Hello WebXR review: a nice showcase of WebVR for developers and newbies

To celebrate the release of WebXR API 1.0, Mozilla has released an experience called “Hello WebXR”, that should serve to introduce newbies to VR, showing them basic VR interactions and capabilities. I have tried it, and I want to let you know my impressions with it.

Video review

You can watch my full hands-on, plus my opinion on it, by watching the below Youtube Video. I have tried the whole experience, and also commented it all along the way.

If you want to see me trying VR with a fancy VR-themed T-shirt (thanks VR Cover!), here you are:

Textual review

If watching a video of mine is too much for you, then keep on reading.

Hello WebXR is an experience fully developed by Mozilla, and you can access it at this page: https://mixedreality.mozilla.org/hello-webxr/ . Be sure to access it from a WebXR-compatible browser, like Firefox Reality, Oculus Browser, or the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox.

In one paragraph you have read what I loved the most of Hello WebXR (and of all WebVR experiences in general):

• It is accessible without installing anything, by just following a link
• It runs on many devices, from PCs to standalone headsets like Oculus Quest. You just have to develop the experience once, and then it runs everywhere.

This is the power of WebVR and the reason why I’m convinced that in the long run, WebXR will be incredibly powerful and widespread: it avoids the users from cluttering their devices with installed applications, and it avoids the developers from creating different versions of an experience for multiple devices. That’s surely the future.

Unluckily, the situation in the present still doesn’t reflect this future dream, and Hello WebXR shows all the limits of current WebVR experiences.

• The graphical quality is just “nice”, but it is not even close to the one that is possible to obtain with game engines like Unity or UE4
• The standard APIs have not been implemented perfectly by browsers and this results in a buggy behavior. If you watch the video above, you can see that I had 2-3 weird problems, like the fact that the teleportation cylinder was invisible, or that the app, in the end, left me with the spray can in my hand so that I could not interact with the world anymore.

So, my impression after having tried Hello WebXR is that WebVR may be the future, but not the present yet.

Returning to the experience, you start in a hall that showcases some common things that you can do in VR, that is:

• Navigating the environment by teleporting: you point with your controller the destination where you want to go, and then press the main trigger to move there. This is a bit different from what usually VR experiences do: you usually see a teleporting arc, and move using a secondary button (like the thumbstick);
• Entering inside 360 photos and 360 3D photos, by grabbing some spheres and putting them in your face (a bit like in The Lab). In this experience, there were mostly relaxing photos of forests and fields. It was nice, even if I think they could find more variated photos (e.g. some photos of big cities at night);
• Grabbing objects and using them. At this purpose, in the hall, there is a xylophone, that you can play by grabbing sticks in your hands, and a wall, where you can draw graffitis using a spraying can. Nice stuff, but also implemented in a simple way. For instance, the can features simple spraying mechanics, not comparable to the realistic ones of experiences like Kingspray;
• Inspecting objects: you can move into the scene and go close to some paintings attached to the wall, and zoom a portion of them by pointing the controller towards them. Very nice interaction, pretty original;

• See a 3D display showing the twitter feed of all people twitting the hashtag #hellowebxr . This was one of the things that I loved the most of this world, and it shows the power that you can have in your hands by making the world of the web and the one of VR to mix together. Kudos to Mozilla for this idea.

The hall also features three futuristic portals, that you can use by pointing the controller towards them and then using the trigger button. The animation that you have when you point the controller towards the portal is really nice, I loved it.

The three portals lead to three different rooms with simple experiences:

• The first one shows you the 3D model of a statue, reconstructed via photogrammetry. The reconstruction is really awesome, and I loved looking at this piece of art (great job, Geoffrey Marchal);

• The second one puts you in a geometrical place where you stay on small platforms at very high heights. This is supposed to give you vertigo, but the fact that you can’t fall down kills a bit the fear. Personally, I wasn’t scared at all, but I guess that for newbies this can b different;
• The third one plays some sound effects all around you, to showcase the power of positional audio.

If you’re an experienced VR user, you won’t find anything particularly extraordinary here, that’s why I haven’t come up much impressed by this website. It’s mostly just about showcasing simple stuff. But if you’re a newbie, that maybe has just bought a Quest, you may find interesting this website that in 10 minutes shows you lots of interactions that are possible in VR, without the length and the complexity of a program like The Lab (that, anyway, has a much higher quality).

As a developer, instead, I appreciate a lot what they’ve done, especially because all the experience is fully available open source at this GitHub repository. This means that you can copy-paste the various interaction elements that you have found in the experience, and use them to create your WebXR-powered website. This is incredibly important and I can’t thank Mozilla enough for what they’ve done.

Doing this experience hasn’t been easy for sure. I thought they used A-frame, but actually it was far more complex than this:

The demo was built using web technologies, using the three.js engine and our ECSY framework in some parts. We also used the latest standards such as glTF with Draco compression for models and Basis for textures. The models were created using Blender, and baked lighting is used throughout all the demo.

We also used third party content like the photogrammetry sculpture (from this fantastic scan by Geoffrey Marchal in Sketchfab), public domain sounds from freesound.org and classic paintings are taken from the public online galleries of the museums where they are exhibited.

ECSY is a new framework by Mozilla that plans to substitute A-frame in some contexts where you need better performances and a more polished programming style. I didn’t know about it, and Hello Web XR has been very useful to let me discover it. And I guess that this experience will serve to make many developers discover the tools to create nice XR experiences on the web.

So, my final impression on Hello WebXR is that it is a nice way to introduce newbies to some simple XR interactions, and it is especially a great tool for us developers to learn how to develop better experiences in WebVR. Thanks Mozilla for providing this to us.

I invite you to jump to Hello WebXR and then let me know your impressions here in the comments. Have fun!