Re: WebVR and DRM

I think we’re going to be a lot more productive if we stay on engineering questions, and the opinion aside. Please? Your messages are coming across more as political point than engineering insight.


> On Jul 10, 2017, at 11:54 , Florian Bösch <pyalot@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 8:22 PM, Kieran Farr <kieran.farr@gmail.com> wrote:
>  • The concept of a restricted Video Layer that supports existing web-based video DRM schemes would be a reasonable solution for most legacy publishers looking to get their "feet wet" with VR. I think this is a great idea and would kickstart many WebVR enabled sites -- especially if it can piggyback nicely off of the HTML5 video element's existing "goodness". Those that wish to make use of more advanced WebVR / 3D pipeline features would need to weigh that against their contractual rights for content access.
> I think that's pretty useless, for the same reasons that Facebook/Oculus felt it was pretty useless, and a few reasons on top of that.
>  • No mipmapping (hurts viewing fidelity overall, but also disables ambient light effects)
>  • No anisotropy (hurts viewing fidelity)
>  • No syncing of video content and WebVR content
>  • No audio integration with anything attempting to do spatial audio
>  • No way to handle subtitles and the like in a VR friendly fashion (at a proper place maybe outside the video frame, with a proper VR oriented text rendering solution)
>  • No shading/integration with the rendering pipeline. That also means no effects on the video surface used for UI or aesthetic reasons
> For anybody unfamiliar with the need to read out textures for rendering, please see this WebGL experiment: http://alteredqualia.com/three/examples/webgl_deferred_arealights_texture.html

I don’t think WebGL (that you later mention) attempts to define time-vased behavior; certainly there is nothing about timestamps in the spec. So, indeed, using a layer that introduces some delay but doesn’t respect timestamps or even pass them through, is likely to lead to tricky timing problems. Why you assume this is necessarily true of WebVR is less clear.

> 
> Ultimately, if you want good applications, those applications need to be able to work with the data they're supposed to operate with. If you can't, what you get is crap. This is a recurring trend throughout all DRM. It degrades user-experience for legitimate uses, while it does nothing to prevent illegitimate uses. The race to "ultimate DRM" is a race to quality rock bottom.

Indeed, if you use systems for purposes that they were not designed for, then you get problems. That’s not a surprise.

David Singer
Manager, Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Monday, 10 July 2017 20:03:59 UTC