Permissions and ongoing user control

[immersive-web]

Permissions and ongoing user control

[bialpio]

This can move to https://github.com/immersive-web/privacy-and-security? In general, it’s a good point but I’d like to defer trying to solve this to a later time as it has to do more with session creation - that to me seems like the only reasonable time for the application to express the need to access more fine-grained data (we don’t want to fatigue the user with too many prompts, although one might be fine).

[blairmacintyre]

I agree we don't want to solve it; but, I posted here so that we keep this in mind. We don't want to go down a path that will be incompatible with these issues, for example.

For example, asking during session creation is one part of the solution. But, as smartphone app developers have found, waiting until a specific permission is needed is better for user understanding (i.e, the work flow of saying something like "We need access to X in order to provide the feature Y you just asked for. Click the button to request permission", then requesting the feature that may cause a permission prompt).

I can see both being needed in a WebXR situation.

• small, dedicated webxr pages may ask up front, for the very reason you suggest (don't bug the user with many permissions)
• large sites (e.g., youtube, ikea, etc) that have XR features (e.g., VR video viewing, put-the-furniture-in-the-room) may want to defer asking until needed. Now, it may very well be that those sites will just defer initializing WebXR until then, so it ends up being the same.

But, as you say, I don't really want to solve this here, I just want to make a note of the issue. Creating a similarly issue in privacy-and-security, and linking it back here is a good idea, I duplicated and linked it here.

[bialpio]

Link to PR: immersive-web/webxr#689.

[bialpio]

Closing stale issue - I believe we have this problem solved by requiredFeatures/optionalFeatures passed in to session request. The use of plane detection needs to be signaled at session creation (to give the UA a chance to ask for permissions), and then the API (whatever shape we end up with) can be used w/o prompts.