The marriage of Web and VR tends to be very one sided. Most of the bits and pieces you need to build a modern VR application already exist in the web platform. Compare and contrast this with VR technology stacks, where people are still building their own event loops, threading models, memory models, etc... The VR space is the wild-wild west and this means there is a lot of room for cowboys, experimentation, lots of wheel reinvention factories and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Leading the way in this round are the entertainment and gaming applications. This is where you tend to get highly specific experiences (tell me the last time the UX on your media player was considered innovative and didn't look like a 1990's VCR) or uniquely creative experiences that tickle your gaming itch. In this world nothing is uniform and everything is a new assault on your senses. A small and very influential group of people love this space and they become our pioneering group. They start to build and design the future while the calm majority sits back and waits for the technology to come to them.
The Web is this calm majority. A highly stable, yet quickly moving substrate of APIs and technologies, spread across billions of devices, with majority stakes already placed into many excellent and well established design principles and practices. Basically, you can get stuff done on the web. Its a productive place. Its usable by the masses, but configurable to the needs of the experts. It can do almost anything. Almost. What it can't do is blast you in the amazeballs with pixels of light that transport you to a far away world. Yet.
Given the existing influences there are two ways to get to the goal. The first is design it all again and make people move to the VR space. A sort of manifest destiny approach to technology. The second is to embrace the existing web for all of its great capabilities and even many of its terrible ones. Evolve the technology and let everyone adopt at their own pace.
The later has a much better chance of working. Not because its the best approach for VR but because it allows us to retain as much of the power of the existing web as we can without resetting the entire ecosystem. Think back just 5 years and look at the rapid adoption of new and pervasive technologies on the web to understand its power and importance. Here are a couple that I was around to watch blossom.
- Canvas - Yeah, it was basically just entering adoption 5 years ago and is now a premiere API for 2D bitmapped graphics creation.
- WebGL - Allowing for truly customized graphical experiences in 2D, 3D, Image Processing and its the basis for WebVR (without WebGL there is no WebVR).
- WebAudio - Giving full access to sound effects and mixing for the first time on the web.
- Web Workers - Half way between threads and tasks giving access to extra cores
- Media Capture - Camera, Microphone, Video
- WebRTC - Adaptive media transfer for person to person interactions
- Fetch - A real networking primitive for highly configurable requests
- Service Workers - A brilliant empowerment of the network stack without breaking existing networking expectations of the long tail web
All of these web technologies were driven by a collective set of requirements from a highly diverse group of interested parties. Each technology did not have to try and incubate and grow on its own. It could instead live side by side with many others. When used in isolation a technology like Canvas would have lost to the many, much better solutions in the market already. But because it was augmentative to your average web page, it had a place.
Those other, better, non-web, technologies live in isolation. They don't understand JavaScript, garbage collection, browser event loops, browser render loops and how to peacefully co-exist in a broad technology stack. Maybe they are faster and you can do more 2D rendering stuff in them than you can in Canvas, but those incremental differences aren't as powerful as being deployed to billions of devices, over the network, compiled from text to the screen and then printed (yeah, printing is a stretch, but bear with me!) alongside of any arbitrary piece of HTML content.
The capabilities of the web are now increasing at a rate faster than any other platform. This means its ability to provide value is leaps and bounds beyond most other systems. When compared on a single axis the web will likely lose. You can always build a better, more specific widget catering to a specific use case, but the power in the web is its Swiss Army Knife approach. We don't buy a Swiss Army Knife to be the best of any given thing, we instead buy it to be good enough at many things and hopefully fill in missing gaps in our tool chest. Its an astoundingly effective convenience and it takes convenience to enable modern developers to achieve the content depth and content breadth that is needed to appease the masses.
Looking forward there are both VR specific technologies and general web technologies that will make VR a success. Personally, some of the most interesting are being driven, not with VR in mind, but instead extending the web to new levels of capability that help it exceed app frameworks and runtimes and puts it on part with existing operating systems. A few critical to VR, web inspired technologies in my short list are...
- Service Workers - VR applications are resource intensive and the first line of defense is going to be prioritization of resource downloads, caching and working around the inefficiencies that exist in legacy file formats.
- WebGL - New performance improvements to WebGL and extensions like multi-view or stereo rendering are likely to land with or without WebVR being a consumer since they have general applications outside of VR as well.
- HTML to Texture - If this existed today, it would likely be the top used API in WebGL applications. The pre-existing power we have in DOM, HTML/CSS layout and all of our existing content is something we don't just want to use we NEED to use it. We have to fill time in VR and new 3D assets alone are just not compelling enough.
VR will reinvent the web, but it won't happen in a chaotic upswell and massive conversion to fully 3D experiences overnight. It can't. There is too much value in our existing base. VR will reinvent the web in subtle ways such as spearhead better graphics APIs, faster JavaScript run-times tuned to our frame based patterns and parameterized GC behavior that will avoid frame jank. VR will push hard on solutions to the HTML to Texture problem so we can bring our web content into our 3D worlds. VR will redefine what security means when it comes to both new and existing APIs. Most importantly VR will define a small subset of new APIs (arguably 5% is too high from my title) that are critically important to the medium itself. Those APIs will work seamlessly with the existing web platform enabling our iterative transformation from the existing 2D informaton packed web to a mixed 3D/2D model allowing developers to pick the presentation mechanisms of their choice.
I hope that VR won't become a parallel stack to the web. If it did then I think we've failed hard. There is no need to reinvent all of the past 20 years in productivity and capabilities increases we've gotten from the web. There is no reason to relive all of the same mistakes and relearn all of the best practices. More importantly there is no reason that the existing web can't continue to evolve and get better as a collaborative partner, or more accurately an elder sibling allowing WebVR to shine in ways that it is best designed rather than spending endless cycles trying to replace all of the web experiences we already have with VR versions of the same.
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