Show HN: A webrtc library for writing multi-user virtual reality in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A webrtc library for writing multi-user virtual reality in the browser

github.com

52 pointshaydenlee11 comments

Developer here. Appreciate any feedback! The goal is to make it really easy to write multi-user / multi-player / social virtual reality experiences on the web, on top of a VR framework called A-Frame.

This is really cool. My wife has been experimenting with using Google Cardboard in her classroom to do virtual field trips, and none of the resources she can find let you add in your own content. I've been thinking of building her an app with A-Frame and something like this to help synchronize what everyone is looking at.

Thanks! And that should be do-able. All the examples show an avatar but you don't have to use one, you could just use the library to sync the active 360 image or environment.

I love this, its simple and makes sense. Would love to talk about it also and what you plan on doing with it next.

Happy to chat more. Twitter is probably the best place: @haydenlee37, or find my email on my website: haydenlee.io.

Next steps: finishing a few basic requirements (master client, scene objects that are defined in the HTML and are always owned by the master client).

Then I'm thinking about how to make it more flexible on the networking side, potentially let people only use websockets if they don't want to do P2P / WebRTC.

Will be making tutorials for it too.

I'm thinking I'll aim for one major feature a week.

Wondering what the WebRTC UDP guts are built on, if it is a new implementation or built on something existing.

Big HN discussion on the rough edges of this tech last week: A solution for enabling UDP in the web https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741155

It's using EasyRTC to handle WebRTC. I found it a delight to work with. The live examples are running with TURN server hosted by Xirsys.

I did catch that article last week. If I remember correctly it boiled down to a lack of good support for UDP / WebRTC in a client-server arch. It's actually one of the problems I want to play with soon. There are some frameworks, like Janus, that do it but I haven't heard great things.

Looks very neat. I'm curious how it syncs the entities. Does everyone send to everyone? I'd imagine you couldn't have too many clients at once if that was the case.

Yeah currently its a p2p, broadcast model. I haven't tested max capacity yet, would be interested to know.

Very cool! Would be nice to be able to chat. :)

Its not included in any of the live examples but audio chat is really easy to turn on. There's just an html attribute you need to change: https://github.com/haydenjameslee/networked-aframe#scene-com...

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