Re: AR Web

Josh:


Interesting. I didn't do any actual experiments, so it's really fascinating the work you've done.


>>You might find those links I posted in my initial response interesting, John.<<


I'll check it out (I'm in a remote location with iffy wifi and a lot of dust, currently).


I was thinking more of a meta visualization, or more accurately, a CMS layer that rendered Wordpress posts into 3D billboards / images.  Not the actual HTML that's served up, but a new CMS layer on top of their metadata. When I did my VR "VisMenu" 20 years ago (it's on some CD-ROM's in books; it was a piece of my VR interface to CompuServe), the metaphor I was using was buildings on a street, for web links. I could see extending this (although the code is way obsolete) to Wordpress "posts" with "pages" perhaps being the central city square.


>>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. <<


Understood on the hard to work. I don't completely get (but think I agree with) 2D compositions, but I'll follow the links when I get back to civilization.


== John ==


Author of "Getting started with React VR[sic:360]" by Packt Publishing


________________________________
From: Rik Cabanier <rcabanier@magicleap.com>
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2018 8:15 PM
To: Josh Carpenter
Cc: John D. Gwinner; public-immersive-web@w3.org
Subject: Re: AR Web



On Sat, Aug 18, 2018 at 2:54 PM Josh Carpenter <joshcarpenter@google.com<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:rcabanier@magicleap.com>>
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2018 3:23 PM
To: public-immersive-web@w3.org<mailto: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