Immersive Web Technologies

[00:00:00]
>> So, we do think that feature is wrapped. And there are other authentications, there are other ways of creating AR and VR applications for example, unity or unreal are very popular tools. But one of the problem with creating things with unity or unreal, is you're still depending on a App Store to improve your application.

[00:00:33]
Another very important part of the web is web is secure and it is backward compatible. If you ever draw with Unity, you might know that nothing is backward compatible. Every time you have a newer version of Unity. You have to download and have that version, and keep that version.

[00:00:54]
And it's really hard to update your applications to the next version. On Web, we decide on the APIs way ahead, before everyone starts to implement it or everyone starts to use it. And in this organization called World Wide Web Consortium, W3C, we come up with the standards that every browser is going to implement.

[00:01:26]
And not only that, but we also make sure that every API is secure and also accessible. The W3C has multiple different groups. So, the working groups are the ones that decide on the next API's. But then we also have a community group which is really cool where anyone can join and look into the API's that are going to come In the future, or experiments on tooling and how we develop our vivix, our developer community.

[00:02:09]
So, the API's that we work on on immersive web working group is vivix, our device API's, which are the API steps detect your hardware capabilities and then give you the sensor data to be able to create the immersive experience. We also have a WebXR game pads module, which is addition to the regular game pads module and works with controllers and everything.

[00:02:43]
We have the WebXR AR module. Finally, to define the XR, AR experiences. So, we have things that we have been working on and haven't implemented yet. Things that are very experimental. One of them is anchors, which is the capability of you being able to put some information attached to a very certain point.

[00:03:16]
So, you can think of anchors as much more accurate GPS. So, GPS works in a proximity and it is not very accurate indoors, but with anchors you are able to put something on a specific surface. Or wall and then come back to it and find it in exactly the same place.

[00:03:42]
And in the future, anchors are going to enable us to share these experiences with other people. So, currently anchors are implemented on our core and our kids and if with a tool like HoloLens device, for example, you can create it and share it with the cloud anchor. And somebody with a iPad can look at the same experience that I'm looking at with a HoloLens.

[00:04:10]
>> How can when you use a WebXR experience? It doesn't feel as smooth or as yeah, smooth or as performant as something that you build in Unity. I know that Unity is a different engine but it always feels like there's something holding it back when I use a WebXR experience.

[00:04:30]
>> That is interesting. Yeah, please do share those experiences. It's, it will be interesting to see. But web GPU might be the answer that you're looking for. So, the web GPU haven't been implemented fully. And once we have that, once we start using that with WebXR experiences, then we will have much faster, much better experiences.

[00:04:56]
But also sometimes the issue is with not knowing how to make your application more performance. So part of making the application very performance is being mindful of the models that you have, right. And the rendering of the particles and things like that just adds up to the complexity of what you need to render in a very small device.

[00:05:23]
So, that seems to be something that we are slowly learning on web development.
>> Sorry, I'm just with a followup question. Is it with Unity? There's a lot of like performance checkers that you can see, like to see your application or throw it on the headset. You'll see drop frames.

[00:05:45]
Is there something like that for the web, but that you can check the performance of your WebXR application?
>> Yes, we do. Multiple things actually, we do have the Chrome Dev tools that you can check but also we can render on top of our experiences, a little gooey that shows you the performance and see what you can do.