
WebVR Experiments - forlorn
https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/come-play-webvr-experiments/
======
_pdp_
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.

~~~
wavefunction
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.

~~~
ge96
>Much easier to do VR with a smartphone than AR

Why? Processing?

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.

~~~
jononor
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.

~~~
ge96
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.

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sevensor
This has the potential to have two, maybe even three times as many users as
VRML.

Seriously though, has everybody forgotten VRML? It's weird to see the last VR
hype cycle repeating itself in such detail.

~~~
modeless
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...](https://www.google.com/maps/@19.8560519,-86.191051,22963938m/data=!3m1!1e3)

~~~
dragonwriter
> Despite the name VRML wasn't really about VR.

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.)

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vkou
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.

~~~
searchfaster
I had the same experience when I saw my first online streaming video many many
years ago.

~~~
vkou
Your first streaming video was probably unwatchable. The problem with VR is
that for a lot of people 'unwatchable' means serious headaches and nausea.

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jumpkickhit
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.

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blurrywh
Slightly OT: Peak and decline of VR related search queries on Google Trends:

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,oculus,ht...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,oculus,htc%20vive,gear%20vr)

~~~
cookiecaper
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.

[0; NSFW]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MgbMI5zhw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MgbMI5zhw)
Example pulled from YouTube. Very NSFW language.

~~~
fudged71
I'm waiting for 6DoF High-Def HDR Mobile VR.

And any AR headset that can pass the bar of "functional but also not looking
weird"

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soared
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)?

[https://www.chromeexperiments.com/](https://www.chromeexperiments.com/)

~~~
russelldc
I assume it supports the Daydream VR controller.

~~~
Klathmon
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.

------
misterdata
Cool. Now we wait until someone builds this one: [http://memory-
alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode)](http://memory-
alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Game_\(episode\))

------
zengid
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]

[1]
[http://etterstudio.com/en/mrnomnom.php](http://etterstudio.com/en/mrnomnom.php)

[2]
[https://github.com/etterstudio/mrnomnom/](https://github.com/etterstudio/mrnomnom/)

------
ge96
Cool tried a couple out on my Nexus 4. Spot the bot was the one out of four
that "fully worked" it was a little laggy. Also I don't have friends ha.

Anyway the forest one the head tracking wasn't working for me. Should report
that bug on GitHub

One of them headset not found. I think it's that NFC tag or "magnet?" on the
cardboard cover.

Thanks for posting this I heard about webvr in a pod cast and open source
code! Want to be Ed from Cowboy Bebop and dive into the web.

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carlosdp
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 =)

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byandyphillips
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!

~~~
socmag
/s? FTFY

Maybe you weren't joking. That's the even more scary thing.

Personally I like to hop on my bicycle and meet real people in the real world.

I don't even know what to think about VR at this point. :/

~~~
prophesi
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.

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howfun
That is a funny domain. Why it exists?

~~~
TheCoreh
Top Level Domains have been available for sale for some time now. Google
purchased .google, and registered a blog domain under that.

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trevordev
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?

~~~
jmitcheson
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.

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guidefreitas
It would be awesome to have a Chrome version with GearVR integration.

~~~
mkeblx
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.

