5 Jan 2024 | Mike Boland

AWE Talks: Bringing High-End Immersion to Web XR

AWE EU 2023

Key Takeaways
– Web XR's benefits have been fairly well established by now. 
– For those unfamiliar, they include compatibility, accessibility, and scalability.
  – Compatibility: ability to operate across most devices that have a browser.
  – Accessibility: ability to launch and/or share experiences with a link or marker. 
  – Scalability: Greater addressable markets, unencumbered by platform fragmentation.  
– But with these upsides come downsides, such as performance, relative to native XR.
– These performance detriments are gradually being addressed by the likes of 8th Wall.
– Wonderland has likewise achieved breakthroughs in porting experiences to web XR. 
  – For example, Dead Secret Circle is an immersive VR experience, successfully ported.
– Wonderland does this through frameworks that plug into standardized web APIs.
– The end result is XR that resides on web hosts and is accessed through the browser.  
– But there are of course several other nuances, such as optimizing experiences for the web.
   – For example, file size is often an issue with polygon-heavy immersive experiences. 
– When porting XR to the web, the name of the game is to optimize original project assets. 
   – For example, surface textures can be compressed for web speed with minimal quality loss.
– In the end, Wonderland got a several-gigabyte experience down to about 150 megabytes.  

For more color from Hale & Kokke, including deep dives into their technical processes, see the full video below...    

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