Immersive Web Working Group

Immersive Web Working Group
Information
Type	Standards working group
Industry	Web standards, Extended reality
Founded	24 September 2018 (Working Group); 1 March 2016 (Community Group, as the WebVR Community Group)
Notable Personnel	Ada Rose Cannon and Ayşegül Yönet (chairs); Atsushi Shimono (W3C staff contact)
Products	WebXR Device API and its modules (Gamepads, Augmented Reality, Hit Test, DOM Overlays, Layers, Hand Input, Depth Sensing, Lighting Estimation, Anchors)
Parent	World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Website	https://www.w3.org/immersive-web/

The Immersive Web Working Group (IWWG) is a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that develops web standards for virtual reality and augmented reality in browsers, chiefly the WebXR Device API and its add-on modules. Its stated mission is "to help bring high-performance Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) (collectively known as XR) to the open Web via APIs to interact with XR devices and sensors in browsers." The group launched on 24 September 2018.

It works alongside the Immersive Web Community Group (IWCG), an open W3C community group that began in March 2016 as the WebVR Community Group and incubates new proposals before they move onto the standards track. In 2018 the Working Group took over ownership of the WebXR Device API from the Community Group, which kept incubating new APIs for web-based AR and VR. The two groups share chairs and a GitHub organization, and describe themselves jointly as "Immersive Web at W3C".

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked the group's history, charters and chairs, spec publication dates, editors, participant counts, meetings, workshops and the 2026 recharter draft against W3C group pages, charters, spec history pages, mailing-list archives, web.dev and MIXED. About review dates.

History

WebVR Community Group (2016-2017)

The WebVR Community Group was proposed on 29 February 2016 by Chris Van Wiemeersch and launched on 1 March 2016. Its supporters at creation included Brandon Jones, Anssi Kostiainen, Diego Marcos and Daniel Appelquist, and its goal was "to help bring high-performance Virtual Reality to the open Web". By March 2017 most of its activity took place in the WebVR GitHub repository, including work on a "2.0" draft of the API. In October 2016 W3C held a two-day Workshop on Web and Virtual Reality in San Jose, hosted by Samsung, with 120 registered participants from browser makers, VR hardware vendors, content producers and accessibility experts; its report identified the WebVR API as an important target for near-term standardization.

In July 2017 W3C brought a draft charter for a WebVR Working Group to Advisory Committee review. In September 2017 W3C announced that the charter had not gathered sufficient support: some key participants in the WebVR Community Group had argued that the work needed more incubation in light of possible changes of scope.

Rename and WebXR (2017-2018)

On 11 December 2017 Brandon Jones of Google told the community group's mailing list that the "WebVR Community Group" would be renamed the "Immersive Web Community Group", to serve as an umbrella group for bringing VR, AR and mixed reality capabilities to the web, and that the API then called "WebVR 2.0" would become the "WebXR Device API". A W3C blog post by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux in January 2018 explained the change: a major rewrite of WebVR was under way, and experiments with ARKit and ARCore had shown enough overlap between AR and VR requirements to handle them together.

In June 2018 W3C gave advance notice that the renamed Community Group had expressed renewed interest in moving its work to the formal standards process and had begun drafting a charter for an Immersive Web Working Group. The Working Group's first charter started on 24 September 2018, with Ada Rose Cannon (Samsung) and Chris Wilson (Google) as chairs and Dominique Hazaël-Massieux as W3C team contact. Its scope covered APIs to detect XR devices, query their capabilities, track position and orientation, present imagery at the device's native frame rate, expose XR input such as tracked controllers, and provide real-world hit testing on AR devices. Browser user interfaces inside VR or AR and "global-scale AR browsing" were out of scope. The charter named Google Daydream, the Oculus Rift, the Samsung Gear VR, the HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality headsets and the Oculus Go as examples of target hardware. The launch announcement was signed by the two co-chairs and by Trevor Smith as chair of the Community Group.

Standards work (2019-present)

The first public working draft of the WebXR Device API appeared on 5 February 2019, and the specification reached Candidate Recommendation on 31 March 2022. Google shipped the API in Chrome 79, with AR support following in Chrome 81. The second charter (from 12 May 2020) listed the Gamepads, Augmented Reality and Hit Test modules as deliverables alongside the WebXR Device API, and named DOM overlays, lighting estimation, hand input, real-world geometry, anchors and layers as further deliverables, all expected to be incubated in the Community Group first. Atsushi Shimono replaced Hazaël-Massieux as team contact. The charter records that Ayşegül Yönet, then of Microsoft, joined the chairs on 10 June 2020.

In 2022 the German outlet MIXED reported that Cannon had moved from Samsung to Apple and would keep chairing the W3C Immersive Web groups. The 2022 charter lists her affiliation as Apple and Yönet as a W3C Invited Expert. The 2024 charter names Cannon and Yönet as the two chairs. It treats the WebXR Device API and the Layers API as living specifications, with new Candidate Recommendations published after substantive changes. It also lists body tracking, persistent anchors and an HTML model element for 3D content among future work, and notes that the model element may instead go to the WHATWG.

The group's charter periods, as recorded by W3C, are shown below.

Immersive Web Working Group charters

Charter	Period	Chairs (affiliation as listed in the charter)
2018	24 September 2018 to 1 March 2020, extended to 30 April 2020	Ada Rose Cannon (Samsung), Chris Wilson (Google)
2020	12 May 2020 to 1 June 2022, extended to 8 July 2022	Ada Rose Cannon (Samsung), Chris Wilson (Google), Ayşegül Yönet (Microsoft, from 10 June 2020)
2022	8 July 2022 to 7 July 2024, extended to 25 September 2024	Ada Rose Cannon (Apple), Chris Wilson (Google), Ayşegül Yönet (W3C Invited Expert)
2024	26 September 2024 to 25 September 2026	Ada Rose Cannon (Apple Inc.), Ayşegül Yönet (W3C Invited Expert)

Specifications

The Working Group publishes its specifications on the W3C Recommendation track. The WebXR Device API states that it "was published by the Immersive Web Working Group as a Candidate Recommendation Draft"; its most recent version is dated 9 June 2026, with editors Brandon Jones and Manish Goregaokar of Google and Rik Cabanier of Meta. None of the group's specifications had become a full W3C Recommendation by October 2026. The table lists each document's first public working draft and its latest published version.

Published specifications of the Immersive Web Working Group (October 2026)

Specification	First public working draft	Latest version
WebXR Device API	5 February 2019	Candidate Recommendation Draft, 9 June 2026
WebXR Gamepads Module - Level 1	10 October 2019	Working Draft, 7 July 2025
WebXR Augmented Reality Module - Level 1	10 October 2019	Candidate Recommendation Draft, 25 April 2025
WebXR Hand Input Module - Level 1	22 October 2020	Working Draft, 5 June 2024
WebXR Layers API Level 1	3 December 2020	Working Draft, 11 August 2026
WebXR Hit Test Module	31 August 2021	Working Draft, 11 December 2025
WebXR DOM Overlays Module	31 August 2021	Working Draft, 24 September 2024
WebXR Depth Sensing Module	31 August 2021	Working Draft, 25 August 2026
WebXR Lighting Estimation API Level 1	9 September 2021	Working Draft, 11 December 2025

The WebXR Anchors Module is listed in the 2024 charter as an editor's draft and does not appear among the group's published documents. The groups also maintain WebXR samples, a WebXR polyfill, a Layers polyfill and the WebXR Input Profiles tool.

Community Group and incubation

The Immersive Web Community Group is open to anyone with a W3C account; W3C membership is not required. Its stated goal is "to help bring high-performance Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to the open Web". The Working Group describes the Community Group as the place where "most new ideas start". The 2018 charter set out the arrangement: features outside the Working Group's current scope are incubated in the Community Group and later added to the Working Group's scope by rechartering.

Proposals start as issues in the Community Group's "proposals" repository on GitHub. According to its guide, an idea then needs consensus, feature advocates, a dedicated feature repository with an explainer, and implementers before it is pitched to a working group, which "may or may not be the Immersive Web WG". Incubation repositories listed in October 2026 included navigation, computer vision, geo-alignment, real-world geometry and WebGPU bindings, with cross-API repositories on privacy and security.

Organization and meetings

In October 2026 W3C listed 83 participants in the Working Group, including 3 Invited Experts, representing 18 organizations. Participating organizations included Apple, Google, Meta, Samsung Electronics, NVIDIA, Adobe, ByteDance, Igalia, the Web3D Consortium and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. The chairs were Ada Rose Cannon (Apple) and Ayşegül Yönet (W3C Invited Experts), with Atsushi Shimono as W3C staff contact. The Community Group listed Cannon and Yönet as its chairs.

The Working Group meets by teleconference and face to face, both during W3C's annual TPAC week and at meetings hosted by member companies. Recent hosted meetings were held at Google in Mountain View (March 2025), at Meta in Menlo Park (November 2025) and at Apple in New York (May 2026). A further meeting was planned within TPAC 2026, scheduled for 26 to 30 October 2026 in Dublin, with its exact date still to be set.

W3C has also run workshops related to the groups' work. Besides the 2016 San Jose workshop, it held a workshop on VR authoring in Brussels at the end of 2017 and a Workshop on Inclusive Design for Immersive Web Standards in Seattle on 5 and 6 November 2019, hosted by PlutoVR, which looked at applying inclusive design to web-based XR standards, including the work of the Immersive Web groups.

Current status

The 2024 charter ended on 25 September 2026, and in October 2026 W3C's charter list described it as "active but expired". On 10 August 2026 the W3C Team announced the start of charter refinement for a new Immersive Web Working Group charter, estimated to last until about 7 September 2026; the announcement said the draft would add a WebXR/WebGPU Binding Module as a new normative deliverable. A draft successor charter published on W3C's charter-drafts site keeps the same mission and chairs, leaves its start date open until approval, and adds a plan to investigate compatibility with multi-view displays that are not worn on the head, naming Looking Glass and zSpace displays as examples.

See also

• WebXR
• WebVR
• OpenXR
• Khronos Group
• Web3D Consortium