a-frame

another day another fascinating javascript library. as much as it pains me to say it, there’s definitely a pattern here.

virtual reality has been five years away from mainstream adoption for 25 years. previously the problem has been the lack of depth in the market place, hardware that can’t refresh fast enough to prevent nausea, and ultimately the curse of tightly linked hardware and software. that curse being that no one is motived to develop software that will only run on a single device. there were historic attempts to solve this problem, including VRML

I believe now the VR industry is going to break out. modern hardware is capable of keeping up, the Oculus 2 Quest for example is smooth and user friendly. the only question is, how will people really use these things? the Oculus has a Facebook proprietary operating system, and is treated as a vertical of Facebook proper. you can’t use an Oculus without having a Facebook account. at this relatively early stage of market adoption, there’s not enough savvy users to demand unlocked devices, and little benefit to providing them. but web standards like webxr provide a way for early adopters to use the mostly locked down hardware and build their presence on software that won’t lock them in by using vr apps over the web.

that is a long introduction for the eponymous a-frame, a javascript framework to make using three.js for webxr apps easier and more composable. I’ve only just started experimenting, but it’s so easy to get started that I’ve already been able to embed a photosphere I took in this post:

a-frame is another topic I’ll be returning to, hopefully with some interesting more developments.