Upcoming: W3C Workshop on Inclusive Design for Immersive Web Standards

29 August 2019

W3C announced today a Workshop on Inclusive Design for Immersive Web Standards, 5-6 November 2019, in Seattle, WA, USA. The event is hosted by PlutoVR.

The goals of the workshop are to:

• Share existing inclusive XR solutions that will help us create new standards for inclusive XR on the web.
• Identify accessibility gaps in existing web XR technologies, and consider solutions for closing those gaps.
• Explore ways to use existing technologies and standards to create innovative solutions for inclusive XR on the web.

Expected topics of discussion include:

• Standards that already exist or are in development that may impact inclusive XR on the web
• Solutions that are already being used to create inclusive XR on the web
• Lessons from other areas like location-based VR, gaming, and 360 video
• Accessibility limitations of existing web XR technologies
• Extensions to existing web XR technologies to enable more inclusive XR on the web
• Role of AI in providing real-time audio description or text captions
• Using existing APIs to provide alternative modes of interaction (like the Vibration API for tactile feedback, the Gamepad API for alternative input devices)

Attendance is free for all invited participants and is open to the public, whether or not W3C members. For more information on the workshop, please see the workshop details and submission instructions.

Expressions of interest and position statements are due by 5 October 2019.

First Public Working Draft: Publication Manifest

27 August 2019

The W3C Publishing Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft on Publication Manifest today. This specification defines a general manifest format for expressing information about a digital publication. It uses schema.org metadata augmented to include various structural properties about publications, serialized in JSON-LD, to enable interoperability between publishing formats while accommodating variances in the information that needs to be expressed.

This manifest format had originally been developed as part of larger work on Web Publications. As a result of some recent discussions, the publication schedule of the group has been modified and, while the Web Publication has been published as a Working Group Note, the Publication Manifest has become a stand-alone, recommendation track document. See a separate blog by Wendy Reid on the backgrounds of this decision.

W3C Workshop Report: Web Games

2 August 2019

W3C is pleased to announce a report from the W3C Workshop on Web Games held in late June 2019, in Redmond, WA, USA.

The workshop convened about 100 participants representing browser vendors, game engines developers, games developers, game distributors, and device manufacturers. Together, they discussed the future of Web technologies for games. The report collects highlights from the individual sessions, with links to the presentation slides, and presents next steps envisioned by workshop participants. Video recordings of the talks are available and linked from the workshop agenda.

Workshop participants singled out better support for threading for 3D rendering and advanced audio processing as a core need to run AAA content on the Web. They also discussed proposals to improve support for cloud gaming scenarios, including proposals to reduce I/O latency and improve communication in real-time between clients and servers. Technical updates that would benefit the Web games ecosystem as a whole were identified and the workshop proved very useful to run broader discussions on discoverability, monetization, hosted Web runtimes and accessibility. These discussions may warrant the creation of a games activity at W3C to coordinate inputs from the games community, pursue broader discussions, and track progress on needs identified during the workshop.

We thank Microsoft for hosting, Facebook Gaming for sponsoring, the Program Committee for organizing the event, and all participants for their contributions.