The W3C Team and Offices offer their sincerest condolences to our W3C Brazil Office Manager Vagner Diniz, his wife and family, for the tragedy that befell them when the Brumadinho dam collapsed late January, claiming the lives of their daughter Camila, their son Luiz, their pregnant daughter-in-law Fernanda and other family members whose bodies we keep hoping they find. We have no words in the face of such a dramatic and horrifying event and our hearts go to them as well as the many people who, directly and indirectly, have been hit.

Since 2001, years before the 2007 launch of the W3C Brazil Office, hosted by the NIC.br (Brazilian Network Information Center) institute, in São Paulo, many in the W3C Team and global W3C Community have known and have met Vagner at different occasions. Our heartfelt condolences to Vagner Diniz, his wife Helena Taliberti, and his entire family.

The Immersive Web Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of the WebXR Device API. This specification describes support for accessing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices, including sensors and head-mounted displays, on the Web.

Hardware that enables Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications are now broadly available to consumers, offering an immersive computing platform with both new opportunities and challenges. The ability to interact directly with immersive hardware is critical to ensuring that the web is well equipped to operate as a first-class citizen in this environment.

Immersive computing introduces strict requirements for high-precision, low-latency communication in order to deliver an acceptable experience. It also brings unique security concerns for a platform like the web. The WebXR Device API provides the interfaces necessary to enable developers to build compelling, comfortable, and safe immersive applications on the web across a wide variety of hardware formfactors.