Google’s Daydream WebXR team is working on a new 3D model viewer called Article. In a blog post, Reza Ali and Josh Carpenter said: “Article is a 3D model viewer that works for all browsers. On desktop, users can check out a 3D model by dragging to rotate, or scrolling to zoom. On mobile, the experience is similar: users touch and drag to rotate the model, or drag with two fingers to zoom in”.
Article has been designed with sharing in mind—the viewer can be placed in web pages as easily as an ordinary image. It is also designed to work in conjunction with Google’s ARCore SDK. Embedded models will feature an extra button when browsing on an ARCore-capable device, allowing users to pull the model up and view it within their real-life environment.
Ali and Carpenter went on to say, “There’s vast potential for AR on the web—it could be used in shopping, education, entertainment, and more. Article is just one in a series of prototypes, and there’s so much left to explore—from using light estimation to more seamlessly blend 3D objects with the real world, to adding diegetic UI annotations to specific positions on the model. Mobile AR on the web is incredibly fun right now because there’s a lot to be discovered”.
Article is still very much in the prototype phase. Whether it ever gets released into the wild remains to be seen.
