Mozilla just announced that WebVR – the technology specification letting people experience VR content directly through a browser – has landed in its first public wide release yesterday in Firefox 55.
I’ve already covered how awesome and important WebVR is – by unlocking distribution at scale and cross-platform – so this is great news for the 3D and VR world, and most importantly for the end users, people who want to experience VR with fewer barriers to entry.
This has been looong in the making. The underlying tech behind WebVR is actually WebGL, which was released in March 2011, also kickstarted by Mozilla.
The work on WebVR started in 2014, as an initiative from Mozilla again. But for the past 3 years, it’s been very experimental, and accessible only through the beta versions of the browsers, just like WebGL was 5 years ago.
This week’s launch is extremely significant. WebVR just got real by shipping in a regular browser, because in 2017 you cannot rely on people downloading beta versions of browsers. Congrats to the Mozilla and Firefox teams for this major milestone, and for paving the way since the early days!
Side note: WebVR is not just for surfing the regular web in a VR interface. You can publish complex VR experiences with WebVR. We produced the first WebVR movie to show it :)
And remember, you can now browse any Sketchfab scene in VR with Firefox and almost any VR headset, our curated VR collection is a good place to start.
We keep improving our VR support and interface, and will have more to share on this soon!
Alban
About the author
Alban Denoyel
Co-founder and CEO of Sketchfab.
