* WebVR brings along all of the baggage of the web browser.
* It's incredibly hard to get beautiful content - that's why Unity and Unreal are so popular, they made it as easy as possible
Best of luck.
And you should have a newsletter I can sign up for.
* The best way to make VR and 3D browsing a thing is to have URLs to 3D/VR spaces because urls can be easily shared and most devices have Browsers.
* It is hard to do something beautiful with WebVR but keeping things simple and allowing 3D models can go a long way. I think that currently running smoothly on a mid-end smartphone is more important than photorealism.
* Game engines are too elitist. Common people have to be able to create 3D spaces very easily, with no code, no 3D modeling knowledge. Then they have to be able to share (deploy) with a single click. The web is the absolute platform for this.
Thank you for your message, you are absolutely right about the newsletter !
* I think you're under-estimating how important Beautiful is. You know and I know that graphics and gameplay are completely orthogonal, but WWW beat out Gopher partly because WWW was more beautiful (HTML had better layout, and had Images.) And you and I are on completely different pages if you're talking about smartphones, unless you mean like Gear VR or maybe Daydream, or the new Oculus thing...
* Web browsers were too elitist. Lynx browser existed for some of them. But then people got bigger machines, faster internet connections. (Heck GLSL was too much for even state-of-the-art gaming machines, now IT runs in the Browser as WebGL!!!) I'd rather reach for the high end knowing that it becomes available.
* Authoring: No question, it sucks. That's why things like this are awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKO9fEjNiio Also we need "VR Wiki". And "VR Wordpress."
* Even if I build a insanely good native VR browser there will be (a lot of) people who won't have it on their devices. This is why at least from a business perspective, for the moment it is far better to have a link towards an experience people can use rather than a link towards a native/desktop app that if downloaded can open an experience.
* I think that in 2018 it is important to have a "responsive" VR experience. It should go from a basic non-VR 3D experience (smartphone) to a full fledged high-end immersive VR one with everything else in between (So yeah GearVR, Daydream and Oculus Go).
People with any device should be able to take part, to interact, to share. My take on graphics is not that it is unimportant but rather that it is not what is lacking in current 3D content. Plus with some polish WebVR can deliver a decent graphical experience. Don't get me wrong : Beautiful is important. It is photo-realism that is not.
* I meant too elitist to use for authoring but you talk about it in your next point, so I will answer to your point about technological evolution. Before having people to buy high end VR hardware and the gaming rig that goes with it, we have to give people good reasons to do so. Gamers have obvious incentives, but most other people currently don't.
First we have to give social content interesting to non gamers and it has to run on their current hardware or they won't really use it. Then by interacting regularly with people with headsets, people without VR headsets will gradually convert into VR users. Then as VR users, they will have incentives to get better hardware. Then with better average hardware there will be competition on software features (graphics, interaction, ecosystem etc)
We still have the (very hard) first step to pass first. Web browser did not start with WebGL: they figured out text first, then layout, then animations, then media etc...
* This video is sweet, this is the future. And agreed about both "VR Wiki" and "VR Wordpress"
