14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has a cool new experiment that seeks to make Virtual Reality a little more realistic in the online medium.
“The opportunity for VR on the Web is particularly exciting. The Web is a vibrant, connected universe where many different types of experiences can be created and shared. People can be productive, have fun and learn all from within their browser,” writes Graphics, JS and Gaming Director at Mozilla, Vladimir Vukićević.
So, Mozilla’s developers are currently working on experimental support for 3D virtual reality within Firefox, one of the most used web browsers in the world.
Therefore, native support for VR devices have been added to experimental builds of Firefox in order to encourage Web developers to start experimenting with adding VR interactivity to their websites and content, which is just one of the many steps they’ll be taking in the coming weeks and months.
The initial technical vision for Virtual Reality on the web includes rendering canvas (WebGL or 2), 3D videos and HTML (DOM+CSS) to VR output devices, mixing WebGL-rendered 3D content with DOM rendered 3D-transformed content in a single 3D space, as well as receiving input from orientation and position sensors while focusing on reducing latency from input/render to final presentation.
“In particular, Web content should not need to be aware of the particulars of the VR output device, beyond that there is one and it has certain standard rendering characteristics (e.g. a specific projection matrix that’s needed). For example, in the case of the Oculus Rift, content should not need to apply the Rift-specific distortion rendering effect,” says Vukićević.
The work is currently in early stages, and there’s no mention on how exactly browsers should handle this kind of Virtual Reality hardware, but right now the developers working on it plan to integrate it into the Firefox’s codebase. The experimentation phase they’re going through is meant to help design the API.
The first step is to receive sensor input and rendering Canvas/WebGl content to VR, while the next few weeks will see an expansion of the scope and support of VR in the web platform to make everything possible.
Josh Carpenter, Mozilla leader for user experience, will be working on this problem from a different angle, namely the way users will experience this new feature and what it will look like, as well as trying to figure out how the VR web might feel like, and what type of content could be created.