aframe-react

Bridging A-Frame VR with React. aframe-react is an extremely thin wrapper. Pretty much all that it does is serialize objects and arrays passed as props to an A-Frame component as A-Frame component strings:

geometry={{ primitive: 'box', width: 5 }}

to:

geometry="primitive: box; width: 5"

and position={[0, 0, -5]}

to:

position="0 0 -5"

aframe-react is the core library. Check out the aframe-react-boilerplate for example usage.

How is this different from react-three?

aframe-react is an abstraction layer on top of A-Frame, and A-Frame is built on top of an entity-component system on top of the DOM. react-three tries to be a contained non-agnostic solution. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit well to wrap React around pure three.js, there are performance limitations to having a requestAnimationFrame for each object, and it is not as composable or extendable.

React works better with A-Frame as A-Frame inherently utilizes the DOM.

Usage

aframe-react can be installed through npm.

npm install aframe-react

aframe-react does not come with the aframe-core library. We will have to require that alongside aframe-react. Again, check out the boilerplate to see how to get everything set up with Webpack.

require('aframe-core');
import {Animation, Entity, Scene} from 'aframe-react';

class ExampleScene extends React.Component {
  render () {
    return (
      <Scene>
        <Entity geometry={{primitive: 'box'}} material="color: red" position={[0, 0, -5]}>
          <Animation attribute="rotation" dur="5000" repeat="indefinite" to={[0, 360, 360]}/>
        </Entity>
      </Scene>
    );
  }
}

Terminology

Be aware of the difference between React components and A-Frame components.

A-Frame components refers to components of the entity-component system.

aframe-react preserves the entity-component system of A-Frame.

Components

aframe-react ships only with components that are considered core to A-Frame.

<Scene {...components}/>

The Scene React component is a thin wrapper around <a-scene>. The scene holds all of the entities.

<Scene>
  <Entity/>
</Scene>

Event	Description
onLoaded	onLoaded handler is called when scene has loaded all entities.

<Entity {...components}/>

The Entity React component is a wrapper around <a-entity>. Entities are general purpose objects in the scene (e.g., tree, player, light, sky) that are modified with components. Entity handles serialization of A-Frame components. A-Frame components can then be passed via props either via object or string.

<Entity geometry={{primitive: 'box'}} material='color: red'
        onClick={() => { console.log('clicked'); }}/>

Events

Event	Description
onClick	If using the cursor or raycaster, onClick handler is called when entity is clicked.
onMouseEnter	If using the cursor or raycaster, onMouseEnter handler is called when entity is collides with raycaster.
onMouseLeave	If using the cursor or raycaster, onMouseLeave handler is called when entity is stops colliding with raycaster.
onLoaded	onLoaded handler is called when entity is loaded.

Check out the A-Frame docs for A-Frame component usage.

<Animation {...attributes}/>

The Animation React component is a thin wrapper around <a-animation>.

<Animation attribute="rotation" dur="10000" repeat="indefinite" to="0 360 360"/>

Events

Event	Description
onAnimationEnd	onAnimationEnd handler is called when animation ends.
onAnimationStart	onAnimationStart handler is called when animation starts.

Check out the A-Frame docs for A-Frame animation usage.