Last summer, Mozilla launched an experimental version of Firefox with support for web virtual reality apps for Oculus Rift. This week, support for WebVR also landed in Firefox’s Nightly and Developer Edition release channels. Why is Mozilla working on virtual reality when its mission is to “promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web?
At a talk last summer, Mozilla’s Josh Carpenter argued that the organization knows VR will be a “really big deal” and because “it presents a really great challenge, and we like great challenges.” To give users that feeling of actually being present in a different world (and not just that of looking at a simulation), you need to get the latency between head movements and the screen reacting to them down to an absolute minimum. Mozilla argues that, in the end, all of this work will not just benefit the VR experience, but also the Web experience as a whole.
To do this, Mozilla has thrown its weight behind WebVR, an experimental API that makes it easier to connect the browser to virtual reality headsets. Google, too, has started to experiment with this as well, so there’s already some cross-browser support for it, even though it’s still far from being an official standard and from becoming a default feature of Mozilla’s and Google’s mainstream browser release channels.