This is an Electron-based (eww!) app that lets you use a VR HMD mount to view a representation of your computer desktop in Virtual or Augmented reality - by opening a website on your phone.
It does this using WebVR and WebRTC.
The current implementation is just a POC; it has only been tested on a MacBook Air (1440 x 900) and an iPhone 6S (1334 x 750)
The motivation behind this was to have a wireless VR representation of my desktop (as I don't own a dedicated VR headset - only an iPhone and a HMD mount that accompanied a Mambo Parrot drone).
TODO:
- Try to always have a connection to the server, i.e. retry on disconnect
- Retrigger content selector on disconnect
- On mobile disconnect: remove remote stream
- Port VR operations to raw THREE.js or A-Frame
- Rotate device/camera feed on screen rotation
- AR mode
- Autogenerate new certificate on build
- Handle sound?
Interesting links:
based on electron-boilerplate and Web VR Starter Kit
The application consists of two main folders...
src - files within this folder get transpiled or compiled (because Electron can't use them directly).
app - contains all static assets which don't need any pre-processing. Put here images, CSSes, HTMLs, etc.
The build process compiles the content of the src folder and puts it into the app folder, so after the build has finished, your app folder contains the full, runnable application.
Treat src and app folders like two halves of one bigger thing.
The drawback of this design is that app folder contains some files which should be git-ignored and some which shouldn't (see .gitignore file). But this two-folders split makes development builds much, much faster.
npm start
To package your app into an installer use command:
npm run release
Once the packaging process finished, the dist directory will contain your distributable file.
We use electron-builder to handle the packaging process. It has a lot of customization options, which you can declare under "build" key in package.json.
You can package your app cross-platform from a single operating system, electron-builder kind of supports this, but there are limitations and asterisks. That's why this boilerplate doesn't do that by default.