Vladimir Vukićević

Vladimir Vukićević (also known as Vlad Vukićević) is a software engineer who created Canvas 3D, the experimental OpenGL context for the HTML canvas element that led to WebGL, and who started Mozilla's work on WebVR, the browser API for virtual reality headsets that was later replaced by WebXR. He chaired the Khronos Group's WebGL Working Group when the WebGL 1.0 specification was released in March 2011.

In June 2014, while an engineering director at Mozilla, he announced native support for VR devices in experimental builds of Firefox, starting with the Oculus Rift. He is listed as an editor of the WebVR specification together with Brandon Jones of Google, Kearwood Gilbert and Chris Van Wiemeersch. After about ten years at Mozilla he moved to Unity Technologies, where he led the team behind Project Tiny in 2019 and was later Director of Lightweight XR.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked every date, title, quote and attribution against the cited Canvas 3D and WebVR blog posts, Khronos releases, MozillaWiki pages, WebVR spec, Mozilla blog, bit-tech, Road to VR, Tech Xplore, MCV/DEVELOP, Voices of VR, FITC and Cesium pages. About review dates.

Career

Canvas 3D and WebGL

On 26 November 2007 Vukićević published a preview of Canvas 3D as a Firefox extension. In the announcement he wrote that he had demonstrated "an early prototype of an OpenGL 3D context for the canvas element" at the XTech conference about a year and a half earlier, and that time constraints and the state of Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 3) had delayed further work. The extension exposed two contexts: "moz-gles11", which closely followed the OpenGL ES 1.1 specification, and "moz-glweb20", which closely followed OpenGL ES 2.0. Both were implemented on top of desktop OpenGL, so they needed at least OpenGL 1.5 and OpenGL 2.0 respectively, and the extension ran on Firefox 3 Beta 1 under Windows, Mac OS X (x86) and Linux (x86). He explained the choice of OpenGL as a standardized, cross-platform API with a large existing developer base, and noted that OpenGL ES was also the standard for 3D on mobile devices. He wrote that he hoped to propose the API to a standards group after developers had tried it. Mozilla's own wiki page for the project now states that "Canvas 3D has now become WebGL, a standard being developed by the Khronos Group."

In March 2009 the Khronos Group announced an "Accelerated 3D on Web" working group, describing the project as "initiated by Mozilla" and noting that Mozilla had proposed exposing the OpenGL ES 2.0 API to an ECMAScript container and had offered to chair the group. A Khronos Group news item of 7 April 2010, introducing an interview with Mozilla's Arun Ranganathan on Firefox and WebGL, described Vukićević as one of Mozilla's Principal Engineers and said that he had originally written the Canvas3D extension, "a precursor to the WebGL work". When Khronos released the final WebGL 1.0 specification at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on 3 March 2011, its press release quoted him as "Vlad Vukićević of Mozilla and chair of the WebGL Working Group".

Other Mozilla work

Vukićević is one of the three authors listed on the APNG 1.0 specification for animated PNG images, with Stuart Parmenter and Andrew Smith. When Mozilla released a pre-alpha build of Fennec (Firefox for mobile) for Android in April 2010, bit-tech reported his caution that the build's memory use "isn't great" because it was in many ways a debug build; the build required Android 2.0 or newer and had mainly been tested on the Motorola Droid and Nexus One.

By 2014 he was an engineering director at Mozilla, described by Tech Xplore as in charge of gaming and special projects. In March 2014 Mozilla and Unity announced that a WebGL add-on for Unity 5.0 would let developers export Unity games to run in browsers without plug-ins using WebGL and asm.js, and Mozilla's announcement quoted Vukićević, "Engineering Director at Mozilla and inventor of WebGL", saying the work "unlocks the full potential of the Web for Unity developers". The same month he told the trade magazine Develop that developers "can quickly port their native C/C++ games to run directly in a web browser".

WebVR

In episode 13 of the Voices of VR podcast, published on 4 June 2014, host Kent Bye introduced Vukićević as a technology innovator at Mozilla working out how virtual reality fits into the web. The conversation covered WebGL and Three.js, asm.js performance, bringing the Unity and Unreal Engine game engines to the web, and what web developers would need for VR.

On 26 June 2014 he published "First Steps for VR on the Web", announcing that Mozilla was "adding native support for VR devices to early experimental builds of Firefox". In the post he asked whether the web could "evolve to become the Metaverse that Stephenson envisioned", a reference to Neal Stephenson. His initial technical plan listed five goals:

• rendering canvas content (WebGL or 2D) to VR output devices;
• rendering 3D video to VR output devices;
• rendering HTML and CSS content to VR output devices, using existing features such as CSS 3D transforms;
• mixing WebGL content and 3D-transformed DOM content in a single 3D space;
• receiving input from orientation and position sensors while reducing latency from input to final presentation.

He wrote that web content should not need to know the particulars of the headset, for example that it should not have to apply the Oculus Rift's lens distortion itself. The first builds covered only sensor input and canvas or WebGL rendering, ran on Windows and OS X with Linux to follow, and supported only the Oculus Rift, with other devices "including Google's Cardboard" planned. His colleague Josh Carpenter was to work on the user experience and design side. Road to VR described him at the time as "a well known graphics programmer" and one of the architects of WebGL.

At FITC's Web Unleashed conference in Toronto in September 2014 he presented "Bringing Virtual Reality to the Web: VR, WebGL and CSS - Together At Last!", covering Mozilla's experimental additions to HTML, CSS and WebGL for VR, responsive layouts that extend from mobile to VR, and VR video on the web. In November 2014 Mozilla packaged the work into MozVR, a site of demos for the Oculus Rift; bit-tech reported that it built on the project Vukićević had first revealed in June.

In June 2015 he and Carpenter wrote a guest article for Road to VR, in which he was identified as Engineering Director at Mozilla Toronto, working on the graphics and media parts of the web platform including VR and WebGL. The article stated that developers from the Firefox and Chrome teams had published the first draft of the WebVR specification, that the API was available in Firefox Nightly and experimental Chrome builds, and set out further goals such as browsing the web from inside VR and extending the video element to common VR video formats. It also said that browsers would need native-like performance, with refresh rates of 75 Hz, 90 Hz and beyond expected to become common. The final WebVR draft, a Draft Community Group Report dated 12 December 2017, lists him first among its four editors. The specification's repository page now states that the WebVR API "is being replaced by the WebXR Device API" and that the document is preserved for reference purposes.

Unity Technologies

A Cesium biography states that he spent ten years at Mozilla before joining Unity Technologies, and credits him as "the inventor of WebGL" and "the initiator of the WebVR R&D effort to bring VR capabilities to the web". In March 2019 MCV/DEVELOP interviewed him as the team leader on Project Tiny, Unity's package for building very small games that load instantly, for targets such as web browsers and mobile devices. The interview set out the 2019 plans as adding C# support, moving to Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) and taking 2D support out of preview, and Vukićević said Unity planned to add 3D and AR support "later this year".

In November 2021 he was the guest on episode five of the Building the Open Metaverse podcast, hosted by Patrick Cozzi and Marc Petit, where he was introduced as Director of Lightweight XR at Unity Technologies. In the episode he argued for companies and individuals to experiment with metaverse technologies "in the open" rather than recreating "that walled garden that we somehow ended up with in the mobile ecosystem".

Selected work

Year	Work	Role
2007	Canvas 3D Firefox extension (preview)	Author
2011	WebGL 1.0 specification (Khronos Group)	Chair of the WebGL Working Group
2014	VR support in experimental Firefox builds	Announced and developed the initial builds
2017	WebVR Draft Community Group Report	Editor, with Brandon Jones, Kearwood Gilbert and Chris Van Wiemeersch
2019	Project Tiny (Unity)	Team leader

See also

• WebGL
• WebVR
• WebXR
• Mozilla