Virtual reality In the browser has been around Almost as long as World Wide Web. VR chat-rooms have existed since 1997 or earlier, at that time the virtual reality was very very basic. Avatars were 2d images, only visible from the front and back like card Soldiers in Alice Through the Looking Glass, and 3D landscape was similarly basic, consisting of simple primitives.
However, the history of the VR web has not been smooth. littered with many short lived providers, appearing, providing a state of the art experience for their users, and allowing users to invest a lot of time and effort in creating their personal virtual worlds, before vanishing., and of proprietary locking, such as Metsa’s Horizon worlds.
The underlying technology or the early incarnations of VR on the web was VRML, an XML description of 3D spaces that, like HTML, could be hand written. The modern replacement WebXR is controlled from JavaScript, restricting development to people willing to learn JavaScript programming. However, the opensource A-Frame project provides an easy to use XML interface, and various extensions provide a pathway to create rich interactive VR websites, compatible with both standard browsers and VR headsets.
In this session I will present a vision for the future of self hosted, simple interconnected VR, based on A-FRame.
Session Resources:
https://aframe.io/