Category: Carmel

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Oculus Launches Developer Preview Of Its WebVR Browser, ‘Carmel’, On Gear VR

Oculus Launches Developer Preview Of Its WebVR Browser, ‘Carmel’, On Gear VR

Oculus revealed its very own VR web browser, Carmel, back at Oculus Connect 3 in October. Now, you can get a taste of what it offers.

Carmel is now available as a Developer Preview in the Gallery Apps section for Gear VR. As the name suggests, the current release is designed for those looking to create VR experiences that are viewed through the browser using the WebVR API, and won’t have much to offer other users. It contains an extensive set of samples to showcase what can be done with VR on the web, along with documentation to help developers get started making their own content.

It is in a very early state; you can’t even access the address bar right now.

Eventually, Carmel will allow you to access both traditional 2D content and VR experiences through the web, but for now it’s focusing on the latter.

Oculus also launched the Carmel Starter Kit either for download or viewable online if you’ve got a compatible browser. It teaches developers how to get their content running inside a headset, how to utilize the Gear VR’s touchpad on the web, how to navigate HTML5 in VR, and display 360-degree content on a web page. The company’s dedicated WebVR page also has some examples of what’s possible with the API.

According to a blog announcing the release, Carmel is based on a version of WebVR that “most major browser vendors believe can reach general availability in mid-2017.” The company also notes that it is taking steps “alongside our partners at Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla” to deliver what it calls a “key milestone” for the Web.

Rift support for Carmel should be arriving later down the line. Oculus is also still working on its React VR framework for building WebVR interfaces too.

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View WebVR Content with Oculus VR’s Carmel

Oculus VR has announced the launch of a developer preview programme for the company’s upcoming WebVR application, Carmel. Officially announced at Oculus Connect 3, San Jose, earlier this year, Carmel is a virtual reality (VR) browser designed to bring web content into VR via head-mounted displays (HMD).

Carmel Developer Preview logo

WebVR content can include both immersive 3D scenes built with the WebGL and WebVR APIs, as well as enhanced 2D web experiences running in VR. This can range from traditional page-based viewing experiences to fully 3D, immersive content. Using Carmel, now available to developers, new experiences can be built to take advantage of the unique properties of HMDs.

As new HMDs and other VR devices are released over time, the Carmel frameworks will automatically upgrade content to work well across all browsers and devices, both in and out of VR. Developers can create WebVR content today without access to a WebVR-capable browser through access to the latest WebVR APIs allowing for testing though the Gear VR HMD.

The Carmel Developer Preview is now available as a Gallery app for Gear VR on the Oculus Store. Launching Carmel will immediately drop you into a WebVR-based built-in Online Gallery, giving you the opportunity to explore a few of the experiences Oculus VR has made available, with more content promised for the future.

Carmel Developer Preview App

No timeframe for a full consumer rollout of Carmel has yet been announced, though Carmel isn’t currently under a strict lockdown. For more details on the use of Carmel visit the official blog from Oculus VR, and VRFocus will keep you updated with future WebVR initiatives.

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An Inflection Point for WebVR and the Open Metaverse

tony-parisiThere’s been a couple of key developments in the evolution of WebVR during the month of October. First, Nate Mitchell announced during his Oculus Connect 3 keynote that Oculus will be supporting the WebVR ecosystem with the React VR framework and a VR-enabled browser called Carmel. And then on October 19th and 20th, there was a historic W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality where all of the major VR players gathered in San Jose to hash out the WebVR web standards for delivering VR and AR applications over the web. Some the participating companies included Mozilla, Google, Samsung, Oculus, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Valve, Sony, Yahoo, Unity, Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, HP, Dolby, High Fidelity, JanusVR, and Sketchfab. With Oculus’ public support and the gathering momentum around delivering VR over the web, WebVR hit an inflection point of buy-in and momentum such that the future of the metaverse will more likely be based upon the principles of the open web rather than driven by a more closed, walled garden application ecosystem.

formvr

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I had a chance to catch up with Tony Parisi at Oculus Connect 3, and he’s now started his own WebVR-focused company called Form VR that collaborated with Oculus on the TripAdvisor WebVR demo that was shown during the OC3 keynote. We talk about some of the latest developments in WebVR, how Microsoft is getting involved to get support for AR WebVR apps for the HoloLens, how Form VR is developing tools for creating WebVR applications, and some of the other big developments that are showing a lot of buy-in and momentum around WebVR.

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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip

The post An Inflection Point for WebVR and the Open Metaverse appeared first on Road to VR.

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Oculus to Support WebVR Through New VR Browser Codenamed ‘Carmel’

Oculus announced at Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, that they’ll be officially supporting WebVR through their new VR web browser codenamed Carmel. WebVR is an API that provides headsets access to web-based VR content.

Touted as an easy way to share VR experiences over the web, WebVR allows JavaScript developers a way of delivering simple VR content into the hands of anyone with a VR headset just by navigating to a URL (i.e. no long downloads or installs necessary).

Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell took the stage and presented the new VR browser, stating the WebVR initiative “is going to lead to an exponential growth in VR content out there. Everyone in the future is going to have their own VR destination on the web.”

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Mitchell then introduced a number of usecases for prospective developers, some that he said could even be completed in just a few days like a web-based photo sphere site, or a 3D rendering of a new car.

webvr-carmel-oculus
a simple photo sphere ‘destination’ that lets you tour a hotel

Oculus says Carmel is optimized for performance, designed for navigation and input in VR, and will be tightly integrated with Home and “run on any Oculus device.”

Samsung’s Gear VR web browser ‘Samsung Internet’ already has preliminary support for WebVR, but the move by Oculus to support it directly and offer the tools to do so means they’ll be throwing their full weight behind the initiative.

carmel-browser

To help developers build VR web content, Oculus also announced React VR, a VR-focused version of the React open source javascript library created by Facebook in 2013 that helps developers build user interfaces for web-based content.

A developer preview of Carmel is said to come later this year along with React VR. Oculus has listed a number of real-world examples on their WebVR page to give prospective devs an idea of what to build for the coming VR web.

The post Oculus to Support WebVR Through New VR Browser Codenamed ‘Carmel’ appeared first on Road to VR.

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‘Carmel’ Is Oculus’ Own Web Browser to Support WebVR

‘Carmel’ Is Oculus’ Own Web Browser to Support WebVR

Oculus announced a lot of exciting directions for the future of VR at its Oculus Connect 3 keynote today, but one piece of news that’s flying under the radar and really shouldn’t be is the company’s work with WebVR.

VP of Product Nate Mitchell talked about this area of VR — largely untouched by Oculus itself thus far — during his section of this morning’s show. It refers to VR and 360 degree experiences that are accessed in-browser, often making them simpler and more primative than native apps, but still providing essential services and entertainment. Mitchell himself exhibited a simple 360 degree hotel experience in which you could warp between locations, and a fully VR, position-tracked car viewer.

Today, Oculus revealed a new framework for building WebVR interfaces. It’s called React VR and, as the name suggests, it’s based on Facebook’s React, a JavaScript library designed to streamline the development of web-based experiences on mobile and PC platforms. This will do the same for creating WebVR content.

The biggest news, however, is that Oculus is developing its very own web browser to support experiences built with React VR. Currently codenamed Carmel, the browser will run on both Gear VR and Oculus Rift and is “fully optimized” for them. Little other information was revealed but Mitchell promised that a developer preview of the browser would be “coming soon”.

It’s easy to see why Oculus wants to boost this section of the VR industry; parent company Facebook is making a big push into 360 degree content with both images and videos. Oculus encouraging that growth means more people accessing that content in a shorter amount of time.

In the long-term, as VR adoption grows and headsets become more accessible, this could actually be one of the most important announcements out of Oculus Connect this year. For now, though, we’re more interested in the price of the Oculus Touch controllers and some of the new social experiences on display.

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Oculus to Push VR Web Experiences With Own Browser Code Name Carmel

Oculus revealed that developers can make simple experiences on the web using two new pieces of software, one of which stems from React, a web making tool, and another is a whole new browser from Oculus made for virtual reality (VR).

The way in which Oculus said it was going to help users to create these experiences is with React VR, which is built on the foundations of React, letting web developers create these simple experiences easily. The way you can publish this is in a VR browser, code name Carmel, which is optimised for VR.

Carmel

Nate Mitchell took to the stage to tease what he was about to reveal, saying that web VR was the next big thing for developers: “There’s another kind of ecosystem that we think is super important, and it’s a content ecosystem of simple vr experiences that are based on web technology and are accessed via a web browser. You can think of this VR ecosystem as the VR web, and it’s going to be huge for a number of reasons.”

As explained by Mitchell, with a few lines of Java Script you can create a VR experience and instantly share it, and because it’s in a browser it isn’t going to be limited to headsets as it reaches out to anyone with a laptop or PC. It is expected to lead to an exponential growth of VR content.

Two experiences were then shown, which includes checking out hotels using 360 degree photo spheres where you can embed reviews and so on within the scene. The other example was a look inside of a Renaut car.

React VR

There will be a developer preview released soon for Carmel, including React VR alongside it.

For more on the latest from Oculus Connect 3, as well as all the news, updates, and features in the world of VR, make sure to check back with VRFocus.