W3C & the Immersive Web

slides

Laval Virtual 2020, Dominique Hazael-Massieux

Transcript

Hello, my name is Dominique Hazael-Massieux.

I work for an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C for short.

I'm here to introduce today one of four exciting projects, which I hope to be of high relevance to the Laval Virtual audience, called the Immersive Web.

Let me first tell you what W3C is. We are a non-profit international organization, a consortium set with a mission to make the web grow with the development of technical standards.

W3C was founded and is directed by the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee whose picture you can see right above me, to ensure the continuous harmonious growth of his invention, the Web.

W3C is the forum where technologies that make it possible to build and run web pages and web application in web browsers are designed and standardized. You might have heard of HTML5, CSS or JavaScript for example.

This means the technologies we're developing in W3C end up on the devices of more than 4 billion people today, approximatively.

So the standards we build are made available freely to everyone and are developed in the open by a community of contributors who come from more than 450 organizations that are members of W3C as a consortium. And these members come from all over the world.

Any organization can join W3C and typically organizations join the consortium to make sure that use cases, their requirements are properly addressed by the technical standards we build.

The work of the consortium is supported by a full time staff of around 60 people located in Europe, in the United States, in China and in Japan. I too belong to that staff. I'm based in south-east of France.

And among my responsibilities in W3C, I have been looking at the intersections of web and AR and VR, or XR for short. You might say that's not the most of obvious intersection. What is the relationship between a web browser and a VR or AR experience?

I'm probably biased, but in my perspective, there are, in fact lots of not only interesting intersections, but also complementarity between the two worlds.

In W3C, we call the Open Web Platform the set of technologies that are available in web browsers. They indeed provide a platform to develop and deploy applications and we all use them in our daily life.

And when you look at it for content and service providers these technologies offer the most widely deployed platform. As I said, it's directly available in the hands of more than 4 billion users today and on devices ranging from desktop PC to mobile phones, gaming consoles, and in practice pretty much any connected devices nowadays.

It also helps in terms of content and service providers that the platform has the biggest developers community available, with estimates ranging from 20 to 40 million developers able to code for web pages, Web applications.

And from my perspective, one of the most magical aspect of the web, one of the most interesting of the web as a platform is how low-friction it is. What I mean by that is that any web page, any web applications that you can think of is available just at the end of a link, just a click or tap away from your preferred search engine or from your preferred social network, it's really easy to get into a web application, you just have to follow a link.

And all of this magic, all of this goodness is available through standards that are well defined, interoperable, and available freely to anyone, both to use as an end user and to use as a developer, and also open to anyone to help define. As I said, W3C is an organization that anyone can join to help define the future of web standards.

And I think all of these characteristics make the web a very compelling platform for AR and VR.

Many of you will know will have had the experience that one of the persistent challenge for XR experiences is that they can necessitate a lot of engagement from end users because they have to overcome a lot of potential friction. They need to get geared up with their headsets, they need to have their controllers and to have their detector setup if needed. And that can make a lot of friction before you even get started. And what that means in practice is that by the time the user is geared up, half of your audience will have given up for lack of time or of engagement.

One of the challenges that it's typically difficult to find developers that can do XR development, and the toolkits that are made available are often either specific to a specific operating system, a specific hardware, and in most cases, they will be specific to either VR or AR which means multiple developments if you want to target both mediums. And that's where I think the wide the availability of web technologies, of web developers makes the web very appealing.

They also bring a very low friction entrance to any XR experience.

And because they are cross platform, they also overcome some of the challenges around multiple developments for a single product.

So the web packages a number of features that makes, I think, a very compelling story to overcome some of the traditional challenges from from XR.

And so, in the W3C, we call this vision of bringing the good aspect of the web with the good aspect of anything XR, we call that the Immersive Web.

And the specific target here is to make web browsers a platform to develop and distribute AR and VR experience to any device using web technologies.

Now you might say "wait a minute, distribute XR content to any device? But not all devices are XR capable, that doesn't quite make sense. What does it mean to experience XR content if the user isn't equipped for it?" The interesting aspect is the web has been dealing with that question for pretty much ever.

There has always been a wide variety of screen sizes when the internet was mostly on PCs and mobile came and so we had a wide variety of interactions and screen types and so on.

And so the web developer community has this strong culture of deploying and developing content that will adapt itself to a variety of hardware capabilities.

And so the vision here is that by reusing the same approach, the same ideas, we can build content that will work on any device - XR content that will work on any device - that will take advantage of the full immersive experience for users that have the required hardware.

And so this approach is traditionally called progressive enhancement on the web. And the rough idea is that you build your XR content, which will be presented as 2d content that you would interact through either touch, the mouse on a traditional laptop or on a mobile. You could also use so called "magic window" mode for VR or AR content on a mobile. And if the user has full VR or AR headset, thenthey get the more immersive experience by you using the headset.

But the idea remains that you develop the content once and, depending on the hardware and the capabilities available, it will adapt itself to what the user can experience as the best experience.

And when I say by best experience is not just whether the user has required hardware or not: you may have, you know, the most fancy hardware available, if you're not in a position either from a time perspective or social perspective to using it, well, then it's great that you can still fallback to a less immersive, but still functional approach to experiences XR content.

And that also means that it's often very expensive to build an XR content, an XR application - and by expanding the number of users that can benefit from it automatically, you actually reduce the cost by spreading it over a bigger audience.

So that's the vision!

The way we achieve that vision is through atechnology under standardization in W3C called WebXR.

More specifically WebXR is an API that developer can use to detect and plug into XR devices when they are available, to create and adapt their web content to the hardware and to make that content react to the user's positions, the user's movement, and as well, to display it on the right display, for instance, on their headsets.

If you look at what we have in our standard, in our specification today, WebXR has a fairly complete support for anything VR. Some of you might have heard about WebVR, which was a predecessor technology. WebXR replace it completely by providing a more structured platform for VR content.

It also includes support for AR and VR controllers.

And we also have some of the basic primitives for AR provided by WebXR. It's only for simple AR experiences at the moment, but it already lets developers get a feel of what WebXR will be useful for AR in the near future.

And I'm talking here as W3C, but the reason WebXR matters is not because of W3C, as much as all the momentum that it has from some of the key stakeholders in the industry. Just to name a few of the organizations that are very actively involved in the development of of the standard: Google, Facebook with Oculus, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Mozilla, Magic Leap - all of these companies are very actively involved in the work, both to actually define the standard, the specification, and also implement it and ship it in their products.

So, if this vision of the Immersive Web is interesting, and you want to get a better feel of what it is useful for, the good news is that it's actually already shipping in a number of widely deployed browsers.

In particular, the VR part of the specification is available in Chrome, in the Magic Leap Helios browser, in the Oculus browser as well, and will be shipping very soon in Firefox and Samsung Internet.

The AR part is already available as well in Chrome and Magic Leap, and we expect it to ship in more browser very soon as well.

From a developer perspective perspective many of you will be using existing frameworks to develop their XR content. And a number of these frameworks have already started to adapt with WebXR as as part of their workflow, of their tool chain, so it's also fairly easy to get started, thanks to that integration point.

So as I said, right now, the AR capabilities are fairly limited in WebXR, they are fairly basic. But of course, we are very actively working in improving that situation. There is a lot of active work on making them richer, in particular, to have all of the primitives needed to bring real world detection and interaction.

We're also starting to look at how to bring hand input for both VR and AR - it's something that has started to appear in several headsets.

And more generally speaking, we're looking at more integration points between existing web content and AR and VR spaces so that you can bring one into the other more easily.

In general, we have plenty of ideas. We have lots of people very excited about the potential of what the web can bring to XR. What we sometime miss is people to make that vision true.

So if you're interested, not just in using WebXR, but in helping shape it, please get involved. As I said, W3C is open to anyone to join. The work we do is completely in the open so you can even look at how we work today without any prior engagement.

And if you want to make sure that the work we are doing, the priorities we put under work doing match your needs, your use cases, your requirements, I would very strongly encourage you to actually join W3C, become a member, become a participant in the Immersive Web group.

And if you need any help to do that, and you have in understanding the Immersive Web, W3C, the work we do in general, feel free to contact me, I'm available by email at dom@w3.org.

I'm also available on Twitter on GitHub, as @dontcallmeDOM.

And thank you very much for attention, thank you for inviting me to this virtual event. And I hope to get a lot of feedback from you all. Thank you!