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A-Frame

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A-Frame v0.4.0 - The Registry

Dec 16, 2016

By Kevin Ngo

A-Frame v0.4.0 - The Registry

Happy first birthday to A-Frame!. A-Frame was born exactly one year ago with the mission to make WebVR content creation accessible and to enable rapid innovation. We can’t begin to describe how much the community has grown and the amazing things people have contributed and built in the past year.

We celebrate with the release of v0.4.0! v0.4.0 comes with Oculus Touch support, API polish, bug fixes, and an update to the A-Frame Inspector. In the past few months, we started the A-Frame Registry! We’ll be expanding upon the Registry and focus on building out more tooling and ecosystem on top of A-Frame.

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Grab the latest build at https://aframe.io/releases/0.4.0/aframe.min.js or npm install aframe.

What’s New?

The Registry is a curated repository of open source community A-Frame components, like the Unity Asset Store for A-Frame. In the next few months, we’ll be working with community developers on getting the Registry populated with quality A-Frame components.

The Inspector update includes UI polish and bug fixes. The Inspector has initial integration with the Registry; in the component dropdown on the entity panel, we are able to inject and attach components straight from the Registry. This integration makes components such as physics, particle systems, text, mountains, or animations a few clicks away:

inspector

Oculus Touch controllers have landed thanks to @machenmusik (@mchen on Slack) with models provided by @arturitu! The hand-controls component supports all different the Oculus Touch hand poses for each finger. Speaking of Oculus, @machenmusik also added automatic Enter VR support for browsers that support it, primarily Carmel!

For A-Frame itself, we’ve improved API surrounding getAttribute and setAttribute, and fixed major bugs regarding component dependencies, the cursor component, and primitives.

Some new features include a reverseDrag property for look-controls for static 360° use cases, support for ambient occlusion/displacement/normal/spherical environment maps for the standard material (thanks for Ada Rose Edwards), and keyboard shortcuts to take perspective (<ctrl> + <alt> + s) and equirectangular (<ctrl> + <alt> + <shift> + s) screenshots.

Check out the release notes for the complete changelog, which includes a list of breaking changes and deprecations to help migrate.

What Have People Built?

A-Frame has been hyping up since the last release. We are really glad that everyone is enjoying A-Frame and finds it useful. We’ve seen an approximate 50% growth in activity across Slack, GitHub, websites since late August. In the meetups we’ve attended, we’ve received great feedback of A-Frame and the support on Stack Overflow. We even got sent flowers from abroad! With that, people have been able to build awesome A-Frame projects:

What’s Next?

We will populate and build out the A-Frame Registry, we’re aiming for 20 by the end of the year, and at least 100 by the end of next year. This will enable powerful and easy-to-use features for A-Frame developers. We will expand ecosystem and tools on top of A-Frame, as we have with the Inspector.

We will continue producing showcase content for A-Frame and WebVR as we’ve done with A-Painter. Within the next month, we will be releasing a room scale first-person shooting game built with A-Frame.

In the next release of A-Frame, there may be movement with animations, systems, materials, and textures as we improve APIs. Link traversal will arrive shortly as the API stabilizes and ships on browser platforms.

2016 was a monumental year for WebVR. A-Frame got tens of thousands of designer, developers, and creators excited about the future of the Web. Let’s carry that momentum and then some into 2017!

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