Navigating YouTube subscriptions & Facebook pages with gaze interactions
The goal was to explore the potential of mobile VR for media consumption on the web. For that I built an app where users can sign in with their YouTube and/or Facebook account(s) and browse content on those platforms
One nice benefit of VR is that it makes both 360 & 3D videos much more engaging, so I added the possibility to only select those type of content. I also added speech recognition in order to circumvent the lack of text input & controllers on mobile VR.
Making YouTube work required proxying video ressources obtained with youtube-dl. Also WebVR was getting hidden behind a flag on Chrome at the time. I had to convince people to activate it, it was far from frictionless.
I shipped it ! It was actually well recieved at the time, it was even mentioned in the A-Frame newsletter ! With a new found confidence in my ability to ship a complex WebVR app, I wanted to give another go at trying to build a social VR app. Also the project's use of youtube-dl was not sustainable as it was against YouTube TOS so I killed it. In retrospect I could have pivoted this project toward a more generic VR online media consumption platform, but I guess hindsight truly is 20/20.