declarative VR languages and 3D file formats.
- Breakout sessions. We split the group into sessions on various topics, including high performance VR implementations, hyperlinking in VR, and extending the browser DOM into 3D.
My fingerprints can be seen on a lot of the Workshop’s content, but I take particular pride in one development that I hadn’t even planned for. glTF, the new file format standard for 3D scenes, continues to build steam, with a groundswell of endorsement from industry partners over the last several months. glTF figured prominently in many discussions over the two days. Folks even floated the idea of glTF as a built-in format that browsers could natively read and display (analogous to JPEG images for 2D), with immediate application as 3D favicons, hyperlink transition animations, and built-in layer graphics, e.g. for splash screens and heads-up displays. Whoa. Mind blown.
Rip Van VRML
As fun a time as this was for me, it was at times surreal. A generation of brilliant technologists had locked themselves in meeting rooms to design the Metaverse, along the way rehashing ideas we explored two decades before, such as 3D scene representation, VR interface design, and shared presence. In earnestness and with great enthusiasm, the kids at this workshop were reinventing wheels left and right. But how could they know? Many of them were in middle school the first time around… if they were even born yet.
A modern day Rip Van Winkle, I had fallen asleep during a 1996 VRML meeting, and woke up twenty years later in the same room. Then I began to realize that things were different. People were holding these little computers in their hands. The Internet was fast and, apparently, connected everybody on the planet. And you could fit VR equipment in your backpack! Most of all, the people leading the discussions weren’t crazy futurists on the fringe; they were sane futurists working at mainstream companies.
It was 2016, and the real world was ready for the virtual one. While most of the problems are the same as twenty years ago, now we’re looking at them through a post-Facebook, post-Pokemon Go lens, and building on technology that is thousands of times more powerful.
A Community Effort
The W3C Workshop explored a vast landscape of technologies and standards, interface design and best practices, and tools and frameworks. While it was a great kickoff, it was just that: a kickoff. There will be much hard work going forward.
We already have a head start, and some success under our belt. WebVR is maturing and really working now, with 90FPS head tracking and support in many browsers. glTF is a ratified standard from Khronos, and has a growing ecosystem. Much of what we discussed at the workshop simply extends existing standards like HTML Video and Web Audio. So we’re not tackling any of this from a standing start, or from an ivory tower. The output from the workshop will be brought back to working groups at W3C and Khronos, or new groups will form to tackle new pieces of the problem.
That, generally, is how the process will unfold. But it’s not just about process; it’s about people. People were the key to the success of this workshop. The organizers, Dominique Hazael-Massieux, Anssi Kostiainen, and Chris Van Wiemeersch, worked tirelessly to put on a first-class event, extremely well-run with top-notch content. The familiar names of WebGL lore — Josh Carpenter, Brandon Jones, Michael Blix and Laszlo Gombos — have been joined by new ones, like Justin Rogers and Amber Roy of Oculus, Nell Waliczek and Adalberto Foresti of Microsoft, Ada Rose of Samsung, Kevin Ngo and the A-Frame team from Mozilla, and Shannon Norrell and other energetic community-builders. There were numerous positive contributions and, given the headiness of the subject matter, the mood remained light throughout the proceedings. There was a real spirit of cooperation and hope for the future.
If we can bring a fraction of this energy to bear in the coming months, we will make great progress. The movement is growing. We have enough people on this, with big brains, pure motivations and a shared vision. And that’s good… because it takes a village to build a Metaverse.
