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HTTP Superset for AR/VR Webapps
AR/VR devices like the hololens 2 are going to be a ubiquitous device just like the phone. Products that have webapps and mobile apps are going to also need to be built for AR. Currently, that means implementing the whole app with Unity or Unreal. But that's overkill and a pain in the ass for a lot of applications (like for instance a bank app).
HTML is a markup language that uses a basic tree structure to describe a 2D document. It could be extended to also support 3D environments. A few additional tags combined with a completely overhauled/reimagined CSS (imagine 3D flexboxes, ew) could extend HTML to describe 3D documents as well as 2D.
This superset of HTML (let's call it 3DHTML) would also let developers make AR apps with the easy distribution and millions of other perks that the web offers. Instead of having users install prebuilt Unity apps through each vendor's marketplace, you could just serve your .3dhtml files from a server behind your URL the same way you do with regular webapps.
Of course, the rendering of these 3DHTML files is a whole different problem which amounts to basically making an AR/VR browser that can draw these 3D documents (probably with Unity/Unreal) consistently across common devices, as well as navigate to different URLs and run javascript and everything else a browser does.
I think that making this standard could benefit AR/VR users/deveopers for a lot of reasons:
- I don't want to be locked into the "Meta Marketplace" or whatever the fuck they call it when I want to install some programon my headset. The internet isn't going anywhere and this would give me an easy way to break out of Meta's ecosystem into the "real internet" so to speak.
- Tons of experiences (like browsing hackernews) are going to find their way to AR/VR somehow. It would be way easier to add a few styling rules to support making the articles and buttons etc. 3 dimensional than to write a hackernews clone in Unity from scratch.
HTML is already a super awesome way to describe interactive virtual documents, and I think it should be extended to support 3 dimensional documents. Does anyone else think this would be awesome?
- meesterdude 5y agocheckout https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/ (based on three.js)
- jhsul 5y agoThat's really awesome