Brian Molidor
With the Oculus Rift release mere months, away the tech world is gearing up for a potential virtual reality revolution. Earlier this week, as part of Mozilla’s 10th anniversary, the organization launched MozVR.com, an experimental site to promote and assist in tailoring web experiences for virtual reality. On the site, developers will find links to GitHub where Mozilla is sharing code, tools, and tutorials for working on web VR. There are also several VR web-based demos including a fly-over of coastal British Columbia in Canada, a tour of the Arctic, a data visualization, a VR motion control demo for the web from Leap Motion, and an episode of Talk Chat Show Thing, a talk show filmed in VR.
When you hear the words “virtual reality”, more often than not you will first think about games or sci-fi computers, not necessarily in that order. And while entertainment is still indeed the most common application of VR even today, the nascent market is slowly growing out of its shell and into more serious use cases. Like web browsing, for example. Mozilla has just announced the existence of MozVR, its own attempt to bring virtual reality and the Web together into one seamless, and still game-like, experience. Actually, if one recalls films like Johnny Mnemonic, VR can be used for more than just games and watching 3D videos. They can also be used for computer user interfaces, like crawling inside a computer or through some incarnation of the Internet. Whether or not those actually turn out to be more usable is a debate better left for another day. The fact is that it’s a technology that is still quite open to experimentation, and Mozilla wants to be one of the first of its kind in that space.
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