Although pretty cool - I am not convinced that the browser is the right medium for this but I am happy to be proven wrong!
While the web is an amazing platform and I do wish it grows beyond what any app store and I think that we need to fundamentally rethink some parts of it to make it better and allow more streamlined clients to operate on top of it.
Luckily WebVR is just a client API which should not be hard to mirror in streamlined clients but I do not see yet the adoption of such approach and I think that will be awesome in terms of performance and in order to make it more portable/emendable into all kinds of devices.
That being said, having a VR experience provided on a web site like Amazon, Google, Facebook or Youtube could be interesting but I am not sure if the adoption will be wide and I do not think this is due to the technology itself but the fact that VR obstructs your entire view - it is immersive for sure - but you need to be comfortable to use it where you are sitting and most people are out and about and not exactly in their safe surroundings of their home.
This is why AR in my opinion will have a much wider adoption.
Much easier to do VR with a smartphone than AR, and given that for most people in the world their only computing device is their phone, this seems to be the fastest way to introduce VR to the widest audience possible.
That's why browser-based VR also makes a lot of sense, because all those phones have browsers and writing a VR app just means targeting the widest and most mature platforms out there.
A Cardboard experience won't match a mature HMD but that's alright. It allows people who wouldn't have any VR at least some rudimentary experience.
>Much easier to do VR with a smartphone than AR
for now, but what is your outlook on Google Tango[0] type devices starting to get wider adoption? It is my general assumption that both google and apple will soon ramp up production of devices with such hardware specs.
I cut out a hole for my phone's camera in my cardboard, was hoping to have the ability to "minimize" VR like minimizing a window and seeing your desktop background except it would be the camera so you could see someone without taking off your headset.
The "minimizing" VR world to show real-world is one that I want as well.
With AR in general, one would want to place virtual objects onto particular real-world locations. This requires depth-vision and mapping this into a (simplified) 3d-world. For interactive use it needs to be done real-time, requiring quite a lot of compute. The single camera available on standard smartphones is not enough hardware for this.
Maybe we will get stereo-cameras by standard. The megapixel race is over, the high-FPS/slowmo fight is happening now, maybe stereo/depth/3d will be next.
I'm not sure if lytro (can't quite recall the name) but the technology that captures a photo at various depths of field, if you had that for 360, and captured sound, you could travel around a spot/zoom/focus on things. I want that.
I get your point about one camera versus 2. It's probably cost maybe? Why they use spinning LiDAR's versus phased array (non-spinning). Though even if it phased you'd still need something that was like 360 anyway to get around.
I don't really understand the cardboard. Maybe I'm using it wrong. Does it provide any VR/3D feeling at all? Whenever I used it it only felt like a big zoom and the fact that you can move your head around, but I can just use my mouse wheel to zoom in and use my mouse to rotate around for almost the same effect.
Honestly nowadays it seems like the browser is the right medium for everything. Most people I know who aren't developers or video game players seem to spend like 95% of their time on a computer in a web browser.
Next step: Browser becomes full screen and always-on. People don't know difference between OS and browser. Rich websites become icons on your new tab screen. People call them apps. Tabs become known as virtual desktops or spaces. Somebody invents an app that can show websites and calls it a browser.
While browsers relay on modern OS to function the reality is that you rarely interact with the OS from user perspective - only when you want to upload a file and such.
This is why the browser as a medium makes perfect sense for OS and I think this is why ChromeOS makes a lot of sense although we see it is not massively adopted - maybe not yet.
But yes, everything you just said is like strange dejavu.
I think it could work for lower-fidelity experiences. I could see it working if I could snap on sleeping mask-sized goggles which plug into my laptop for 360 video, simple experiences/games like a quiz show or rubiks-cube puzzles, that sort of thing.
I think it could be a super cool way to deliver minor time-wasters like flash games, (what with flash dying off and everything,) especially if you could quickly pause/resume them while keeping the heavy overhead confined within a browser tab.
This doesn't look quite performant enough for that, but baby steps.
You can only consider WebVR similar to VRML if you know nothing about it. Despite the name VRML wasn't really about VR. It was about 3D for the web. VRML failed but 3D for the web has been solved. WebGL works great today: https://www.google.com/maps/@19.8560519,-86.191051,22963938m...
Sure it was about VR, even though it didn't require the (then extraordinarily expensive) goggles and gloves; it was about a declarative means of specifying VR content. That the common clients for it were limited to fishtank interaction with monitor, mouse, and keyboard is irrelevant to what it was about.
> VRML failed but 3D for the web has been solved.
WebGL doesn't actually solve the problem VRML existed to solve (though it underlies many modern solutions, like X3DOM implementations.)
Well, obviously GPU hardware has become a lot cheaper, more powerful, and more widely available in the last 20 years. VR display hardware hasn't become ubiquitous in the same way, but it's still way beyond what was previously available to consumers.
Also, VRML took the approach of trying to build all kinds of special-purpose functionality into the platform (see e.g. http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Eve... or http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Int...). This is similar to what old-fashioned fixed-function OpenGL used to look like. Over the years, graphics APIs have evolved to become more general-purpose and programmable. And we've seen a similar trend with browser APIs: consider how Service Workers have replaced the old AppCache, or how MediaSource has replaced proprietary video streaming plugins. The design of WebGL/WebVR is a lot more flexible, and better suited to the modern web, than VRML was.
Obviously this doesn't mean that VR is going to be a huge success this time around, but it's also not fair to assume that nothing has changed in the last 20 years.
VRML was amazing. I distinctly remember the hours upon hours upon hours I spent playing on CyberTown[1]. It was based on an Internet Explorer ActiveX plugin for VRML (named Blaxxun), providing a full 3D environment... and this was in the late 90's / early 2000's.
For its time it was incredible, far beyond the graphics for any multiplayer world I'd seen up til then - especially considering it was in the browser. It was essentially 3D chat in common map areas, with your own home like Geocities. You could upload your own assets for your avatar, including your appearance and the somewhat annoying but awesome and little-known functionality to have a sound (wav file if I recall correctly) to play to other players based on your proximity to them. I went all-in with a ghost avatar, and a funny/spooky ghost sound. The hours I spent roaming just to get the "what was that sound?!" reaction from other players was priceless.
I will remember that experience fondly for as long as I live. I was a gentle phantasm gleefully haunting a 3D world. Great memories, though more specific details are a faint whisper.
Only VRML 1.0 was static. VRML 2.0 and VRML97 included animation and events (user and time triggered). As I recall you could program fairly rich behaviours using java or javascript, with collision detection.
> It's weird to see the last VR hype cycle repeating itself in such detail.
VR, VMs & cloud computing, automation "taking all our jobs". We've been running the same course since at least the 1960s. Everything that's new is old already.
Even the space race has been restarted. Maybe this should be a new Olympic Games category - "Set foot on the moon, by starting from first principals."
Pretty sure Wernher von Braun isn't available any more though [x], in fact I think you're going to have a real hard time with many of the other principals. Principles though seem to be potentially an easier route.
Either way, I'd back that category in a heartbeat, though not sure if it could be completed in the duration of a normal games cycle... In a way it's been started already with the google lunar x prize [o] though that's been running a little longer than your typical games...
What killed VRML is that when it was being pushed, clients having internet bandwidth for complex models was rare, and clients having desktop horsepower for even fishtank-style interaction with even simple models was also rare, which limited it's utility.
Declarative VR content on the web has a lot better infrastructure across the board now; the context is not much like 1995.
Viewing this on a beefy desktop, running Linux-Chrome, I'm seeing ~18 FPS, with very frequent freezes and frame skips. (Especially on the ping-pong demo.)
I don't have my cardboard on hand, but this sounds headache-inducing in VR.
I have a Nexus 5X and trying this just crashed my phone. As in everything froze and then the device rebooted. I only tried one experiment[0] and couldn't even get it to run.
Wow, using Chrome on Win10, I tried to select the text "Daydream ready phones" to search for it.
Unable to select text after bringing up the right-click context menu.
This counteracts how I browse the internet for more information on a topic I've just read about. Try it, try to select some text in the article then right-click it and see it happen.
The problems with VR are much higher-level than anyone wants to admit. Nobody wants to wear a headset on their face. They'll try it for the novelty, but they have a hard time doing it very long, or mustering up the motivation to do it frequently.
VR won't hit critical mass until movie-style "holograms" are implemented (check out the video game in Her for an interesting example [0]), just as tablets didn't catch on until they looked and functioned just like the thin slates that had been dreamed of in sci-fi.
Awesome. I remember last year going through all of the chrome experiments [1] on my smart mirror and being absolutely stunned. Regardless on your views of VR, platform, form factor, etc.. these are just cool. Does anyone know what controllers are used with android phones (for the ping pong game)?
I just wobble my head forward, in a cow-licking-your-face fashion. My highesh score is 9. The google cardboard's band is little too tight for my head so can't keep it on for longer.
I have the daydream, and it looks like it doesn't use the controller for anything other than "clicking". Your head movements are still used for all of the controls.
I haven't tried playing it yet, but Mr Nom Nom looks adorable; one of those creative games that stirs my inner child. Etter studios shared some info about its development [1], and open sourced the code that procedurally generates the characters using threejs [2]
Cool, good to see some colorful WebVR stuff coming out of Google Experiments. Hopefully that means WebVR will be making from Chromium to Chrome soon =)
I'm excited for the day that I can put on VR through my phone or computer and shop Amazon with hand gestures and voice. Or look through all the pictures and videos I have stored and fly through memories.
I know we're still a far way away, but this is definitely a step in the right direction - great job Google!
So this prompted me to pickup my daydream that I got for free with my phone again after a few months, and I looked back through some old "photosphere" photos I made.
It's one thing to look at old pictures, it's another to be able to stand in your old house the day after you moved in, to be able to go back to the beach where you went on vacation a few years ago, to be able to stand outside your old house in the woods in the dead middle of fall.
It instantly brought me back to those times in a way that normal photos or videos ever could, and when I made those photospheres I had no idea that I would be able to one day view them in a VR headset!
Now this is the mindset that I don't understand. Why can't you like both VR and real life? People made this same complaint for computers, the internet, gaming, and so on. But all of these technologies can augment your socialization.
I have a vive and what I don't understand is why I need to use chromium or nightly firefox to view this content when it is out on official mobile builds. Does anyone know why this hasn't made it into official desktop builds yet?
It could still be quite buggy with Oculus and Vive hardware. They have only enabled WebVR in "Cardboard" mode on mobile which has a much smaller surface area.
There's actually a couple of Chromium-based browsers on there, Samsung Internet for GearVR which has been out and quite popular for 360 video watching (Youtube.. etc.), and Oculus just came out with theirs.
While the web is an amazing platform and I do wish it grows beyond what any app store and I think that we need to fundamentally rethink some parts of it to make it better and allow more streamlined clients to operate on top of it.
Luckily WebVR is just a client API which should not be hard to mirror in streamlined clients but I do not see yet the adoption of such approach and I think that will be awesome in terms of performance and in order to make it more portable/emendable into all kinds of devices.
That being said, having a VR experience provided on a web site like Amazon, Google, Facebook or Youtube could be interesting but I am not sure if the adoption will be wide and I do not think this is due to the technology itself but the fact that VR obstructs your entire view - it is immersive for sure - but you need to be comfortable to use it where you are sitting and most people are out and about and not exactly in their safe surroundings of their home.
This is why AR in my opinion will have a much wider adoption.