WebXR is the browser standard that exposes VR and AR devices to web pages: headset pose, controllers, hand tracking, and immersive rendering sessions, all behind a permission prompt instead of an app store.
Its promise is structural, not cosmetic. The same URL can serve a flat, walkable 3D scene to a laptop and a fully immersive session to a headset — one codebase, one deployment, no installation on either path. For anyone who believes distribution friction is what killed most VR content, that is the whole ballgame.
The practical state of the standard is more mixed. Support is strong in Chromium-based browsers and on standalone headsets' built-in browsers, thinner elsewhere. Immersive sessions demand a rendering discipline (foveation, reprojection tolerance, strict frame pacing) that flat WebGL pages can shrug off.
The pragmatic architecture, and the one Holovate follows, is progressive: build the world as a screen-first WebGL experience that stands on its own, keep the scene graph clean enough that an immersive session is an additive mode rather than a rewrite. General-purpose engines like three.js — which powers our frontier — already speak WebXR when that day comes for a given project.
Until then, the zero-install part of the future is already real. It is a link.