W3C Will Hold Virtual Reality Workshop in Mountain View, CA This October

From the World Wide Web Consortium Blog:

W3C announced today Web & Virtual Reality Workshop, 19-20 October 2016, in Mountain View, CA, USA. The event is hosted by Samsung.
The combination of improvements in hardware and software capabilities have brought lots of renewed interest in virtual reality experiences. Many of these improved capabilities are available in modern browsers via the Open Web Platform, and thus make the Web a promising ecosystem to create, distribute and enjoy virtual reality applications and services. W3C is organizing the workshop to look at the intersection of Web and Virtual Reality technologies. The workshop aims at enabling sharing experiences between practitioners of the field, discuss existing gaps in the Web platform that make some Virtual Reality use cases difficult or impossible in browsers today, and explore what future standards are needed to pave the way for the Web to be one of the major VR platforms.
Expected topics of the Workshop include:

• displaying stereoscopic content
• detecting & adapting to characteristics of VR headsets
• handling new input methods for VR (gamepad, hand position, etc.)
• accessible user interfaces and interoperability considerations across VR applications
• innovative VR applications that provide novel accessibility supports
• 3D audio
• 3D media synchronization
• declarative 3D scenes
• interoperable formats and codecs for 3D and 360 content
• displaying and interacting with 360 video and images from HTML
• bringing VR as progressive enhancement to classic Web browsing
• 3D video capture (3D camera) and processing (e.g. scene perception)
• streaming 3D/360 content, streaming real-time 3D content
• obstacles to high framerate rendering of 3D

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On a Related Note…
FCC Chairman Visits Stanford for Virtual Reality Lesso (via Stanford News)
From the Article:

Another area of concern for Wheeler was privacy, from both user-to-user and user-to-business perspectives. Virtual reality can provide the illusion of privacy, [Jeremy] Bailenson, [the Thomas More Storke Professor of Communication] said, but sophisticated users – or computers – can actually infer a lot of personal details from data collected in virtual spaces.
Virtual reality systems track a person’s movements down to fractions of a millimeter, and these actions – both the way you move as well as the way you react to stimuli – create a sort of virtual footprint. Bailenson’s work has shown that this footprint can be traced back to individual user profiles with decent reliability. Furthermore, researchers can predict attitudes and future behavior by watching these data sets. The implementation of machine learning algorithms could reveal even more information from the body tracking data.
“Virtual reality technology is becoming incredibly immersive, to the point where we’ve shown that your brain processes it in much the same way it does real-life experiences,” Bailenson said. “We absolutely need to consider how this medium will affect people.”

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