Immersive Web Weekly

Issue #067, September 21, 2021, ImmersiveWebWeekly.com

I took a moment away from making 20 tiny Memex to check in with activity on the immersive web and there's a lot going on! The WebKit team seems to be playing a solid game of catch-up, Khronos is looking forward to ubiquitous scanning, and creators continue to blow minds with new experiences.
Fill your gas canisters, check the light seals on your microfilm development chambers, and prep your documents for scanning into trails because it's time for another issue of the Immersive Web Weekly!

- Trevor Flowers, some random YouTuber

Scans For The People

This article is a quick summary of LIDAR asset creation and how its greater availability could change major uses of WebXR like e-commerce.

A Sneak Peek of Dingo Gap

Bruno Fanini teased a demonstration of their ATON library for collaborative immersive web apps by loading multi-resolution 3D tiles from Cesium to render a section of Mars scanned by the Curiosity rover.

Placebo Records Call For Immersive Musicians

Placebo Records (a collective of alternative pop artists) put out the call for musicians interested in taking part in Ur Phantasii, their immersive web venue and hang out space.

WebKit WebXR Support: Coming Soon?

The meta-bug that tracks development of WebXR on WebKit (the web engine used by Apple) shows that most of the dependencies are marked complete and what remains is testing-related. Undoubtedly, tests will reveal more bugs but this is still a bit of a milestone on the road to WebXR on iOS, padOS, and macOS. Combined with new WebGL2 support in Safari 15, this seems like forward motion for the immersive web on Apple devices.

UW Reality Lab Demo Day

The University of Washington's Reality Lab released a video of student presentations from the Spring session of their lab focused on XR, many of which use WebXR in part due to the pandemic lockdown.

Beatboxes Make Money

Beatboxes are 841 generated rooms available as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. While the general idea of A-frame experiences available as NFTs has been around for more than a year, Beatboxes is notable because the rooms have apparently been purchased for a relatively large amount of money compared to other immersive web experiences.

Wonderland Releases More Wonder

The big feature in this release of the Wonderland platform is runtime glTF loading which enables features like dynamic digital body loading, NFT-referenced model loading, and use of the WebXR input profiles library to show appropriate input controllers.