Abstract:

It is easy to imagine a future where cheap and powerful stand-alone head-worn AR and VR displays are central to the average person's everyday computing experience. To ensure that the open web remains healthy in this new world, web APIs and standards must be created to ensure that immersive experiences can be created, delivered and consumed as freely as the 2D web is now. 

Over the past two years at Mozilla, I’ve worked as part of the Immersive Web community to bring AR and VR to the web, and web-based XR will soon be a reality. In the near future, we will see prototype implementations of the WebXR Device API begin to appear in major browsers on phones, tablets, traditional computers and stand-alone AR and VR head-worn displays. In this talk I will discuss how WebXR might support the diversity of sensing and world knowledge future AR devices will make available to applications, including geolocation, content persistence, and advanced capabilities like custom computer vision.

Speaker Bio:

Blair MacIntyre is a Principal Research Scientist in the Emerging Technologies group at Mozilla, and a Professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He has been doing AR research and development since 1991, founded the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech in 1999, and joined Mozilla in 2016. He has been working on bringing AR to the web since 2008, when he helped start the open-source Argon project at Georgia Tech. At Mozilla, he is leading the effort to bring high performance AR to commodity web browsers. He has worked on AR systems in military, industrial, educational, entertainment, and gaming domains, and consults on technical and legal issues in AR.