Re: AR Web

> Is it HTML elements in VR that is dead, or decomposable content in a
regular web page? (or both?)

Specifically we were investigating the ability to  take a traditional 2D
HTML/CSS page, loaded in a XR viewing context (eg VR HMD), and
progressively enhance it into a 3D composition, by using styles (eg 3D
transforms) to position flat ements in 3D space, beyond the bounds of the
parent window.

The was part of a broader push to explore composable, declarative XR web
layout standards. Distinct from imperative WebXR / WebGL.

It’s not “dead” per se, as it wasn’t ever really alive. Aside from some
very cool prototypes built on Firefox by my MozVR colleagues back in 2015
(code that, AFAIK, was never merged to master).

Rather, in the past six months our squad has deemed this approach probably
too hard to be worth pursuing, relative to other approaches closer to what
we’re talking about in this thread.

On Sat, Aug 18, 2018 at 8:15 PM Rik Cabanier <rcabanier@magicleap.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Aug 18, 2018 at 2:54 PM Josh Carpenter <joshcarpenter@google.com>
> wrote:
>
>> You might find those links I posted in my initial response interesting,
>> John. I was for a while very enamored with the idea of being able to break
>> page layouts into compositions in 3D space by leveraging CSS 3D transforms.
>> At Moz and Google we built some prototypes that, to my satisfaction at
>> least, demonstrated that the approach was easy for a relatively experienced
>> web designer/dev to work with, and surprisingly compelling/fun. Turn a
>> Vimeo video into a 60 ft screen in VR with a few lines of CSS :) The
>> framework that Diego Marcos and team built to help enable to experiments at
>> Moz was actually a forerunner of A-Frame in some ways. But more recently,
>> based on cumulative discussions with browser engine people, we’ve come to
>> believe that approach would be extremely hard to make work in existing
>> engines, at web scale, and that the much better place to start is
>> composable models in 2D compositions. That’s not to say the dream of HTML
>> elements in 3D space is dead, but more back burnered, at least in my team’s
>> thinking.
>>
>
> Is it HTML elements in VR that is dead, or decomposable content in a
> regular web page? (or both?)
>
> I can see that bringing HTML in VR would have a lot of landmines around
> security and privacy but decomposable content should not be affected.
>
> On Sat, Aug 18, 2018 at 2:30 PM John D. Gwinner <john@gwinner.org> wrote:
>>
>>> >>Is there a group that is currently working on extending regular web
>>> pages with 3D content?<<
>>>
>>>
>>> I had an idea a while ago about extending Wordpress pages into 3D
>>> objects; sort of "spreading" the page around in 3D space, but that's about
>>> all I've done so far. It would suddenly inject a lot of default content
>>> into the world. Sort of a "Minority Report" API (how I explain it to
>>> Hollywood types).
>>>
>>>
>>> I had a (traditional) publisher that wanted me to cover WordPress
>>> alongside A-Frame and React in my second book (I wrote the book "Getting
>>> Started with React VR[now 360]", but the acquisition editor insisted on
>>> WordPress being covered in the second VR book "because it was another one
>>> of the larger web API's."
>>>
>>>
>>> It did get me to thinking ... there could be something to that.
>>>
>>>
>>> == John ==
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------
>>> *From:* Rik Cabanier <rcabanier@magicleap.com>
>>> *Sent:* Friday, August 17, 2018 3:23 PM
>>> *To:* public-immersive-web@w3.org
>>> *Subject:* AR Web
>>>
>>> All,
>>>
>>> last week at Magic Leap we released our browser Helio.
>>> You can find an overview here:
>>> https://www.magicleap.com/experiences/helio
>>>
>>> As part of its feature set, we created a set of extensions that allows
>>> authors to create and manipulate 3D objects such as animated models and
>>> textures. It also allows extraction so content can be pulled out of the
>>> browser and placed in the user's environment.
>>> To make development easy, we created a library called "Prismatic" that
>>> provides a simple declarative syntax.
>>>
>>> We'd like to iterate on our current approach with others vendors and
>>> work towards an open standard that works on 2D, AR and VR devices.
>>> I looked at the current community and working groups but couldn't find
>>> one that covers our current use case.
>>>
>>> My questions are:
>>> - Is there a group that is currently working on extending regular web
>>> pages with 3D content?
>>> - If not, is anyone interested in working with us on this?
>>>
>>> Please let me know if you want more details on our current
>>> implementation. I'm happy to explain.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>   Rik
>>>
>> --
>> Josh Carpenter
>> UX Lead, WebVR/AR
>> Google
>>
> --
Josh Carpenter
UX Lead, WebVR/AR
Google