A-Frame v0.6.0 at last fulfills the “Web” in WebVR. After three months of work,
this release features support for WebVR 1.1 API features such as link
traversal that shipped on Firefox Nightly (and soon release Firefox 55),
portals, and fills out controller support for Daydream and GearVR
including a component for laser interactions.
Use it today with <script src="https://aframe.io/releases/0.6.0/aframe.min.js"></script>.
What’s New?
After years of waiting, link traversal has finally landed in a desktop
browser with Firefox in the WebVR 1.1 API, and A-Frame is there to help you
travel from world to world. Link traversal lets us stay in VR as we travel
between VR web pages, at last fulfilling one of the key promises of WebVR.
This is accomplished by listening to a browser event on page load and kicking
into VR, but A-Frame also provides a link component and portals so we can zip
through the Metaverse in style.
Developed by Diego, the portals are represented as windows into another scene,
powered by 360° panoramic images, which can be taken in A-Frame using the
screenshot shortcut <ctrl> + <alt> + <shift> + s.
Try link traversal out with Firefox Nightly and a
headset or read
the link docs. We’ll have
another blog post in detail soon.
A-Frame completes the collection by providing components out of the box for
controllers for every major headset: vive-controls,
oculus-touch-controls, daydream-controls, and gearvr-controls. Want to
support them all at once in your application? Just toss in <a-entity laser-controls></a-entity> and we have a ray-based control scheme that scales
across every type of controller.
There have been major gains in performance. We’ve:
- Added some caching and reduced some type checking in critical paths of object updates.
- Reduced memory usage by caching textures.
- Reduced memory usage by reducing the number of instantiated JavaScript objects.
- Eliminated duplicate asset network requests when using
<a-assets>.
- Throttled the
componentchanged event which gets emitted very often.
Some nice cherries on top are the shadow component for creating real-time
shadows. Add some depth and presence to our scene alongside lights. Brought to
you by our now core A-Frame developer,
@donrmccurdy. And add some post-processing
with aframe-effects by
@wizgrav.
Check out the release notes for the complete changelog which
includes a list of all new features, optimizations, and bug fixes.
