W3C announced today WebVR Authoring: Opportunities and Challenges Workshop, 5-7 December 2017, in Brussels, Belgium. The event is hosted by DigitYser.

The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together WebVR stakeholders to identify unexploited opportunities as well as technical gaps in WebVR authoring.

Participants in the workshop will:

• Share good practices and novel techniques in creating WebVR-based content
• Discuss existing and foreseen challenges in using WebVR to deploy content and services in specific usages
• Contribute to the unification of efforts for documenting and advocating the development of WebVR content

Attendance is free for all invited participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members. Our aim is to get a diversity of attendees from a variety of industries and communities, including:

• 360° video and VR content producers and distributors
• VR experience designers and artists
• 3D, VR and WebVR authoring tools and platforms
• authors of WebVR content
• experts in challenges and opportunities of VR for people with disabilities
• browser vendors

Expected topics of discussion include:

• Landscape of WebVR authoring tools
• Creating and packaging 3D assets for WebVR
• Managing assets for practical progressive enhancement
• Progressive enhancement applied to the variety of user input in WebVR
• Understanding and documenting WebVR constraints for 3D artists
• Optimizing delivery of 360° videos to VR headsets on the Web
• Practical approaches to building accessible WebVR experiences
• Mapping the impact of ongoing evolutions of the Web Platform (Web Assembly, WebGPU, streams) on WebVR authoring
• Impact of performance factors on authoring WebVR content
• Creating convergence on WebVR advocacy platforms

For more on the workshop, please see the workshop details and submission instructions.

Registration is available online due by 10 November 2017.

Core Accessibility API Mappings (Core-AAM) 1.1 has been published by Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Working Group as a Candidate Recommendation and is now undergoing implementation finalization and testing. Core-AAM describes how roles, states, and properties in Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1 should be exposed to accessibility APIs. Implementation of this specification makes it possible for users with disabilities to obtain and interact with information using assistive technologies. These mappings will also be used in part for verifying implementation success of WAI-ARIA 1.1 which is already a Candidate Recommendation. The draft implementation report shows the progress of testing. Please send implementation information or comments by 19 October 2017. Read about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).