Hello and welcome friends of the Wider Web!
Due to a bit of a schedule change The Transmutable News Weekly will now land in your inbox on Fridays instead of Tuesdays. For the next nine months I’m scheduled to spend the first three days of each week in a machine shop learning how to convince huge and loud machines to precisely cut delicate metal and plastic parts like (just to pick an example out of the air :-) the frames of open and trustworthy Wider Web glasses.
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Wipe down your ways, tap in your stock, and zero out your dial indicators because it’s time for another issue of the Transmutable News Weekly.
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News
WebVR is Dead, Long Live WebXR
Increasingly, Wider Web teams are removing the defunct WebVR API from their projects and in that vein this week Will Eastcott revealed that Max M has converted PlayCanvas to a WebXR-first platform. In general the web community tries to avoid breaking the web so it’s unusual for APIs to disappear. WebVR didn’t go through the standards process before being shipped in Google Chromium- and Mozilla Gecko-based browsers so it is an unusual case.
If You Build It, They Will Come
Continuing the standardization process of WebXR, the W3C invited implementations of the core device API and welcomes comments from the community until 28 April 2022. This is one of the first hard(ish) dates leading up to full status as a web standard. The general goal is for every new API to have at least two independent implementations so that the API is less likely to be useful or possible for only a single device manufacturer or browser vendor. In the case of WebXR, the Chromium team (with downstream users like the Oculus Browser team) as well as the Wolvic team are working on WebXR implementations.
I Left My Wallet At Home is No Longer an Excuse
Ash Connell demonstrated the process of linking a blockchain wallet like MetaMask to a Wider Web site using the Oculus Browser and WalletConnect. Their stated goal is to provide more traction for WebXR in 2022 by providing cryptocurrency payment and other distributed application (dapp) capabilities to all WebXR developers.
Who Will Think Of The Children?
The WebXR Awards team announced their new Summit Series event, the WebXR Education Summit which will go live on 21 July. The new event fills out their annual triple-event series all about the Wider Web. They also have sponsorship opportunities available to companies working toward a better future for the Web.
Building The Wider… TV?
Raw: Emotions, the Wider Web experience created for the Paralympics by Phoriatech and Facebook, was nominated for a Sports Emmy in the Outstanding Digital Innovation category.
Stay open, friends.