In reality, the field is still very nascent, and the user experience quite rough. In 2023, when Michael Gutensohn and I founded Volumetrics, we set to build app development tools native to the medium.
See, it’s ok to build software for a phone or a watch on a laptop, and switch back and forth between the devices for debugging and testing. But for mixed-reality, it’s rough. Taking on and off the headset, readjusting vision and straps.
It’s physically exhausting. Not to mention that there are no debugging tools in headset, no console log…
Another thing we learned in the past year is that the field still needs a lot of prototyping and exploration. The WebXR community is small but active, there is still much to discover. How do people currently jam on XR code? How do we enable XR-curious designers to quickly test an interaction? Why is it so difficult to even serve local WebXR content to a headset?
As such, it felt natural for us to build a headset-first, native development environment, that would allow the community to share their work, explore ideas, and showcase cool stuff, and that’s precisely what we did!
Volu allows anybody to get started with WebXR quickly by taking care of all the boilerplate, the HTTPS serving, and offers in headset development tools: a console (finally), a lil-GUI still API to expose variables. It is also a nice place to see what other people are building, get inspired, and even remix other people’s experiments 🔀
We just started building, but we are getting some good feedback from the community. Please don’t hesitate to join our Discord to hang out, and follow the development 😊