WebXR is knocking on our headsets door
Bi-weekly update with the latest insights from the Metaverse: news, posts, creations and communities.
Hey hey! Hope you’re all staying safe from Coronavirus. It’s affecting major events like Mobile World Congress bringing to the forefront the need for XR for remote work and remote events. IEEE VR is actually doing an experiment related to this that you can read about below. It’s also affecting manufacturing as stated by Oculus and TiltFive.
Outside of Coronavirus hoarding the news, it’s good to see constant progress in the open metaverse space. WebXR is now ready and we’re seeing the XR community embrace it. It’s finally Phase 1 for WebXR and I couldn’t be more excited!
On the news
Somnium Space launches 20/02/2020: A known contender in the Social VR space is launching. Somnium is based around land that people can buy. It’s built on top of Ethereum. I’ve always considered that a benefit of virtual worlds is that they don’t need to share the same limits of our physical environment, so we don’t need to set a limit on available digital space. Never the less, Somnium has worked hard on producing an easily buildable virtual platform and we’ll need to see how they convince the community to jump in. Social VR platforms need to give people a reason to use them. Out of curiosity, Decentraland from the ICO frenzy days is also launching on the same day. [Link]
Sidequest adds support for WebXR content: It’s a directory of popular WebXR experiences promoted by the now pretty well known Sidequest app. We’ve had directories for some time, with Supermedium being the most noticeable, but none have come from a previously established player. [Link]
NathieVR plays WebVR Spiderman experience: And now a WebXR game is featured in probably the most popular VR YouTube channel. It’s an important milestone for WebXR to reach the mainstream. It helps display WebXR as a viable platform for VR content. The tooling is getting better and it’s now supported by major browsers [Link]
Hand tracking available for WebXR: Oculus having their own browser has the nice benefit that they can quickly add support for new features on the Quest. In this case, it’s hand tracking. Many experiments have popped up on Sidequest making use of this feature. Now we can also build with in with WebXR! [Link]
Cool Creations
Offloading WebXR app off the main thread: Great article by Das Surma, from Google, on how to move physics off the main thread to ensure 72 FPS on the Quest. Definitely worth a read if you’re considering building WebXR experiences. [Link]
XR Design Theory video by Mike Alger: Another great video from Mike showcasing design guidelines for XR applications. Definitely a must watch. [Link]
Interesting Meetups & Communities
IEEE VR 2020 Online experience: Mozilla Hubs is once again attempting to add an online VR experience to a physical event. Sign up at the link to join in. With Coronavirus bringing the need for better remote work tools to the front, this is a very timely experiment. VR events is an obvious use case for the tool. [Link]
Thanks for tuning in, that’s it for today. If you find anything interesting that we should post in the next one, reach out via Twitter or Email.
See you in 2 weeks!
Alberto