W3C Workshop on Web Games

Breakout session on Web Audio

This breakout session was part of the Workshop on Web games. Notes taken by Raymond Toy and Paul Adenot.

WebXR and Social VR

Not much said about WebXR. For Social VR, WebRTC + WebAudio kind of works if you’re careful. WebCodec will help.

Spatialization Support/Ambisonics

Opus works really well here to support all the channels and modes needed. Paul Adenot mentions that, if there is interest, an updating to PannerNode with a new type could be envisioned to provide a middle-ground between equalpower and HRTF: higher fidelity than equalpower, but lower cost than HRTF.

Hardware Acceleration for Audio

Intended to support raytracing, occlusion, etc. for audio, like how graphics is done. Probably not ready for any kind of standardization. Neil Trevett mentions the fact that this could be done efficiently in hardware. Paul Adenot points out that a general GPGPU approach would be best.

WebRTC

WASM support for WebCodec should be designed in. This means at least having views into the WASM heap so that no copying is required.

Don’t use promises; use callbacks instead for tighter control.

API should use buffer views (regular buffers or WASM heap).

Some questions on how this would work:

• Who reports errors?
• What’s the permission model?
• What’s the input/output?
• Realtime thread issues?

WebCodec

Some discussion about WebCodec was discussed, better covered in the Networking in games breakout session.