IN DEVELOPMENT

Wevr is the one-stop-shop for adding social (i.e. multiuser) capabilities to your VR website built with aframe https://aframe.io/

Just by adding the script tag to your page (after the aframe import), wevr will add player elements for camera, head tracking, hands, movement and interactions control.

Avatars for every user who visits your page will be created, with hands if they have them. Microphone audio will also be enabled automatically so you can see and hear each other, with positional audio if supported (i.e. Firefox).

Finally wevr has support for game scope state (i.e. key/value pairs that are synched to all users, as well as any new users who join later). Documentation to follow.

Just add:

<script src="https://jayber.github.io/wevr/dist/wevr.js"></script>

to your page. (Only tested with A-Frame 0.6.1 and above)

Wevr uses WebRTC to sync players with avatars and broadcast audio, the web audio API for positional audio, and websockets for signaling and game state.

Wevr requires a server for WebRTC signalling and to store game state: https://github.com/jayber/wevr-server

By default wevr uses the wevr-server hosted by VRLobby.co

www.vrlobby.co

Alternatively, if you want to set properties for wevr to use, add the wevr component to your <a-scene>:

<a-scene wevr="signalUrl:ws://localhost:9000/wevr">

Important Omissions

Please be aware that at the moment

• Movement is restricted to a single plane on the vertical axis
• Not all features will work or have been tested on all available devices

Features under consideration

1. Ability to override avatar and player elements
2. Add terrain tracking to movement, so users' location is automatically affected by ground elevation
3. Add teleportation to movement options
4. Ability to set wevr origin, so that player and avatars are spawned around that point in scene, rather than always 0,0,0
5. Complete device support
   1. Daydream?
   2. Movement for GearVR and mobile 2D
   3. Vive testing
6. Refactoring to support use as code library
7. Get avatars and/or avatar settings from user account on server

Usage notes

• As soon as you give permission to the browser to use your microphone it is possible for someone else to be linked with you and hear what you're saying / doing. This is especially to be noted during local development, since the wevr library will still be using the public wevr.vrlobby.co server unless you have specified another. The server will attempt to make unique room names for requests coming from local or private ips using information in headers and remote address, but be aware.
• Currently Chrome will not allow pages from non-secure (i.e. non https) origins access to the microphone (except for local addresses).

Avatar overriding

Wevr is intended to give developers access to multi-user without having to create their own avatars, and for users of your site to set their own avatar preferences and even custom avatars (using e.g. vrlobby.co) that get used on all the wevr enabled sites, without you having to build an avatar customisation process.

However this doesn't stop you from overriding user avatars if you wish. To specify an avatar template, add a avatarTemplate property to the wevr component.

<a-scene wevr="avatarTemplate:#avatarTemplate; avatarRHTemplate:#avatarHandTemplate; avatarLHTemplate:#avatarHandTemplate">

The value you supply is a selector to a <script> element contained within the <assets> element of your scene. As you can see, you can also specify a template for each hand using avatarRHTemplate and avatarLHTemplate. If you want to use the same template for both hands, wevr automatically sets a rotation substitution variable which will correct for right hand rotation weirdness. Use it like this:

<a-sphere color="#5985ff" radius="0.1" ${rotation}>

Wevr uses the template component. Check out the documentation there for usage.

Take a look at the index example to see how to use all these features.

Please email me at vrlobby.co@gmail.com with questions, comments, abuse, love notes etc :-D