We had one as well. We're rendering VR with barrel distortion applied in the main vertex shader rather than as a post-process. Saves an expensive framebuffer (some mobile GPUs take as long as half a millisecond to switch render targets) at the cost of a slightly heavier vertex shader. It also requires geometry to be tesselated for the distortion effect to work.
We had to write our own polyfill for our implementation but it beats the post-process technique of webvr-polyfill quite easily.
That's how UE4 and Unity3D do barrel distortion as well.
I'd recommend checking out PlayCanvas (https://playcanvas.com). It gives you a pretty powerful editor app to build WebGL content. It's got a scripting interface, but you can create some pretty cool graphical scenes without writing a single line of code.
Interesting. With a little hackery, it should be fairly easy to get this working with PlayCanvas. I'm not sure why it needs to use a new element type though (canvas3D).
Canvas does not support all the 3D elements needed for spatial recognition and accessibility via 3D audio. I'm hoping to read through and see canvas3d support that feature.
What does Canvas have to do with audio? Web Audio has the necessary components to do spatialized audio. And spatial recognition is an input. Canvas is for output.
I'm seeing a dramatic up-tick in companies wanting WebGL content to be built, either in-house or externally. WebVR is only going to accelerate this trend. So, sure, picking up skills around WebGL content creation should be a safe bet but avoid learning WebGL at a low level. Tools like PlayCanvas are there to help you get excellent results in a fraction of the time - you're much better off learning that.
I don't see a hot code replacement feature. The editing of scripts is in another window. It looks complex, but that's normal ; the thing is it seems like it abstract way too many things. Using playcanvas you don't learn js/webgl, you learn playcanvas ; see the difference ?
Here is a hot code replacement feature: https://twitter.com/playcanvas/status/751469647149621248 You definitely learn JS! That's the language typed by the coder in the video. Of course, PlayCanvas has its own API to make certain tasks quicker and easier for you, but you can write your own shaders in GLSL if you like.
