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A-Frame v0.9.0 - Perf & Initial WebXR

Feb 11, 2019

By Kevin Ngo

A-Frame v0.9.0 - Perf & Initial WebXR

Over the last year, we’ve continued to try to push the limits of the Web to produce VR content that stands on its own alongside the native apps and games found on the stores. At Supermedium, we developed content such as Soundboxing WebVR alongside @ericflo, Supercraft, and the BeatSaver Viewer.

We’re starting to highlight usage of A-Frame by companies such as Disney, Ford, Toyota, Chevrolet, Sony, Samsung, Google, CERN, Magic Leap, Electronic Frontier Foundation, NPR, and NASA. See the new and developing A-Frame showcase on the website.

And thanks to Google Creative Labs for financially supporting development of initial WebXR support through us at Supermedium in this release of A-Frame.

What’s New?

Major changes to A-Frame involve large performance improvements, a new animation component, Inspector updates, addition of oculus-go-controls + vive-focus-controls, and introductory WebXR support. Note that the release date of WebXR is indefinite a few years under discussion and is not yet parity with the WebVR 1.1 standard from five years back. A-Frame will do its best to smooth out the flux. We may ship an 0.9.1 since WebXR has already broken with Chrome Canary. Biggest things to note for migrating is that:

  • <a-animation> has been removed in favor of the animation component (a back-polyfill exists). We are currently working on fixing some memory leaks in anime.js .
  • Raycaster event APIs have slightly changed.

The Inspector has also received some overhaul with stability, bug fixes, performance improvements, a complete refactoring, UI enhancements, and now a companion server to sync changes back to your HTML files with the A-Frame Watcher!

See the release notes or changelog for more details.

What Have People Built?

Let’s check out what people have built how world-renowned companies have released production projects using A-Frame! Also see the new [A-Frame Showcase].

Hidden Mickey from Disney developed by @shaunmnemonic:

Disney

Inside Music from Google, Song Exploder developed by tambien and help from Supermedium:

Inside Music

Access Mars from Google, NASA with help from Supermedium:

Access Mars

Here are some companies, startups, and studios that have leaned on A-Frame and thus some pretty fun jobs created!

And some more cool A-Frame projects:

Numbers

  • 268 contributors with 45 new contributors since March 2018
  • 1,600 total questions asked on StackOverflow
  • 370,000+ people visited aframe.io since March 2018
  • 3,200,000+ pageviews since March 2018
  • Over 9000! GitHub stars
  • 145+ entries of A Week of A-Frame and still going!

What’s Next?

We will ensure that A-Frame runs well on the Oculus Quest, and that there is a place for users to experience A-Frame applications. A-Frame will continue to keep up to date on the WebXR flux. We need to update documentation, guides, and examples. And there are some lingering improvements we want to make to the A-Frame API. Perhaps provide more streamlined tools for A-Frame development.

Thanks to everyone for filing issues, contributing, and sharing your projects!