Does anyone know of a cheap alternative to Oculus Rift / Vive that has controls and is browser / A-Frame compatible?
Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and WMR headsets are all valid options for desktop.
And you're not stuck with Edge if you want WMR - you can use Windows MR headsets as SteamVR devices via an official Microsoft SteamVR plugin (but Edge with Windows Mixed Reality is quite good, really).
You did not specify if you want 6DOF. If 3DOF is enough, there's also mobile - GearVR works very well and has a controller, Daydream isn't that bad too. If you're really desperate there's also cardboard with which you can use a bluetooth gamepad or something.
I'm maintaining 360WebPlayer and I have an up to date list of supported browser/device combinations. It's not using A-Frame, but the list should be close.
Unfortunately, on Desktop the only headsets that browsers support are Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on Firefox / Chrome / Supermedium and Windows Mixed Reality headsets on Microsoft Edge.
Mobile headsets only support a single 3DOF controller at the moment. Your options are Samsung Internet and Oculus Browser for Gear VR and Oculus Go and Chrome for Daydream headsets.
Check Web VR Rocks periodically for an up to date compatibility table.
Related
I have been struggling for a while to get my A-Frame scenes to display in my VR headset through SteamVR. Simply put, my goal is to find a way to get A-Frame projects to properly display on my headset, but instead my headset receives no feed from the A-Frame scene and displays a solid grey or black color. Here's the odd part: sometimes, I can get the A-Frame scene to show up on the SteamVR VR View window on my desktop, but when I put my headset on, the display is still greyed or blacked out. Unfortunately, no errors were encounter (so far) in the console log of the browser I tried running the A-Frame scenes in.
Important to mention, the HTC Vive Headset and OptiTrack Equipment do work. They work for Unity programs and other VR applications. They are just not working with WebVR, WebXR, and A-Frame programs.
Usually what occurs is when I open up the A-Frame scene in a web browser tab manually or by using http-server and ngrok, the scene runs fine on the desktop monitor. However, it then proceeds to open up SteamVR and attempts to connect to my headset. SteamVR will usually say Playing Firefox or Playing Chrome. Sometimes the A-Frame scene appears on the VR View of the SteamVR application, but every time I try this the headset display is blacked or greyed out. That's as far as I can get.
Equipment:
HTC Vive Pro Eye (w/ OptiTrack Active Tag Attachment and Wireless Adapter)
OptiTrack IR Cameras (not using base stations)
HP Z4 Desktop Workstation Computer
Here's what I've tried so far:
Enabling web xr and vr flags in browsers like Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Edge, and Firefox Nightly (However, for browsers like Chrome, I couldn't find the web vr or xr flags anywhere)
Disabling xr sandbox in the web browsers that provided the option to enable/disable xr sandbox
Trying beta versions of SteamVR
Using a mixed reality HP headset (The one that comes with the backpack VR computer) with Edge
Trying different release versions of A-Frame
Tried using Supermedium, which some have recommended, but I don't think opens A-Frame scenes...
I would paste error and code snippets, but for this scenario it wouldn't make sense since no errors pop up and it's very unlikely that the issue is from the HTML/JavaScript A-Frame code. Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this issue! If you need any other details I'll provide them here so just let me know.
I got a Lenovo headset that uses Microsoft Windows Mixed Reality.
I cannot figure out how to use it to see 360 degree a-frame webpages.
When I click the VR glasses on the right lower corner nothing happens.
When I use the MR portal, I can only see the page in a plane, not the whole 360.
Does the html of the a-frame need to have some special activation for Windows MR?
I can see them with another headset using Google Cardboard.
Windows MR headsets are only supported directly by Microsoft Edge and indirectly by Firefox and Supermedium through SteamVR (You need to install this application)
I'm looking at this question: How to detect Desktop vs. Mobile vs. GearVR vs. Oculus Rift vs. Vive in A-Frame?
It seems that AFRAME.utils.device.isMobile() is seeing the Go as a mobile device.
The check will ship in A-Frame 0.9.0 (as one of the comments mentioned). In the meantime you can incorporate the code to your application:
function isOculusGo () {
return /Pacific Build.+OculusBrowser.+SamsungBrowser.+MobileVR/i.test(window.navigator.userAgent);
}
This checks relies on the specific navigator.userAgent strings of the browsers available on Go (Oculus Browser and Samsung Internet). It's not super robust but the only known way to do it at the moment. Mozilla Firefox Reality has just been released and the expression above does not take it into consideration. I don't have a Go available to access the userAgent.
You'd think just "webkit", but the screenshots it shows me (and the issues it finds) are quite different to anything that I've seen via devtools device testing or using actual devices.
Is it maybe just an outdated version of webkit?
Without knowing what they're using it's hard to know how to fix the issues, and I feel they'll negatively affect my search index rankings if I don't.
tl;dr:
1- You are right, it is webkit, however, it is a pretty much A stripped down version of Chrome for Android
2- What you see is the default android browser, you can use
Can I Use
and look at "Android Browser" to see whether or not your design is supported by the "mobile view" in PageSpeed
Long Version:
my understanding is this:
1- The view-port you see in PageSpeed represents what a person using the default browser in Android phones would see.
2- The Default Android browser - AKA "WebView" -
is based on the same code as Chrome for Android version
However,
WebView does not have full feature parity with Chrome for Android
Source: Google
Running into an issue with A-Frame 0.3.0 running in GearVR on the Samsung Internet app.
When it loads it displays the A-Frame scene on a card hovering in space like an ordinary stationary web page - the content in the web page rotates with head tracking, but the card remains stationary in space.
When I click on the various 360/180 display modes, the image of the flat web page appears to simply map to a sphere and responds loosely to head rotation - there are swirly patterns at the poles so I'm pretty sure it's just a 2D mapping of the web page. Like it's trying to display it as a 360 video.
Is there a hidden setting? I've enabled WebVR in the Samsung browser. Or is there a directive I need to include in A-Frame? The scene runs fine in cardboard through chrome on android. thx
Ryan Betts from Slack said:
You have to type 'internet://webvr-enable' into the address bar to enable it.
Here is the documentation by Samsung: http://developer.samsung.com/technical-doc/view.do?v=T000000270L where it says:
To enable WebVR visit the internet://webvr-enable URL in the Samsung Internet for GearVR browser (visit internet://webvr-disable to disable WebVR support).
ngokevin's answer is correct, you have to enable. If that done correctly, a working demo using 1.0 API will be able to go into correct mode. Note that can't access correct 'mode' using the fullscreen mode options meant for VR/360 video formats. Try https://toji.github.io/webvr-samples/03-vr-presentation.html If this example doesn't work then have not enabled. If this runs but another page doesn't it would be an issue specific to that page and WebVR API usage.
Remember that webvr support in Gear VR is still experimental and really doesn't work very well yet.
For me the Gear VR is extremely jerky and makes you dizzy when looking around and the quality just isn't very good on the sky images.
I'm using a new Gear 360 camera to take my sky images and when I look at them through the regular Gear VR 360 photo viewer app they look awesome but once you go into webvr and look at those same images they're really really blurry.
Hopefully Gear VR can get the kinks worked out soon and hopefully just replaces that stupid Samsung browser with the new Oculus Carmel browser so these webvr apps will work correctly.