XRWD: The Future of Accessible Spatial Content

Understanding the Basics

One of the most exciting hardware technologies that has really matured significantly over the last 10 years is Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed (or Extended) Reality. For the folks that are deeply involved in the industry, we have come to know these terms affectionately by their abbreviations: AR/VR/XR. One of the biggest challenges was head tracking and movement that would translate through to the user’s eyes without causing significant nausea. With Oculus bringing their first headsets to the market and eventually being purchased by Facebook (and prompting their subsequent rebrand to Meta) the VR fanboys and fangirls had something tangible to get excited about.

Practical Applications

Now that it’s been some years and the improvements have seemed a bit more incremental, we are on the cusp of another breakthrough in hardware technology in the form of the Apple Vision Pro. We believe this device will be another huge step forward in terms of fidelity of experience and capabilities for immersive and extended interactions with digital content.

With this new hardware comes the question that drives us: what about content? Right now the AR/VR/XR content production process is locked into the world of game engines and App Store marketplaces. Both of these things come with fees, added complexities, and unnecessary burdens on the content development and distribution process. It got us thinking that there had to be a better way. Enter XRWD.

XRWD means eXtended Responsive Web Design and is our attempt to create a vocabulary for the coming spatial internet. We have never really understood the need for the word “metaverse” because in many ways we already have one: it’s called the internet. Currently 99+% of web content is flat and 2 dimensional – but we see a future where that number will change and websites will go from the traditional flat experiences that we have all become all-too familiar with, to full immersive experiences where marketing, sales, and general web content is more interactive than ever before.

We feel so strongly about this concept that we wrote a white paper – check it out here: https://xrwd.org. It explains more of the details around this perspective and we hope it helps create more opportunities for conversations about how we start envisioning and building the future of a 3 dimensional internet. Read the white paper and contact us if you get excited about what you are seeing!