Intent to Continue Experimenting: WebVR
Brandon Jones
Contact emails
baj...@chromium.org, meganl...@chromium.org
Spec
Summary
An Origin Trial for WebVR was launched in Chrome 56 and is scheduled to end in Chrome 58. The results of that experiment to date have been reported and we feel it's been a productive experience that has proven popular with developers.
As a result of the origin trial we've received excellent feedback that has triggered large scale changes in the WebVR spec. Those changes are still in progress, but we have already identified several pieces of existing functionality that we intend to drop from the refactored API. We would like to run a new trial on this subset of the API while the new spec is finalized.
Link to “Intent to Implement” blink-dev discussion
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/m32Yy87Ggt0
Goals for experimentation
- Ensure that the proposed functionality removals do not adversely affect developers.
Experimental timeline
Enabled:
Apr 13th: Chrome 59 Branch to Dev
May 25th: Chrome 60 Branch to Dev
Jun 6th: Chrome 59 Stable*
Jul 20th: Chrome 61 Branch to Dev
Aug 1st: Chrome 60 Stable*
Sep 12th: Chrome 61 Stable*
Disabled:
Aug 31st: Chrome 62 Branch to Dev
Oct 24th: Chrome 62 Stable*
* Stable dates are estimates: https://www.chromium.org/developers/calendar.
Any risks when the experiment finishes?
Unless the API transitions to stable sites will lose the ability to interact with VR hardware. Given that hardware availability is limited we are encouraging developers to write responsive content that can account for it's absence, but anything that relies on VR features would stop working.
Ongoing technical constraints
None.
Will this feature be supported on all five Blink platforms supported by Origin Trials (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android)?
The WebVR API will be available on Android only for the M59. Work to expose the API to Windows is underway, but the exact timeframe is unknown. Other platforms can be supported in the future, but at this time there is no significant VR hardware at this time that supports Mac, Linux, or Chrome OS. We do intend to evaluate support on any platforms that gain VR hardware support in the future.
OWP launch tracking bug
Link to entry on the feature dashboard
Chris Harrelson
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