What's the AR/VR/3D Web. How about "The Web"?
My super-awesome colleague Trevor raised the question "What’s a name for the web after we start supporting AR/VR headsets?" He even posted the question to Twitter (you can go read responses there if you'd like, and chime in if you want).
Help! Do you all have a good phrase for "the current flat page web plus portal and immersive display modes as well as overlay and spatial controls". I've used "transreality web" but I feel like "reality" is too focused on one type of content.
— Trevor Flowers 🌸🌸 (@TrevorFSmith) April 25, 2018
It's a great question. Some folks call it the 3D web, others like the Immersive Web. Or the MetaVerse. Cyberspace.
I read through some of the discussion (on twitter and elsewhere) and realized that one of the reasons I'm so enamored of responsive design for the immersive web (aside from the fact that my student Gheric Spieginer couches his work on the Argon project this way) is that I strongly believe that the core feature of the web is that people get to choose what technology they use to browse the web, and good web pages should respond to their choice.
I like to call it "The Web". The essence of the web is "people create content" / "other people consume it on whatever device (and in whatever modality) we want".New content should start responding to new modalities. But old ones should still work. If not, it's not the web.
— Blair MacIntyre (@blairmacintyre), April 26, 2018
Put another way: if you're creating content that ONLY works in AR or VR, you're doing the Web WRONG!
— Blair MacIntyre (@blairmacintyre), April 26, 2018
Your content should work in Firefox Reality and Lynx, and everything in between.
Long live user choice, long live the open web!
(If you don't know about Lynx, a customizable text-based web browser, you should ... it was created in 1992 and is still being used and developed!)
So, to all you folks who are dreaming of a "Web" that's entirely 3D and unencumbered by all this legacy 2D content, you're doing it wrong.
(EDIT 03/10/2019: the above two tweet by me were deleted during on of my occasional twitter purges, so I'm just including the text here. It's one of the reasons why I am tyring to publish most to my micro.blog instead of Twitter, so that I can keep my content under my control when I purge the anti-social media sites.)