W3C

– DRAFT –
Immersive Web WG/CG

19 January 2021

Attendees

Present
bajones, cabanier, cperey, cwilso, dino, jgilbert, Leonard, yonet
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
Leonard

Meeting minutes

<ada_> hi!

Platform/Framework Feedback (administrivia #147https://github.com/immersive-web/administrivia/issues/147

Brandon: General discussion to make sure we are all in sync and to see if there are any API issues
… share collective knowledge about how things are going

Leonard: I need to dial in...

Brandon: <missed a bunch of this report... :-(>Lots of content being displayed on cardboard

https://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Valley-HTML5-WebGL-Meetup/events/275828660/?refund_policy=true&rv=ea1_v2&_xtd=gatlbWFpbF9jbGlja9oAJDdiYTVkYzlmLTY3ZTYtNDU3Ni05Nzk4LWJhN2U4ZWY4ODgxNw&utm_campaign=event-announce&_af=event&_af_eid=275828660&utm_medium=email&response=3&action=rsvp&utm_source=promo

https://www.awexr.com/global/AWE-Nite-Producing-High-Impact-WebAR-Campaigns

<Zakim> dino, you wanted to speak after discussion

Dino: Qs to Brandon:
… 1: Less VR and more AR. Who other than Occulus are making VR browsers?
… From developers at Apple, a lot of people want to embed a web-view into AR apps. Problem with flatness of web vs. 3D of AR

Ada: To clarify: want DOM to texture or DOM layer?

Dino: Have a plan that displays a browser. Now put 3D into the browser display -- what happens? Not trivial

Brandon: A to #1-- Google seeing shift to AR. Still supporting VR on mobile and desktop. Moving internal resources to AR.
… Microsoft expanding on open-source capabilities of Chromium. Google is the only one who can work on ARCore.
… Like to see more players in VR side of things. Occulus needs competition to make things better.
… A #2: ZSpace has a stererstopic display that works.

Rik: Other companies: a lot of HPC sets sold at Christmas
… Immersive video provides a lot of use of VR

<bajones> I concur! The input profiles have been a resounding success!

Rik: Most complaints are about performance. Frame rate causes problems for h/w with keeping up or heat.
… No real complaints about API

<Zakim> bajones, you wanted to answer Dean's question about Chrome/AR/VR and to ask Rik about any insight into performance bottlenecks.

Brandon: Where are the bottlenecks comming from? Have people done performance anaylsis

Rik: <broken-up> ... about device not keeping up with head motion
… Web workers with a lot of other computations (physics, etc.) cause problems

Brandon: Good insight. Move to WebGL2; however, not Safari supported (currently). Updates coming.

Rafael: Microsoft ship Edge (VR browser) and mixed reality headset. Moving Edge to work on Hololens.
… Developers want more feature parity with native apps. +1 for better performance need.

<Zakim> ada, you wanted to ask about navigation

Rafael: Complaints for 2D layers, especially for 2D Canvas. Video too.

Ada: Difficult to create single large scene and have it performant. Would it be possible to navigate with "teleporting"
… to reduce the scene size and load

Nick: Would like to see: ARCore features - depth sensing, camera texture, curved image targets embedded (images on curved surfaces)
… access to scene that is currently being rendered
… DOM overlay does not always work on some phones
… WebXR developers seem to have usability issues, especially around scale.
… Q for Brandon & Rik.
… --> Rik: What kinds of videos are you seeing?
… --> Brandon: Expected winds for WebGL2. Not at all obvious

<someone>: <broken>

Brandon: WebGL2 worse is not expected

Rik: Seeing immersive video being used

Brandon: Agrees with Rik

<jgilbert> (someone => jgilbert: We expect zero perf regression in webgl2 vs webgl1. If you see any, file a bug immediately)

Brandon: For WebGL2 -- there are a number of content that are JS bound. WebGL2 reduces the JS load and draw calls. If there are bandwidth
… limitations there are a more limited options

WebGPU timing? Tossed to Jeff

Jeff: Late 2021.
… Don't build a product yet. Things will break between now and public ship/release date.

<Zakim> bajones, you wanted to talk navigation

Brandon: Navigation may or may not help with performance. It depends on the supporting libraries (culling), and how much
… web access and texture loading is needed
… may cause more problems than a single scene

Lachlan_Ford: Big problem is filling pixels (as Brandon mentioned).

Ada pushes another issue to next time...

Ada: Accessibility for WebXR. Need someway to get screen readers to handle arbitrary text. Don't know where to start
… Great if browser could render titles/notes/CC rather than the developer/application

<ada> https://github.com/immersive-web/layers/issues/239

<ada> https://github.com/immersive-web/webxr/issues/1158

Leonard: Are you referring to text in tags (e.g., title) or direct text into the scene?

Ada: Text in attributes could go through text to speech, but different than a screen reader. Requires developer to initiate vocalizations
… (claify) use user's assistive technology, not developer's choice

<laford> link me!

Rik: Discord for developers

<yonet> https://discord.com/invite/Jt5tfaM

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 124 (Wed Oct 28 18:08:33 2020 UTC).