The OpenXR 1.1 minor release comes out today, which moves some of the more commonly used extensions into core and it also marks a new Khronos Group commitment to a yearly release cycle. It’s been nearly five years since the initial release of...
I’m digging into my unpublished interview archives backlog to publish this conversation with Khronos Group President Neil Trevett marking the 1.0 release of OpenXR that happened during SIGGRAPH in July 2019. We talk about the intention of...
OpenXR 1.1 is being released today, and so I’m digging into my archive of unpublished interviews to go back GDC 2018 when OpenXR working group chairman Nick Whiting presented some of the first information about the OpenXR specification, which...
Michael Cooper works for the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative, and he was attending the XR Access Symposium to learn more about the existing XR accessibility efforts but also to moderate a break-out session about...
WebGPU shipped in Chrome 113, which brings high-performance 3D graphics & parallel compute capabilities to the web. I was able to chat with Google Chrome software Engineer Brandon Jones, who is a W3C specification editor for both WebGPU and WebXR...
Immers Space implements the ActivityPub open standard in order to add a federated social graph to the open Metaverse. I had a chance to try a prototype back in December 2022 where I went from a modified Mozilla Hubs WebXR space (that had the Immers...
The Metaverse Standards Forum announced today that they are “incorporated as an independent non-profit industry consortium.” The Khronos Group has been financially bootstrapping the Metaverse Standards Forum’s efforts to see if there was enough...
The Khronos Group published a blog announcement on November 3rd titled, “Deliver Interactive Experiences with glTF: A Node Graph-Based Approach,” which is adding an interactive extension called KHR_Behaviors to glTF (the *.jpg format for 3D objects)...
The Metaverse Standards Forum was announced today on June 21, 2022 as it 'brings together leading standards organizations and companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the open metaverse.' There's lots of...
There's a lot of debates about the Metaverse, and whether or not it's complete BS or if it's the natural evolution of the Internet as a culmination of a spatial computing revolution that's been evolving human computer interaction from 2D frames to...
On November 9th at the beginning of the Augmented World Expo (AWE),Qualcomm announced Snapdragon Spaces, which is a series of AR tools striving to cultivate an 'open, cross-device horizontal platform and ecosystem.' The Snapdragon Spaces tools...
Tony Parisi published really great Metaverse manifesto on October 22nd titled The Seven Rules for the Metaverse, which attempts to rein in some of the more hyperbolic musings about what the Metaverse is or could be.
The WebXR Design Summit was a 9-hour series of talks about immersive design & experiential design that was organized by Ben Erwin and his WebXR Polys Awards team on October 12th. I was the host and moderator for the day, but also helped to curate a...
The Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS) is holding a hybrid event where the IRL component in LA starts today October 15th, and the virtual festival starts on October 22nd. FIVARS has been curating independent and...
The Polys WebXR Awards was an awards show on February 20th, 2021 founded by Ben Irwin in collaboration with Sophia Moshasha and Julie Smithson. Irwin wanted to feature a lot of the work that's been happening on the immersive web in the year 2020...
Aardvark is an AR platform within the context of virtual reality applications. Here's how Aardvark is described on it's Steam page:Aardvark is a new kind of web browser that allows users to bring multiple interactive, 3D 'gadgets' into any SteamVR...
Pluto VR is a general-purpose VR, telepresence application that hopes to provide the social presence glue for a standards-driven, multiple-application ecosystem using SteamVR on the PC. I had some new conceptual breakthroughs about the potential...
I talk with the founder of the FIVARS VR & AR story festival Keram Malicki-Sánchez & WebXR developer James Baicoianu to talk about how the repurposed the open source JanusXR code in order to create a platform to deliver 360 video. It's a pioneering...
In the final interview of this VR for Good series, I'm featuring the WebXR Device API and how this represents a new open standard that allows for the easy creation and distribution of immersive content.
Wendy Seltzer is the Lead Strategist and Counsel for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and she says that the concerns of privacy and security on the web have been taking up a lot of her time lately. I had a chance to talk to her at Mozilla's View...
The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) published a set of Ethical Web Principles on May 30, 2019 in order to provide an ethical framework when evaluating new standards. The TAG group doesn't have any formal power in the W3C, but their...
Selena Deckelmann is the Senior Director of Firefox Browser Engineering, and she gave a great talk at Mozilla's View Source conference titled 'Our privacy and the web' that covered a lot of the work that she's been doing to protect user privacy...
Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research practice led by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg, and they've been architecture students for the last eight years about spatial design as well as the latest immersive technologies. They've been...
Mozilla Hubs is an open source social VR platform built using open web technologies. You can create your own 3D scenes using their Spoke platform, or launch your own private Hubs server using the open sourced infrastructure code for Hubs. Mozilla...
The Open AR Cloud is a volunteer organization whose mission statement is to 'drive the development of open and interoperable spatial computing technology, data, and standards to connect the physical and digital worlds for the benefit of all.'...
Back at Microsoft Build 2018, I had a chance to talk to two of the lead programmers of Babylon.js, which is a JavaScript framework for building 3D immersive environments with HTML5 and WebGL. It's a framework that's similar to three.js or React 360...
Mozilla Mixed Reality's Diane Hosfelt says, 'The immersive web has all of the problems of the 2D web, they're just magnified and they're harder.' She says the the privacy challeges around biometric data privacy are even more dire because you can't...
I facilitated a panel discussion at the Decentralized Web Summit that brought together some of the leading virtual reality creators who have been integrating blockchain technologies and creating the foundations of the decentralized metaverse.We...
Janus VR has been implementing an IPFS distributed file system option for creators for the past couple of years. I talk to 'Taco Dog' who was the catalyst behind helping to architect the protocol foundations of the decentralized metaverse.He has...
The decentralized metaverse will require the transferring of A LOT of data. Distributed, peer-to-peer file systems like IPFS could provide the backbone of the decentralized metaverse.I talk with David Dias who is one of the developers of IPFS about...
Kaliya Young (aka Identity Woman) has been working on digital identities for the past 15 years including helping facilitate the twice-a-year Internet Identity Workshop. These workshops lead to the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops and the...
There is a lot of promise of a decentralized metaverse built on top of the open web, but the idealism of that promise isn't yet matching the quality & stability of experiences from centralized, native applications built on top of Unity or Unreal...
The open metaverse is going to be built on web standards like the WebXR Device API (formly WebVR), but the larger community of web developers has been waiting to fully commit to building immersive WebVR experiences until there's universal support in...
Mozilla's mission statement is to ensure that the Internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all, and they've been helping bring VR to the web for the past three years. A-Frame is an open source framework that has gained a lot...
Mark Pesce is a VR pioneer who has been thinking about networked virtual and augmented reality for over 20 years now. He developed the Ono-Sendai Sega VR helmet prototype, co-created VRML, and presented his Cyberspace Protocol spec at the first Web...
Valve's Joe Ludwig talks about the latest updates on the Khronos Group's VR standardization process that is now being called 'OpenXR.' Ludwig says that OpenXR is still primarily creating an open and royalty-free open standard for virtual reality...
The Khronos Group announced on Tuesday that they have a critical mass of major VR players who are collaborating on a VR open standard. This VR open standard will have a software and hardware component that will enable VR application portability...
Google announced at the W3C WebVR workshop in mid-October that they would be shipping a WebVR-enabled Chromium browser in Q1 of 2017. I had a chance to catch up with Josh Carpenter last week to talk about some of the work that Google is doing to...
Some of the earliest experiments of making VR a first-class citizen on the web originated at Mozilla in 2014. Then the WebVR spec was drafted in a collaboration between Mozilla and Google's implementations. There's been a lot of excitement and...
There's been a couple of key developments in the evolution of WebVR during the month of October. First, Nate Mitchell announced during his Oculus Connect 3 keynote that Oculus will be supporting the WebVR ecosystem with the React VR framework and a...
Brandon Jones has been one of the lead developers on the WebVR API over the past couple of years as part of his 20% project at Google. He announced this week that he's now going to be working on WebVR full-time, which is a great indicator that...
Is VR on the open web going to provide a good enough experience as to be a viable distribution platform for certain VR content? That's the big question that people have been asking for the past couple of years, and there's been a lot of big steps...
Brandon Jones is a WebGL developer who started implementing WebVR into the Chrome web browswer as a part of his 20% project at Google. He's been working on it for the past year in order to get VR into the browser. You can find the latest WebVR...
Josh Carpenter is a researcher and interaction and user interaction designer for figuring out how to use virtual reality on the web with WebVR. Mozilla has been increasing the size of the team working on WebVR because they're betting that immersive...
Josh Carpenter is a VR researcher at Mozilla looking to see how to combine the best of the web with what the VR communications medium can offer. Mozilla lead the effort to release a WebVR API in June and it's supported in Firefox as well as Chrome...