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Control Scheme Research

For the first sprint, I looked into possible control schemes that could be used with A-Frame, then at existing libraries for implementing these controls, and physics systems that could be implemented in A-Frame.  As the initial idea is to have the finder use desktop, we want to support keyboard and mouse, as well as controller (the standard PS/Xbox configuration) based interaction.  Since we were not sure whether A-Frame supports controllers by default I set out to find out what level of support was integrated, and what libraries could be used for controller support.

The first step was checking the A-Frame documentation on Interactions and Controllers.  Here I learned that A-Frame fully supports all common VR controllers, but it only supports conventional controllers through custom controllers, however, the library aframe-extras includes code for working with game-pads.  Since implementing our own code for controllers will be time consuming and the A-Frame documentation recommends the add-on we will likely use it for our experience.

Furthermore, since the experience will involve working with parts in a realistic environment we will need some kind of physics system, which A-Frame does not implement by default.  The most popular physics system in A-Frame is the aframe-physics add-on, which adds simple 'static-body' and 'dynamic-body' tags that can be added to most primitive elements as seen in the code below.

<!-- The debug:true option creates a wireframe around each physics body. If you don't see a wireframe,
the physics system may be unable to parse your model without a shape:box or shape:hull option. -->
<a-scene physics="debug: true">
<!-- Camera -->
<a-entity camera look-controls></a-entity>
<!-- Floor -->
<a-plane static-body></a-plane>
<!-- Immovable box -->
<a-box static-body position="0 0.5 -5" width="3" height="1" depth="1"></a-box>
<!-- Dynamic box -->
<a-box dynamic-body position="5 0.5 0" width="1" height="1" depth="1"></a-box>
</a-scene>
view raw physics.html hosted with ❤ by GitHub

An example of aframe-extras and aframe-physics used in conjunction to simulate throwing a ball.

Ideally, these two systems will create a strong foundation for us to build off of as we begin to hammer out the details of our VR experience.


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