Google will soon launch VR-ready capabilities on its native web browser, Chrome, for all smartphone devices on the Android platform.
Coming in fresh from its I/O developers conference in May, the company's talks mostly revolved around its current works and future plans for VR technology. This has led most to believe that Google, now running under its parent company, Alphabet, is (definitely) heavily focused on making VR a real possibility in the near future.
Through Google's latest development, though, that future may be coming much more sooner than you think.
Previous Google Chrome leaker, now officially a hired employee of the company, François Beaufort, revealed on June 15 that the developers behind Google Chrome, the Chromium team, are working on bringing VR to the web.
"They've ... been working towards WebVR support in Chromium and launched VR view to help web developers embed VR content in their web pages," Beaufort says.
WebVR is a Google-supported and open-sourced "experimental Javascript" API that provides the necessary tools for web makers or business establishments to bring more functionality to their web pages. Specifically, these tools enable virtual reality support for such web pages, which can then be viewed on VR devices and platforms, including the Oculus Rift, Samsung VR, HTC Vive and the upcoming Google Daydream.
While this is promising, WebVR was previously fairly limited to an extent due to the need for web makers to actually include the necessary lines of codes on their websites to enable VR mode. Simply put, if a web page was not built with VR support in mind, users had to remove their VR devices to access these sites, halting a full virtual reality experience.
This is where Google's latest development, VR view, comes into play.
Essentially, what this feature does for Chrome on Android is force a non-VR web page to enter virtual reality mode. A so-called "browser shell" will take care of the rest while end-users view any web page, regardless of VR build, on their VR headsets.
Currently, WebVR support is only limited to Google Chrome Beta while VR View is only available on Google Chrome Dev. Both apps can be downloaded from Google Play if users want to try the features out.
These have to be enabled first by accessing "chrome://flags" on the URL bar, where a couple of other experimental options can be tested out as well. Of course, since these features are still in development, some functionalities may not work out as planned.
As for iOS platform users, do not fret.
"Starting today, there'll be a native Cardboard SDK for iOS, [which] ... includes all of the features already available in the Cardboard SDK for Android," a Google blog post says.
Photo: Maurizio Pesce | Flickr
