JS / Web support

[JimAllanson]

I noticed the Readme has a link to a WebGL browser demo of Habitat.

I really liked the idea of a self contained web page that anyone could run in their browser, running a simple simulation with visualisations. I thought about forking the demo to add a basic embodied agent and some controls to help visualise training etc. But digging around for the demo code, I noticed you dropped the experimental JS support here, saying:

Given the paradigm shift to habitat-lab's Human in the Loop (HitL) client-server architecture, it no longer makes sense to maintain and develop direct web deployment of habitat-sim on web through JS.

Looking into the HitL framework, it says "Use it to build interactive desktop and VR applications". The VR client uses Unity, so maybe there's a way to build for the web there, but the client server architecture of HitL means I'd still need to run a server somewhere, so I couldn't just make a free public example on Github pages etc.

I guess Habitat's going in the direction of a more integrated application for serious research projects, where it makes sense to have more control over client apps. But I think there's still some good use cases for browser based WebGL apps:

• Simple demos of Habitat functionality, like the one in the readme
• Teaching & interpretability tooling, simple web based demos that use habitat
• Simpler distribution of tasks, e.g. this project that creates a habitat web interface to use in Amazon Mechanical Turk.

So I'm wondering if there's any plan on the roadmap for supporting projects like this? Or if these sort of use cases are out of scope, is that because you want to avoid the support burden they introduce - so the gap could potentially be bridged with community builds / wrappers etc.? Or are you planning architectural changes to the framework that would make the web a non-viable target platform?

Obviously for now I can always check out an older version of habitat-sim, or fork it and re-add WebGL build support if I want latest, so I have options. Over time I'd need to keep it up to date or fall behind on Habitat releases, so it'd be handy to get an idea of where things might be going.