Virtual Reality on the Web

Everyone would love to be able to go to a web page, slip on their wired gloves, and literally feel the product they are considering purchasing. Unfortunately, as Mike Hurwicz writes about, it’s not so simple.

“More websites would use VR if it weren’t for technical impediments. VR is most convincing and pleasing when it uses realistic textures, lighting and sounds. Using those elements makes files large, and large files mean slow performance — which could account for Web surfers spending more time in 3D areas on e-commerce sites. The upscale Web surfers who go to The Sharper Image site are likely to have fast computers with graphics acceleration that display demanding textures and lightning at a reasonable speed. For much of the rest of the world, realistic VR on the Web may just be too slow to be fun. In particular, graphics processing may be insufficient to present smooth motion with realistic shading and textures.

On the other hand, the limitations of computers and the demands of VR should not be exaggerated. VR files are not necessarily huge. They can be small if they consist mostly of vector graphics. A bit of code that says “draw box, size 10×10x10, color red” takes up a lot less space than even a compressed bitmap of the same box.

“It’s been a misconception in the media since day one that VR files are huge,” says Dan Ancona, founder of Vizbang.com, which is developing “Spark”, a VR-based presentation tool. “File size is increasingly irrelevant, especially with the mushrooming availability of higher than 56K bandwidth.”

In addition, many computers shipping today come with built-in 3D graphics acceleration.

But there are areas where limitations remain. Even the best standard monitors aren’t big enough and don’t have the resolution to give complete, detailed, life-size images of many objects, not to mention whole scenes. Color reproduction is usually inconsistent and audio is seldom hi-fidelity. These problems apply to all 2D and 3D graphics on standard desktop machines, not just the Web. And they apply no matter what the underlying VR technology.

Add to that the bandwidth limitations and possibly unreliable connections of the Web, and you have the potential for a deeply dissatisfying experience.”

He suggests that XML might possibly make this movement simpler. You can read the full details in the full article from Web Developer’s Journal.