Firefox Reality – A browser for the Virtual Reality

Firefox Reality 1.0.1 is now available for download in the Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream app stores. The new mixed reality web browser is built on the top of Mozilla’s quantum engine for mobile browsers. Although the Quantum engine is based on the Gecko engine, it leverages its parallelization on GPU to deliver the 2D web and immersive VR experience. The team of Mixed Reality at Mozilla has designed its first VR browser from the ground up since it is dramatically different from the regular browser in many ways. It requires new VR and AR headsets, so the images are close to your eyes to produce the spatial dimension, which feels like you are in a virtual world.

“We had to rethink everything, including navigation, text-input, environments, search and more. This required years of research, and countless conversations with users, content creators, and hardware partners. The result is a browser that is built for the medium it serves. It makes a big difference, and we think you will love all of the features and details that we’ve created specifically for a MR browser,” said by Andre Vrignaud, Head of Mixed Reality Platform Strategy at Mozilla.

There are many libraries and frameworks available for developers for building WebVR applications that use WebGL, such as three.js, A-Frame, Sumerian, PlayCanvas, and Babylon open source library. Three.js, a high-level library for GPU-accelerated 3D animation, is probably a good one to get started for the VR development that works on Firefox Reality. The overall experience is smooth and fast according to the Mozilla development team.

In the latest version of Firefox Reality, it includes a reclined viewing mode meaning the view will adjust while you’re lying back. In the immersive mode, it has MSAA (Multisample anti-aliasing) to improve its image quality.