Second Feature: Positional Tracking ?

“Positional tracking provides the position of the user virtual camera”

It allows us to display the 3d according to the position of your camera device. Thus, physical moves of your body are immediately reflected in the virtual world. This links between physical and virtual world, and it is key to immersion.

So WebVR is for Augmented Reality too!

WebVR contains all the stuff for Virtual Reality obviously! Stereoscopic Rendering is useful for VR. Positional Tracking is useful for VR. Sure… but they are equally useful for Augmented Reality. As I keep repeating through out this post :)

So why WebVR has “VR” at the end ? My guess is that the authors were thinking about VR when they wrote it. Nothing specific VR to it, it is equally good for AR. Some people even joked about renaming it WebXR :)

“Using WebVR to write AR applications”… It is super confusing from the start. When I talk about it, I’m never sure how to explain this in a non confusing way. From a name point of view, it is a nightmare. Currently I call it “WebVR for AR” or WebVR4AR for short.

Let’s Unite for “WebVR for AR”

WebVR for AR is about using WebVR standard to write augmented reality applications. I would love if all AR platforms move to support WebVR for AR. Unity is strength.

WebVR would create a common ground which could benefit everybody involved in AR for the Web. We don’t need to wait for a standard specific to AR to benefit from the advantage of having a standard.

Developers will be able to write applications more easily, they will have only one API to learn. So more applications will be written. As each application will be able to run on every AR platform. With each new applications, each of our AR platforms will become more relevant to the users.

If we support only proprietary APIs, we will create little islands and slow down the maturation of AR as a whole! Each platform may have specificities that they want to offer to their users thru proprietary APIs and it is totally fine. To support WebVR doesn’t imply to support only WebVR.

The community of AR for the web is still rather small. We are still at an early stage. We dunno which applications we will run in the future. We need to make it easy to experiment, thus we learn more about AR and make it more mature.

I think everybody in augmented reality would benefit from “WebVR for AR”.