that's what we thought, but you get a solid 60fps on a typical laptop in a 4 way webrtc video conference, or when showing 4K 360 degree video (plus a video call). My Samsung S5 manages about 30fps in Cardboard mode, which is adequate for Cardboard, and on a proper gaming rig it works flawlessly with a Vive or Rift. Seriously: try the demo at https://matrix.org/vrdemo in browser and see!
The only perf problems we've had are when using VP8 or VP9 for WebRTC video, whereas H.264 (which the demo prefers) correctly decodes efficiently in hardware... and on Firefox where unfortunately https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246410 slows down the 360 video significantly (to around 20fps for 4K video on the gaming rig) relative to Chromium which manages a solid 30fps (which is the source framerate).
The only motion sickness we've seen has been when editing the skiing videos - the worst thing in the world is if the cameraman wobbles the camera whilst getting up from the floor but your head doesn't move...
Video is one thing--you can offload a lot more of that out of JS-land, yeah? What worries the hell out of me is the rest of WebVR. I mean--we see frame drop in Canvas on midrange PCs that's really hard to erase (sincerely, My Last Two Days Of Free Time). The prospect of that sort of mess in VR has me worried. I have a strong stomach so I may play with it once my replacement Vive gets here, but...man. This stuff is so razor-thin on the margins that it really worries me and will continue to so long as we're stuck with stop-the-world GC (and to be clear, of course you can write GC-friendly code...but it's a lot harder in JavaScript, IME, than in Java) anywhere in this stack.
The only perf problems we've had are when using VP8 or VP9 for WebRTC video, whereas H.264 (which the demo prefers) correctly decodes efficiently in hardware... and on Firefox where unfortunately https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246410 slows down the 360 video significantly (to around 20fps for 4K video on the gaming rig) relative to Chromium which manages a solid 30fps (which is the source framerate).
The only motion sickness we've seen has been when editing the skiing videos - the worst thing in the world is if the cameraman wobbles the camera whilst getting up from the floor but your head doesn't move...