Brandon Jones has been one of the lead developers on the WebVR API over the past couple of years as part of his 20% project at Google. He announced this week that he’s now going to be working on WebVR full-time, which is a great indicator that Google is putting more resources in supporting VR on the open web. I had a chance to catch up with Brandon at GDC to talk about all of the web technologies enabling web browsers to drive room-scale Vive experiences and WebGL exports from Unity & Unreal Engine. Some of the highlights include a new WebVR 1.0 draft spec, the Gamepad API, WebGL 2, and WebAssembly.
I expect that there will be more announcements about what Google is doing in VR next week at Google I/O. Google is definitely investing in the future of VR and the open web with Brandon now working on this full-time, as well as with their recent hiring of Josh Carpenter to the WebVR team.