7 ms·

WebVR Experiments

185 points by forlorn 10y ago

carlosdp 10y ago
Cool, good to see some colorful WebVR stuff coming out of Google Experiments. Hopefully that means WebVR will be making from Chromium to Chrome soon =)
vkou 10y ago
Viewing this on a beefy desktop, running Linux-Chrome, I'm seeing ~18 FPS, with very frequent freezes and frame skips. (Especially on the ping-pong demo.) I don't have my cardboard on hand, but this sounds headache-inducing in VR.
- searchfaster 10y ago
  I had the same experience when I saw my first online streaming video many many years ago.
  - vkou 10y ago
    Your first streaming video was probably unwatchable. The problem with VR is that for a lot of people 'unwatchable' means serious headaches and nausea.
- matt_kantor 10y ago
  I have a Nexus 5X and trying this just crashed my phone. As in everything froze and then the device rebooted. I only tried one experiment[0] and couldn't even get it to run. [0]: https://www.webvrexperiments.com/experiment/mass-migrations https://www.webvrexperiments.com/experiment/mass-migrations
byandyphillips 10y ago
I'm excited for the day that I can put on VR through my phone or computer and shop Amazon with hand gestures and voice. Or look through all the pictures and videos I have stored and fly through memories. I know we're still a far way away, but this is definitely a step in the right direction - great job Google!
- socmag 10y ago
  /s? FTFY Maybe you weren't joking. That's the even more scary thing. Personally I like to hop on my bicycle and meet real people in the real world. I don't even know what to think about VR at this point. :/
  - praneshp 10y ago
    You like meeting real people, they like VR. What's so difficult to understand?
  - prophesi 10y ago
    Now this is the mindset that I don't understand. Why can't you like both VR and real life? People made this same complaint for computers, the internet, gaming, and so on. But all of these technologies can augment your socialization.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  So this prompted me to pickup my daydream that I got for free with my phone again after a few months, and I looked back through some old "photosphere" photos I made. It's one thing to look at old pictures, it's another to be able to stand in your old house the day after you moved in, to be able to go back to the beach where you went on vacation a few years ago, to be able to stand outside your old house in the woods in the dead middle of fall. It instantly brought me back to those times in a way that normal photos or videos ever could, and when I made those photospheres I had no idea that I would be able to one day view them in a VR headset!
  - byandyphillips 10y ago
    thanks for painting that scenario - that would be really cool.
_pdp_ 10y ago
Although pretty cool - I am not convinced that the browser is the right medium for this but I am happy to be proven wrong! While the web is an amazing platform and I do wish it grows beyond what any app store and I think that we need to fundamentally rethink some parts of it to make it better and allow more streamlined clients to operate on top of it. Luckily WebVR is just a client API which should not be hard to mirror in streamlined clients but I do not see yet the adoption of such approach and I think that will be awesome in terms of performance and in order to make it more portable/emendable into all kinds of devices. That being said, having a VR experience provided on a web site like Amazon, Google, Facebook or Youtube could be interesting but I am not sure if the adoption will be wide and I do not think this is due to the technology itself but the fact that VR obstructs your entire view - it is immersive for sure - but you need to be comfortable to use it where you are sitting and most people are out and about and not exactly in their safe surroundings of their home. This is why AR in my opinion will have a much wider adoption.
- leggomylibro 10y ago
  I think it could work for lower-fidelity experiences. I could see it working if I could snap on sleeping mask-sized goggles which plug into my laptop for 360 video, simple experiences/games like a quiz show or rubiks-cube puzzles, that sort of thing. I think it could be a super cool way to deliver minor time-wasters like flash games, (what with flash dying off and everything,) especially if you could quickly pause/resume them while keeping the heavy overhead confined within a browser tab. This doesn't look quite performant enough for that, but baby steps.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  Much easier to do VR with a smartphone than AR, and given that for most people in the world their only computing device is their phone, this seems to be the fastest way to introduce VR to the widest audience possible. That's why browser-based VR also makes a lot of sense, because all those phones have browsers and writing a VR app just means targeting the widest and most mature platforms out there. A Cardboard experience won't match a mature HMD but that's alright. It allows people who wouldn't have any VR at least some rudimentary experience.
soared 10y ago
Awesome. I remember last year going through all of the chrome experiments [1] on my smart mirror and being absolutely stunned. Regardless on your views of VR, platform, form factor, etc.. these are just cool. Does anyone know what controllers are used with android phones (for the ping pong game)? https://www.chromeexperiments.com/ https://www.chromeexperiments.com/
- mkagenius 10y ago
  I just wobble my head forward, in a cow-licking-your-face fashion. My highesh score is 9. The google cardboard's band is little too tight for my head so can't keep it on for longer.
- russelldc 10y ago
  I assume it supports the Daydream VR controller.
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    I have the daydream, and it looks like it doesn't use the controller for anything other than "clicking". Your head movements are still used for all of the controls.
- strictnein 10y ago
  What smart mirror do you have?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
sevensor 10y ago
This has the potential to have two, maybe even three times as many users as VRML. Seriously though, has everybody forgotten VRML? It's weird to see the last VR hype cycle repeating itself in such detail.
- ino 10y ago
  Vrml was really bad, everything was static and you couldn't do anything but look around and click. And I think you're right about the hype, but wrong on the number of potential users. You didn't need special hardware for vrml.
  - shellac 10y ago
    Only VRML 1.0 was static. VRML 2.0 and VRML97 included animation and events (user and time triggered). As I recall you could program fairly rich behaviours using java or javascript, with collision detection.
- teraflop 10y ago
  Well, obviously GPU hardware has become a lot cheaper, more powerful, and more widely available in the last 20 years. VR display hardware hasn't become ubiquitous in the same way, but it's still way beyond what was previously available to consumers. Also, VRML took the approach of trying to build all kinds of special-purpose functionality into the platform (see e.g. http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Events http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Eve... or http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#InterpolatorNodes http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Int...). This is similar to what old-fashioned fixed-function OpenGL used to look like. Over the years, graphics APIs have evolved to become more general-purpose and programmable. And we've seen a similar trend with browser APIs: consider how Service Workers have replaced the old AppCache, or how MediaSource has replaced proprietary video streaming plugins. The design of WebGL/WebVR is a lot more flexible, and better suited to the modern web, than VRML was. Obviously this doesn't mean that VR is going to be a huge success this time around, but it's also not fair to assume that nothing has changed in the last 20 years.
- 10y ago
misterdata 10y ago
Cool. Now we wait until someone builds this one: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode)
guidefreitas 10y ago
It would be awesome to have a Chrome version with GearVR integration.
- mkeblx 10y ago
  There's actually a couple of Chromium-based browsers on there, Samsung Internet for GearVR which has been out and quite popular for 360 video watching (Youtube.. etc.), and Oculus just came out with theirs.
blurrywh 10y ago
Slightly OT: Peak and decline of VR related search queries on Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,oculus,htc%20vive,gear%20vr https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,oculus,ht...
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  The problems with VR are much higher-level than anyone wants to admit. Nobody wants to wear a headset on their face. They'll try it for the novelty, but they have a hard time doing it very long, or mustering up the motivation to do it frequently. VR won't hit critical mass until movie-style "holograms" are implemented (check out the video game in Her for an interesting example [0]), just as tablets didn't catch on until they looked and functioned just like the thin slates that had been dreamed of in sci-fi. [0; NSFW] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MgbMI5zhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MgbMI5zhw Example pulled from YouTube. Very NSFW language.
  - fudged71 10y ago
    I'm waiting for 6DoF High-Def HDR Mobile VR. And any AR headset that can pass the bar of "functional but also not looking weird"
- luma 10y ago
  That appears to correlate strongly with the Christmas shopping season. For example, here's a couple similar looking trends for "ps4" and "xbox one": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=ps4,xbox%20one https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=ps4,xbox%20one I don't think this indicates any lack of interest in the technology.
jumpkickhit 10y ago
Wow, using Chrome on Win10, I tried to select the text "Daydream ready phones" to search for it. Unable to select text after bringing up the right-click context menu. This counteracts how I browse the internet for more information on a topic I've just read about. Try it, try to select some text in the article then right-click it and see it happen.
howfun 10y ago
That is a funny domain. Why it exists?
- TheCoreh 10y ago
  Top Level Domains have been available for sale for some time now. Google purchased .google, and registered a blog domain under that.
zengid 10y ago
I haven't tried playing it yet, but Mr Nom Nom looks adorable; one of those creative games that stirs my inner child. Etter studios shared some info about its development [1], and open sourced the code that procedurally generates the characters using threejs [2] [1] http://etterstudio.com/en/mrnomnom.php http://etterstudio.com/en/mrnomnom.php [2] https://github.com/etterstudio/mrnomnom/ https://github.com/etterstudio/mrnomnom/
ge96 10y ago
Cool tried a couple out on my Nexus 4. Spot the bot was the one out of four that "fully worked" it was a little laggy. Also I don't have friends ha. Anyway the forest one the head tracking wasn't working for me. Should report that bug on GitHub One of them headset not found. I think it's that NFC tag or "magnet?" on the cardboard cover. Thanks for posting this I heard about webvr in a pod cast and open source code! Want to be Ed from Cowboy Bebop and dive into the web.
trevordev 10y ago
I have a vive and what I don't understand is why I need to use chromium or nightly firefox to view this content when it is out on official mobile builds. Does anyone know why this hasn't made it into official desktop builds yet?
- jmitcheson 10y ago
  It could still be quite buggy with Oculus and Vive hardware. They have only enabled WebVR in "Cardboard" mode on mobile which has a much smaller surface area.

185 points by forlorn 10y ago

Cool, good to see some colorful WebVR stuff coming out of Google Experiments. Hopefully that means WebVR will be making from Chromium to Chrome soon =)

vkou 10y ago

Viewing this on a beefy desktop, running Linux-Chrome, I'm seeing ~18 FPS, with very frequent freezes and frame skips. (Especially on the ping-pong demo.) I don't have my cardboard on hand, but this sounds headache-inducing in VR.

searchfaster 10y ago
I had the same experience when I saw my first online streaming video many many years ago.
- vkou 10y ago
  Your first streaming video was probably unwatchable. The problem with VR is that for a lot of people 'unwatchable' means serious headaches and nausea.
matt_kantor 10y ago
I have a Nexus 5X and trying this just crashed my phone. As in everything froze and then the device rebooted. I only tried one experiment[0] and couldn't even get it to run. [0]: https://www.webvrexperiments.com/experiment/mass-migrations https://www.webvrexperiments.com/experiment/mass-migrations

byandyphillips 10y ago

I'm excited for the day that I can put on VR through my phone or computer and shop Amazon with hand gestures and voice. Or look through all the pictures and videos I have stored and fly through memories. I know we're still a far way away, but this is definitely a step in the right direction - great job Google!

socmag 10y ago
/s? FTFY Maybe you weren't joking. That's the even more scary thing. Personally I like to hop on my bicycle and meet real people in the real world. I don't even know what to think about VR at this point. :/
- praneshp 10y ago
  You like meeting real people, they like VR. What's so difficult to understand?
- prophesi 10y ago
  Now this is the mindset that I don't understand. Why can't you like both VR and real life? People made this same complaint for computers, the internet, gaming, and so on. But all of these technologies can augment your socialization.
Klathmon 10y ago
So this prompted me to pickup my daydream that I got for free with my phone again after a few months, and I looked back through some old "photosphere" photos I made. It's one thing to look at old pictures, it's another to be able to stand in your old house the day after you moved in, to be able to go back to the beach where you went on vacation a few years ago, to be able to stand outside your old house in the woods in the dead middle of fall. It instantly brought me back to those times in a way that normal photos or videos ever could, and when I made those photospheres I had no idea that I would be able to one day view them in a VR headset!
- byandyphillips 10y ago
  thanks for painting that scenario - that would be really cool.

_pdp_ 10y ago

Although pretty cool - I am not convinced that the browser is the right medium for this but I am happy to be proven wrong! While the web is an amazing platform and I do wish it grows beyond what any app store and I think that we need to fundamentally rethink some parts of it to make it better and allow more streamlined clients to operate on top of it. Luckily WebVR is just a client API which should not be hard to mirror in streamlined clients but I do not see yet the adoption of such approach and I think that will be awesome in terms of performance and in order to make it more portable/emendable into all kinds of devices. That being said, having a VR experience provided on a web site like Amazon, Google, Facebook or Youtube could be interesting but I am not sure if the adoption will be wide and I do not think this is due to the technology itself but the fact that VR obstructs your entire view - it is immersive for sure - but you need to be comfortable to use it where you are sitting and most people are out and about and not exactly in their safe surroundings of their home. This is why AR in my opinion will have a much wider adoption.

leggomylibro 10y ago
I think it could work for lower-fidelity experiences. I could see it working if I could snap on sleeping mask-sized goggles which plug into my laptop for 360 video, simple experiences/games like a quiz show or rubiks-cube puzzles, that sort of thing. I think it could be a super cool way to deliver minor time-wasters like flash games, (what with flash dying off and everything,) especially if you could quickly pause/resume them while keeping the heavy overhead confined within a browser tab. This doesn't look quite performant enough for that, but baby steps.
wavefunction 10y ago
Much easier to do VR with a smartphone than AR, and given that for most people in the world their only computing device is their phone, this seems to be the fastest way to introduce VR to the widest audience possible. That's why browser-based VR also makes a lot of sense, because all those phones have browsers and writing a VR app just means targeting the widest and most mature platforms out there. A Cardboard experience won't match a mature HMD but that's alright. It allows people who wouldn't have any VR at least some rudimentary experience.

soared 10y ago

Awesome. I remember last year going through all of the chrome experiments [1] on my smart mirror and being absolutely stunned. Regardless on your views of VR, platform, form factor, etc.. these are just cool. Does anyone know what controllers are used with android phones (for the ping pong game)? https://www.chromeexperiments.com/ https://www.chromeexperiments.com/

mkagenius 10y ago
I just wobble my head forward, in a cow-licking-your-face fashion. My highesh score is 9. The google cardboard's band is little too tight for my head so can't keep it on for longer.
russelldc 10y ago
I assume it supports the Daydream VR controller.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  I have the daydream, and it looks like it doesn't use the controller for anything other than "clicking". Your head movements are still used for all of the controls.
strictnein 10y ago
What smart mirror do you have?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

sevensor 10y ago

This has the potential to have two, maybe even three times as many users as VRML. Seriously though, has everybody forgotten VRML? It's weird to see the last VR hype cycle repeating itself in such detail.

ino 10y ago
Vrml was really bad, everything was static and you couldn't do anything but look around and click. And I think you're right about the hype, but wrong on the number of potential users. You didn't need special hardware for vrml.
- shellac 10y ago
  Only VRML 1.0 was static. VRML 2.0 and VRML97 included animation and events (user and time triggered). As I recall you could program fairly rich behaviours using java or javascript, with collision detection.
teraflop 10y ago
Well, obviously GPU hardware has become a lot cheaper, more powerful, and more widely available in the last 20 years. VR display hardware hasn't become ubiquitous in the same way, but it's still way beyond what was previously available to consumers. Also, VRML took the approach of trying to build all kinds of special-purpose functionality into the platform (see e.g. http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Events http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Eve... or http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#InterpolatorNodes http://gun.teipir.gr/VRML-amgem/spec/part1/concepts.html#Int...). This is similar to what old-fashioned fixed-function OpenGL used to look like. Over the years, graphics APIs have evolved to become more general-purpose and programmable. And we've seen a similar trend with browser APIs: consider how Service Workers have replaced the old AppCache, or how MediaSource has replaced proprietary video streaming plugins. The design of WebGL/WebVR is a lot more flexible, and better suited to the modern web, than VRML was. Obviously this doesn't mean that VR is going to be a huge success this time around, but it's also not fair to assume that nothing has changed in the last 20 years.
10y ago

misterdata 10y ago

Cool. Now we wait until someone builds this one: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode) http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode)

guidefreitas 10y ago

It would be awesome to have a Chrome version with GearVR integration.

mkeblx 10y ago
There's actually a couple of Chromium-based browsers on there, Samsung Internet for GearVR which has been out and quite popular for 360 video watching (Youtube.. etc.), and Oculus just came out with theirs.

blurrywh 10y ago

Slightly OT: Peak and decline of VR related search queries on Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,oculus,htc%20vive,gear%20vr https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=vr,psvr,oculus,ht...

cookiecaper 10y ago
The problems with VR are much higher-level than anyone wants to admit. Nobody wants to wear a headset on their face. They'll try it for the novelty, but they have a hard time doing it very long, or mustering up the motivation to do it frequently. VR won't hit critical mass until movie-style "holograms" are implemented (check out the video game in Her for an interesting example [0]), just as tablets didn't catch on until they looked and functioned just like the thin slates that had been dreamed of in sci-fi. [0; NSFW] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MgbMI5zhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MgbMI5zhw Example pulled from YouTube. Very NSFW language.
- fudged71 10y ago
  I'm waiting for 6DoF High-Def HDR Mobile VR. And any AR headset that can pass the bar of "functional but also not looking weird"
luma 10y ago
That appears to correlate strongly with the Christmas shopping season. For example, here's a couple similar looking trends for "ps4" and "xbox one": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=ps4,xbox%20one https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=ps4,xbox%20one I don't think this indicates any lack of interest in the technology.

jumpkickhit 10y ago

Wow, using Chrome on Win10, I tried to select the text "Daydream ready phones" to search for it. Unable to select text after bringing up the right-click context menu. This counteracts how I browse the internet for more information on a topic I've just read about. Try it, try to select some text in the article then right-click it and see it happen.

howfun 10y ago

That is a funny domain. Why it exists?

TheCoreh 10y ago
Top Level Domains have been available for sale for some time now. Google purchased .google, and registered a blog domain under that.

zengid 10y ago

I haven't tried playing it yet, but Mr Nom Nom looks adorable; one of those creative games that stirs my inner child. Etter studios shared some info about its development [1], and open sourced the code that procedurally generates the characters using threejs [2] [1] http://etterstudio.com/en/mrnomnom.php http://etterstudio.com/en/mrnomnom.php [2] https://github.com/etterstudio/mrnomnom/ https://github.com/etterstudio/mrnomnom/

ge96 10y ago

Cool tried a couple out on my Nexus 4. Spot the bot was the one out of four that "fully worked" it was a little laggy. Also I don't have friends ha. Anyway the forest one the head tracking wasn't working for me. Should report that bug on GitHub One of them headset not found. I think it's that NFC tag or "magnet?" on the cardboard cover. Thanks for posting this I heard about webvr in a pod cast and open source code! Want to be Ed from Cowboy Bebop and dive into the web.

trevordev 10y ago

I have a vive and what I don't understand is why I need to use chromium or nightly firefox to view this content when it is out on official mobile builds. Does anyone know why this hasn't made it into official desktop builds yet?

jmitcheson 10y ago
It could still be quite buggy with Oculus and Vive hardware. They have only enabled WebVR in "Cardboard" mode on mobile which has a much smaller surface area.