Augmented Reality with Chrome: Let Flowers Grow!
With Chrome 81 Beta for Android, it’s now possible to use immersive Augmented Reality in the browser. I have again created two variations of the original demo source code to show what is easily possible. You can now walk around the earth, having a closer look, and (hopefully) spread joy by placing flowers wherever you like.
A minimal Web Push example
Web push notifications allow users to opt-in to asynchronous messages from a server to a web application. The message can be sent at any time, even when the web application or the web browser is inactive. This W3C standard, based on the HTTP/2 protocol, is now supported by Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Safari – but not by iOS.
Chrome 79 Beta: Virtual Reality Comes to the Web
Chrome 79 Beta is out and with it the public support of the WebXR Device API. This API is about accessing virtual and augmented reality devices. One usable device is in your pocket or lying next to you on the desk or you are even reading this blog post with it: your mobile phone. So let’s play around a bit and see what can be done.
What web can do: a mobile speech-to-speech translator
In the 70s and 80s, some people thought that you could soon travel the world with a portable computer, only the size of a backpack, that would translate any spoken utterance to any other language. Nowadays, with the Google Translate App, you can easily do this with any mobile device. But is this also possible using only HTML, CSS, and Javascript?
Creating a Docker image from a WSL instance
At some point, it may be necessary to publish the current state of a Windows Subsystem for Linux distribution to a wider audience. A WSL instance can be exported into a tar file, a Docker image can be created by importing a tar file. Then the image could be publicly made available to any host system running Docker. Let's see if it's that easy.
What web can do today
Yesterday I tried to create a Progressive Web App displaying an artificial horizon over a live camera view and was wondering if this would be possible with a modern mobile web browser. During the research, I stumbled over several websites which you can use to test the hardware capabilities and their software support in web browsers and I wanted to share some links.
A CSS hack to show page element layouts
Today I stumbled over an interesting blog post by Gajus Kuizinas. The idea is to inject a CSS style snippet into a web page to show the layout of all web page elements. This can be achieved by setting a different translucent background color for every depth of nodes. This way you can see the size, the margin and the padding of each element on the page.
Safe Browsing with the Windows Sandbox
The Windows May 2019 update brought the new Sandbox feature. It can be used as a safe browsing environment without the risk of affecting the base Windows installation with malware of any kind. We will create a host installation of a Web browser with a persistent configuration, which is mirrored into the virtualized environment of the Sandbox whenever needed.
