Bring VR Experience in Your Browser with WebVR

By Jake Rocheleau. in Toolkit. Updated on April 22, 2021.

The Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and other VR products have changed the future of technology. We may scoff at the idea of VR headsets but much like the Internet in the 1990s, VR is the way of the future.

And thanks to WebVR we already have a way to merge the Internet with VR using a powerful JavaScript API. This library is completely free, open source, and supported by the W3C so it’s the perfect library to play with if you’re into virtual reality.

WebVR is still experimental and you can only test it with browsers on VR headsets. Because of this you can’t really see live demos in your browser although you certainly can try.

Most examples give a warning saying that your browser isn’t supported. But you can still see what the idea is behind VR and why WebVR can drastically change how web developers create virtual reality on the web.

The Moz VR site is another cool place to check out live projects. Again these work best with VR headsets but many of them have been built with WebVR.

The WebVR API is actually supported in the Firefox Nightly Build and upcoming versions of Chromium. It’s a very experimental library but it proves that developers are interested in virtual reality even on the web.

In case you’re wondering who’s managing the WebVR API, it’s actually hosted on GitHub by the W3C team. This would ideally become an official W3C spec and it even has an editor’s draft of how the spec can be implemented once the W3C pushes it through.

This WebVR API has the chance to radically transform web games and interactivity on the web. It may be well over a decade before consumers see any benefits, but WebVR is in place and it’ll only continue to grow.

If you wanna give it a try you can download the source directly from WebVR’s GitHub page with links to the different API specifications and dev resources to get started.