Chrome Now Lets You Browse All Of The Web In Virtual Reality
It sounds almost like a cliché now to say that VR can bring more to your life than shooting zombies or flying around space in a virtual reality arcade, but if you’ve been paying attention it should now be clear that virtual reality is going to change the way we interact with the everyday. Whether we like it or not, its impact is not only going to be felt in areas like education or commerce, but the applications of its technology will be so widespread they will impact everything we do, especially when we begin to see large scale adoption.
It’s with this in mind that makes the most recent release of Chrome so exciting.
Chrome 61’s mobile browser will allow anyone, with some caveats, to view the entirety of the internet in virtual reality. First, as you may have guessed, you’re going to have to be accessing the internet from a mobile device through the most recent version of Chrome. Secondly you’re going to need one of Google’s Daydream View headsets in which you can place your phone and use the VR feature. Sure, that does sound like a lot, but if you’ve got those two things down, you’ll be able to view and interact with any website in VR, which we think is probably going to make it worth the effort, especially for sites with games or 360 degree videos.
With that said, of course some sites are going to work better in VR than others. But whether or not your favorite site is a natural fit for VR, the fact that you can now browse a virtual web is an exciting first step in what are no doubt going to be major advances in how we interact with VR.
Whether it’s surfing the web, doing the laundry or buying groceries, you can probably foresee a future virtual reality experience that will enhance these typically mundane activities. Putting on your futurist hat, it’s not hard to imagine a near future where we’ve pushed even beyond this, where headsets are common everyday items and we use VR not only to view the web, but as a way to re-engage with the ordinary.
I’m not saying that Chrome 61 was the first step to large scale adoption of virtual reality for common everyday things; I think that’s where we were headed before this latest Google release. But for those who may have been questioning the influence VR may have in the future, it’s exactly these kind of small steps that could push VR from a niche technology to something far more mainstream.