This is a draft Call for Participation for a possible but not yet confirmed W3C workshop. This document may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time.

Context

Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences (XR) leverage the availability of head-mounted displays and environment sensing capabilities to create immersive worlds experiences, where users can virtually meet, collaborate, and interact. Each world comes with its own rules and mechanisms, with limited possible interactions between worlds.

There is a corresponding growing interest in the ability to create links and continuity between immersive worlds to create a metaverse, e.g. through the use of avatars and affordances to maintain group presence across experiences. While the web has evolved to support low-level primitives for XR (WebXR), immersive worlds require additional semantics to handle users' presence, localization, interactions with virtual artefacts and people, and navigation within and in-between immersive worlds.

What is the purpose of this workshop?

Following previous W3C workshops on Web & Virtual Reality (2016), WebVR Authoring (2017) and Inclusive Design for Immersive Web standards (2019), this workshop connects the web platform and immersive worlds creators and users, and explores evolutions of the web platform to address immersive worlds requirements. Overall goals are to:

  • Develop a vision for immersive worlds on the web: usages, accessibility challenges, security & privacy needs, role of browsers;
  • Grow a common set of principles for immersive worlds: presence, localization, interactions, navigation mechanisms, linking capabilities, etc.;
  • Identify gaps and standardization opportunities for a metaverse to emerge on the web.

Which topics will be covered?

We welcome proposals on topics for the workshop. The following topics have been proposed so far. Please submit a pull request or raise an issue on GitHub to suggest further workshop topics. You may also email Dominique Hazaël-Massieux <dom@w3.org> or François Daoust <fd@w3.org>.

  • Usages: Can immersive worlds experiences be categorized (e.g. business meetings, social gatherings, games)? What are common principles and features?
  • UX patterns: How to convey locomotion mechanisms to users? Are there useful guidelines to represent and manage exchanges between users or interactions with virtual assets?
  • Identity: How can users maintain their online identity (or lack of identity) throughout immersive worlds?
  • Social: How to create and manage immersive sessions for a group of people?
  • Continuity: How to maintain a continuity of experience between immersive worlds?
  • Integration with the physical world: How to create persistent anchors and manage geographic alignment? How to capture and transmit the user's environment?
  • Integration with the web: How can regular web pages be rendered in immersive scenarios? How to navigate between immersive worlds through direct links?
  • User Agent Intermediation: How can browsers maintain security and privacy boundaries in immersive world experiences, where the trust anchor provided by the browser UI is not necessarily easy to surface? Can these boundaries be preserved when using a browser in a virtual device in an immersive world?
  • Accessibility: How to create inclusive immersive worlds experiences?
  • Formats: What standard formats may be used or would need to be defined to describe 3D assets, scenes, avatars and associated semantics for capture, rendering, transport and interaction purpose?
  • Internationalization: How to manage language negotiation when changing between immersive worlds? How to integrate machine-based language translation systems to enable voice-based chats?

How can I attend?

The attendance is free for all invited participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members.

Please register for the event before ?? to be notified of the videos availability, of the forum set up to facilitate discussion among registered participants, and of the logistics for the physical meeting . The Program Committee will only accept participants whose registration data shows relevant to the topic of the workshop.

This workshop, as other W3C meetings, operates under its Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.

How can I suggest a presentation?

To submit a talk for the workshop, please refer to our information for speakers.

What is W3C?

W3C is a voluntary standards consortium that convenes companies and communities to help structure productive discussions around existing and emerging technologies, and offers a Royalty-Free patent framework for Web Recommendations. We focus primarily on client-side (browser) technologies, and also have a mature history of vocabulary (or “ontology”) development. W3C develops work based on the priorities of our members and our community.

Program Committee

Chairs

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Committee

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Sponsor

Interested in sponsoring the workshop?
Please check the sponsorship package.