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by trevordev 3052 days ago
This project looks awesome. Do you know if you have any plans to push some wild/experimental webVR features into this? I am desperately looking for a browser that will support:

- webVR multitasking (>1 tab rendering to display a time)

- tab content sharing

- obtaining textures from html elements to project into VR

so I can watch twitch in WebVR while browsing Reddit in VR. So far I have a sketchy fork of Firefox that somewhat works but I'd love for something more stable to recommend to people. What I want is described in more detail here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JzxKqir57c4RnpHhpH8nED8C...

Let me know if you have any thoughts. Thanks.

2 comments

I looked into your ideas and they are something, my team (LensVR browser UX team) has been researching. We are looking to find what would be the best browsing experience for VR. For now, we have done a few prototypes on a "customizable" website, multitasking and VR bookmarks but I am looking for more ideas on what to try next. Get back to me if you want to chat more about your ideas.
Hey Billy, I think I chatted with you over Skype a little while ago :). From what I've seen your team's teams effort seem the most inline with what I'm wanting but there are a couple things I haven't yet seen from lensVR:

- Desktop support (I have a Vive and I think you mentioned its only available for gearVR right now)

- Multitasking, all the images on your twitter seem to only have one site at once

- Fallback to 2D site (If Im in a webVR version of reddit and I click an unknown url I need to be able to multitask on that site even if it doesn't have 3D support)

Since I have yet to find a vendor heading towards support for these things, currently Im using a fork of firefox where I just hacked out a bunch of security settings. Right now it lets me load iframes and pull content from them into webVR but it was just a quick way to get it working as I'd prefer if each separate tab could draw to its own layer and then be composed with other tabs (Im hoping this is part of WebXR standard but it sounds like it wont be there for a long time).

If you have anything else to share with me or if you have any additional questions for me, Id be happy to answer. I would LOVE to get a browser I could target so I can stop worrying about building my own browser and focus on my web apps.

Thanks!

I get you :) I have the feeling that the industry is going ahead with baby steps while developers like you need stable multiplatform technology to implement their groundbreaking ideas. I will push ahead the multitasking ideas we have. One idea we played around with is being able to extract specific parts of a webpage and compile a new tab containing all the information you need - while all the extracted elements stay dynamic. This video tries to illustrate the concept for 2D but it would be basically the same in VR if the websites are flat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppDguFFws9U
Yep, its seems like theres a lot of directions the web can go in and I like the more experimental concepts shown in your videos. Looking forward to see how lensVR will turn out.
Thanks!

I don't think in the short term we will work on virtual desktop / browser like features, but some people have played with them in WebVR (https://jonathanzwhite.github.io/screenvr/). Focusing on true immersive content at the moment.

Maybe something like Oculus Dash would fulfill those needs?

Dang, sorry to hear that. I've seen those projects in the past but the problem I have with those is that they seem to only support web 2D multitasking using browser APIs. Here's hoping you reconsider in the future. Thanks