Late last year, we published a blog post letting you, our readers, know about an exciting one-of-a-kind event hosted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an affirming partner of the OpenStand principles and leading advocacy group for web standards. We are happy to report that The Web & Virtual Reality Workshop turned out to be a productive, positive, inspiring (and fun!) event.
Held in Mountain View, CA, the workshop set out to to examine the intersection of Web and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. Practitioners of both technologies were brought together, allowing the opportunity for discussion and the sharing of experiences to improve the Open Web Platform as a delivery system for virtual reality experiences. The 120 participants were made up of browser vendors, headset and hardware manufacturers, VR content providers, designers and distributors.The workshop also sought to create an environment for VR practitioners, and those in related fields, to share their experiences with making the Web a successful platform for VR. Discussions ranged from difficult to impossible VR use cases and future standards and timelines for the Web to be successful as a VR platform. According to W3C, “the secondary goals were also met and exceeded in productive discussions that took place at the workshop in ten one hour-long focus sessions.” The sessions were formatted with a short topical introduction, then a group discussion and summary. Session topics included:
- VR user interactions in browsers
- High-performance VR on the Web
- 360° video on the Web
- Depth Sensing on the Web (Ningxin Hu, Intel / Rob Manson, awe.media)
- Link traversal, are we there yet? (Fabien Benetou, Freelance)
The workshop concluded with a standardization of the VR landscape, put together by input from all attendees and the discussions that were had. “The landscape analysis identified existing W3C standardization work that was seen beneficial to VR, recommendations for new standardization work, as well as longer-term standardization targets to explore.”
Read more about the workshop and what was accomplished, as well as view presentations and slides, here via W3C’s official recap.
Continued collaborative discussions around cutting-edge Web technology like VR is critical. Creating conversations around open standards and technological advancements across technology industries is the key to success on all fronts.
Did you attend the workshop? If so, what did you think? If not, what do you hoped was discussed?