Web is Communications

Dominique Hazael-Massieux — W3C

TADSummit Asia 2021 - May 2021

Web is Communications

Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C)
dom@w3.org

TADSummit Asia 2021 - May 2021

W3C

Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor, W3C Director

Free and open technical standards for the Web
HTML5, CSS, JavaScript APIs,
but also many non-browser techs
430+ member organizations globally
Staff of ~60 in North America, Europe, Asia

Web Real-Time Communications

WebRTC - a shared standardization project across IETF and W3C

COVID-19

WebRTC-based Google Meet saw 3000% increase of usage in the first months of 2020

RTC in times of CODIV-19

WebRTC entered new spaces: schoolrooms, doctor offices, stadiums, theaters, …

WebRTC brings a sense of shared presence to the Web

… and needs to adapt to new usages

Designing the future of real-time communications

The W3C WebRTC Working Group develops features for the WebRTC stack based on its perception of priorities & needs - we need your input to make that view match your reality

Seamless screen sharing

Screenshot of browser-based screensharing UI

Screenshot of an alternative UI under discussion

Making WebRTC more intimate

Moving from an architecture where the teleconferencing server has access to the media streams to a full end-to-end encrypted solutions for teleconferences

Anchoring Trust in Identity

Web Authentication (WebAuthn) enables to bind authentication in browsers with security keys and other authenticator mechanisms (such as fingerprinting and face recognition) — **Web Authentication (WebAuthn)**

Using DID to manage pool of identities — **Decentralized Identifiers (DID)**

Making WebRTC more immersive

Incorporating virtual elements into a WebRTC camera feed

Making RTC more seamless

Web Neural Network API & real-time communications ⇒

Noise suppression
Speech transcription
Language translation
Object detection & recognition
…

Making WebRTC more accessible

Making WebRTC more customizable

The WebRTC stack is being rearchitected to allow more use of smaller components that can be adapted to different requirements with different trade-off from the current monolithic API

Making WebRTC more adaptive

When different end points have different capabilities in terms of network or CPUs, it is inefficient to send the same video feeds to all devices; Simulcast and Scalable Video Coding allow greater flexibility and performance in how devices send and receive media streams in a teleconference scenario

Customized codecs

WebCodecs opens up the blackbox of encoders/decoders, possibly integrating just-in-time codec deployments through Web Assembly and WebGPU

Build on Web Platform Innovations

WebRTC benefits from integrating with the various improvements being brought to the Web Platform, enabling innovators to create new intersections with other emerging capabilities