Immersive Web Weekly

Issue #059, July 20, 2021, ImmersiveWebWeekly.com

This week saw a major broadcasting group ship a VR experience, a raft of progress on glTF tools and standards, and some actual coverage of web XR by the usually native-centric VR press. Slow and steady wins this race.
Top off the tanks, retract the support tower, and check in with mission control because it's time for another issue of the Immersive Web Weekly!

- Trevor Flowers from Transmutable

Clear Text in DesktopVision

The new WebXR Layers support in Facebook's immersive browser enabled high quality text rendering (among other graphical improvements) which greatly increased the comfort of using virtual desktops in the Quest headset.

Sculpting in Three, Eventually XR?

NASA engineer Garrett Johnson put out the call for assistance in bringing the new library for mesh sculpting (demo here) into WebXR.

VR at PBS!

The coalition of around 350 television stations called PBS put together a multi-viewer XR experience around their annual short film festival.

Brushwork is Working

It's great to see that the VR press picked up Brushwork VR, an app for painting and sharing paintings in VR.

experience brushworkvr.com

Read a Report on Your glTF

Prolific toolmaker Don McCurdy released glTF-Report, a browser-based tool for inspecting and manipulating art assets in the new standard for 3D scenes.

Refraction, Color Attenuation, and Volumetric Properties in glTF

New features landed in glTF which brought the physically based rendering technology closer to photorealism. Their sample viewer was updated to use the new properties.

Know You Know Mobile AR Features

Oscar Falmer updated this handy spreadsheet listing which AR features work on which mobile platforms.

Wonderland Is Even More Wonderful

A new version of Wonderland arrived, most notably with skinning and animation support for FBX files. This is a common file format used in the 3D industry so this opens up more of the standard workflows used by technical artists. One point of interest: some feature development was sponsored by Playko.