@adwood53 The XR team is responsible for the XR Interaction system, and whether that works or not for WebXR is a completely separate issue from the topic of WebGL / WebGPU. I know most people at Unity want it all to work, but it’s always a matter of picking battles with each teams limited resources. None of it is for lack of want. Personally, I really hope Apple gets in the WebXR game because that would be a huge incentive for department leads to want to invest in that instead of something else. It’s easy to come up with theories, or conspiracies, about what Apple is doing or not doing, but all any of us can do is just continue to push on them to do it (for general web and not just Vision Pro).
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For historical interest, here is the very first triangle rendered with Unity WebGPU! As they say, the first triangle is always the hardest. It has come a long way since then, and I’m looking forward to the continued work to improve it!
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only a developer can understand the joy that 1 triangle brought…
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Hey,
I’m back from Unite2023 and I see people here mentioned me and WebXR in a WebGPU post.
So first, I want to say kudos to the Unity Web team for the efforts of enabling WebGPU. I follow this forum, and got to see the works of the team and Brendan on other sites as well, and it’s very impressive.
The move from “Unity WebGL” to “Unity Web” is great. It will help to explain that WebGL is just one Web API, same as WebGPU, Web Audio, WebXR and others.
As commented before, Unity Web depends on the availability of related Web APIs.
So WebXR+WebGPU support depends on the specs of such an option, and the implementation in browsers.
It seems like Unity make lots of efforts in web, and the team got more members now. Which is great news IMO. The session about the web platform at Unite2023 was full, and I hope it’ll give Unity more insentive to invest in the web platform.
Regarding official support of Unity in WebXR, it’s something that I would also want to see, but if there’s a choice between improving Unity Web performance (both load times and runtime) vs adding more features like WebXR, I prefer they’ll focus on performance.
I got to talk with some XR developers from Unity, and it seems like most of the XR APIs are now open to use by 3rd parties, so input handling in WebXR using Unity’s Input System similar to other supported XR platforms is something achievable (and I’m working on it for the next version of WebXR Export, video at x.com test build at Unity WebGL Player | XR Interaction Toolkit and guide at unity-webxr-export/Documentation/Using-XR-Interaction-Toolkit.md at master · De-Panther/unity-webxr-export · GitHub ).
Only thing which requires better collaboration would be the rendering.
WebXR is different from other XR platforms in some core parts, so it does require some extra work over the similar implementation of the OpenXR package.
But the OpenXR package, and recent changes in XR Interaction Toolkit and AR Foundation to generalize AR/MR input on both flat screens and headsets make some of the difficult parts more on par with WebXR capabilities and use cases.
All in all I think the Unity Web platform is in a good direction. And I’m really excited about the WebGPU implementation
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With this announcement, does it means we will have soon the list of improvements/fix about WebGPU in the changelogs of future alpha/beta or it’s too soon ?
In any case, I wanted to thank the entire Unity team for the immense efforts for this port. The first tests are really impressive.
Great news, would love to know if a webXR and an AR app can now be done from WebGPU project - one project one web deployment, run everywehere (mobile phone, XR, AR etc)
As always your posts and assessments are spot on @De-Panther and you are a very welcomed part of the WebGL, Web and XR community here on the forums mate
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As mentioned on previous comments, no. Not right now, as there are still works on the specs and no implementation in browsers yet.
Thanks❤
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Hey! I saw a post on Linkedin about the new WebGPU features coming to a later version of Unity. (Later than the version I’m currently using).
I’m curious about the state of “Web” in general. I work at a studio that previously made games for WebGL and released them on Facebook. Having access to a platform like Facebook made it easy to build up an audience for that platform. However, Facebook stopped accepting new submissions as of the end of 2020. There are alternatives like hosting a web game on your own website. But building an audience that will go to your website regularly to play is much harder than just continuing to support the same products on mobile.
In general, I’m not all that aware of the state of web gaming, or web development. So hearing about this news caught me by surprise. So not to repeat myself, but what is ‘web’ looking like these days? What are the goals with new updates to enhance graphics for web purposes? And how does it stand against this other push to turn most things into an application you access instead of a website?
well you surely advertise your games in the games you did on fb, and on your fb games paage, so they go to your site and play?
Thanks, that indeed works. The game builds correctly, but when it runs it is only a black screen with the same errors I mentioned on my previous message…
Everything runs fine in the editor.
oddly a quick trip round mine didnt cause those errors any more - although i did manage to make one black screen in the editor at one point… but no warnings/etc on the console
I did a full check in the editor, and everything works out correctly, but the build still doesn’t work. What is weird for me is that I can’t find those shaders in the project
i have a real issue with shaders, so, for example, i have material bricks, and about 100 walls. (its a maze) and it makes a few thousand variants, and why? its the same wall, let alone why its compling in hidden vr ones, itgs not got any vr in it
@xiongju The version of WebGPU that was in 2023.2 has a WebGPU feature that was deprecated by browsers. You will need to use the latest 2023.3 alpha version of Unity to use WebGPU.
The version of unity I was using at the time was 2023.3.0a3, but later I updated it to 2023.3.0a13 and it worked. thank you
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The 2023.3.0a13 test still has this problem
@bugfinders said a problem was resolved in 0a14, you could try upgrading and see if that helps,
https://discussions.unity.com/t/933493/38
Hi @brendanduncan_u3d just wanted to share our enthusiasm with WebGPU that we tried today on our project.
We struggled for many years with asm.js, wasm was a huge step forward, but this is an insane improvement : I experience almost instantaneous load time and twice as much FPS in our interior design app.
Thanks a lot, and if you mind sharing a roadmap, it would be much appreciated.
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any idea what this might be? @brendanduncan_u3d
