Technology nowadays is rapidly evolving into greater heights. As we think of it, we all just watch fantasies and virtual reality (VR) on television. Today, there are new innovations that bridge the gap between reality and the virtual world. Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift, and the Gear VR are the new technology that developers are giving a buzz on the IT world. As this new technology is coming in, there is a daunting question that faces developers whether this new era will fall into the same problem of incompatibility.
The closest cousin to virtual reality is our friend, the Web, and many developers are eager to find a solution to this problem. They suggest that instead of building native applications, why not integrate or build it through HTML.
The idea was mentioned on the blog, “First Steps for VR on the Web”, and they called it VR on the Web. The developers are currently adding native support for VR devices to Firefox and they suggest that rendering several web technologies such as canvasing, 3D Video where you can now experience on YouTube, HTML and CSS, and mixing it with WebGL, would give the perfect experience on the 3D World.
This idea opens up new doors for developers to come up with a technology make this happen. People at Mozilla and Google are taking efforts to build an application that supports these kinds of technology with the aid of the VR on the Web concept.
As days moves forward, Mozilla had launched their own take and they called it, The WebVR. Google, on the other hand, had also contributed to the VR on the Web by launching their own take on the concept and built a website that focuses on VR Chrome Experiments which turns your smartphones into a gateway to the virtual reality using Google Chrome and Google Cardboard.
But points, however, suggest that they are not still completely compatible. In a sense that WebVR do not work on Google Cardboard, and VR Chrome Experiments is not compatible with the Oculus Rift. Now, we are just to wait for these guys to come up with a plan and agree on a common ground.
A software engineer and UI prototype, Boris Smus, published a blog that suggest an idea about the integration of responsive web design to VR. The concept involves that to make the web-based VR to work across the platform, we’ll use a technology which similarly answers the problem for the mobile device which is, responsive web design. Responsive web design automatically adapts to any view-ports by using fluid, flexible layouts, and proportional grids. He called this concept, “Responsive VR.” Smus also released a WebVR project called, “WebVR Boilerplate Project.” This project is meant to easily develop experiences on all VR platforms, and provides a fallback option when there’s no specialized viewer is available.
This proves that change and evolution are inevitable. It is accelerating faster than we ever imagine and soon, we’ll be enjoying a touch of Web into our VR headsets.
