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a-frame front-end-development Uncategorized Virtual Reality

A-Frame

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Following on from my last post, I’ve been sinking my teeth into something that eventually will tick three out of the four boxes I listed there: frontend engineering, game development and reading.

That thing is A-Frame.

A-Frame is a tool for building things in VR entirely in HTML. You can of course make it a lot more complicated and achieve some incredible things doing so, but this tool gives you the ability to knock up something so quickly and easily, that will work across most VR devices, it’s almost silly.

A colleague pointed it out to me this week, though it’s been around for a couple of years now. I’ve been excited about the possibilities of VR for a while, but since I lack a PC and Vive/Rift setup (or the spare cash to get one), I’ve been constrained to trying to build something in Unity. I’m still very much a beginner on that front so progress has been slow but, as a frontend engineer, it’s a god send to find a tool like this that makes WebVR development so easy. Within a couple of hours I had something more complex than I was able to build in Unity over a few days, and I haven’t yet run hit the rough part of the learning curve (if there is one).

My first A-Frame project is going to be a recreation of a famous living room, and it’s early days yet. With each additional item in the room, I’m trying to do something new: adding textures, adding assets, creating modular items, experimenting with entities and components etc etc. I’m not sure where it’ll end up exactly, but I know I want to introduce interactivity to it, models (potentially my own, created in Blender) and animation on some of those models. As I said, it’s early days yet, but I’m excited to see where it goes.

I recently bought and played Moss, for PSVR, and was as blown away by it as everyone else seems to be. A lot of this is down to the protagonist: Quill. It’s impossible not to feel as though there’s a bond between you and her as you guide her through the adventure, and the times when she communicates directly with you are something special. That feeling, that connection, is exactly the sort of thing I’d like to be involved in creating one day.

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