Can you use HTC Vive VR Headset with Babylon.js via the browser?

At the moment, we are trying to understand how this would and if it can work? When using the Vive headset and the controllers, can you run this right from the browser? or do you need to compile an EXE. If so, then we would have to use a GoDo or Unity etc… Can anyone shed some light on this please as we are not quite sure yet how and if this will work!

I believe the vive runtime should work in firefox with webxr enabled and steamvr installed. I don’t have a vive so i can’t quite check. have you tried this setup?

Ok let me have a play and see, do you have any links to some Playground examples I can maybe load?

You can start here - Introduction to WebXR - Babylon.js Documentation and continue down the path :slight_smile:

Sorry for asking the obvious, as I normally do loads of research first, but this link at least gives me a good starting point.

Thank you :slight_smile:

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it’s all good, we are always happy to help :slight_smile:

Hi I hope you had a great week :slight_smile:

I got the VR headset going, but I found that I can run VR demos via Firefox, but the issue am having is there is no way to test a Babylon.js based scene. do you have link to any demo?

I have tried all the playground stuff, but I got no idea how to make it trigger the Headset, in all the other demos, you click a button to say EnterVR, but there is no way to triggering this with all the BB demos?

Any ideas please!

Hi man,

Ok so I tested the Vive Pro head set with many of the BB demos. And his is what I found out.

To start with before doing the testing with BB, I tested the webXR demos from here to confirm all works. All these samples and controller mapping/triggers work perfectly, but only in FireFox and not from Chrome. The VR experience is managed via SteamVR by the way.

So when it came to BB this is what I discovered!

1- All the BB WebXR demos do not work at all in Chrome or FireFox
2- I then tried all the same BB WebXR demos in Chrome canary and FireFox nightly, then these start work. however. moving around the scene is buggy and impossible to navigate the scene, I would not say it is buggy but rather unstable/broken. Trying to move around the scene is clickly and you jump around the mesh and sometime you end up outside the 3D evn. Basicly a totall mess!!

That said, the Control mapping seems ok, i.e. pointing and clicking on things seems to work ok.

Just to clarify on the Movment, looking around the 3D env works good, but the issue is moving around!

Can you let me know if there is anything one can do to fix this? all the BB tests were done using the latest 4.2.0 beta!

Think I will try he 4.1 maybe?

4.2 is more stable than 4.1 when it comes to XR.

What are the BB demos?

I tried all the demos on the bottom page here: WebXR Demos and Examples - Babylon.js Documentation

all with the latest 4.2.0 beta etc… and the problem I found is the ability to trigger/show the VR button, on Chrome / FireFox, this part only works in Chrome Canary and Firefox Dev.

Then when using the dev browsers, it was really hard to use the teleportation thing, but really we wanted a way to walk around a test scene, and this super impossible.

Anyways, maybe what we need to do is put a simple scene together to test the WebXR support, and then see if this works, then try to use that in our project.

The VR button is one of the more stable feature we have :slight_smile:

You find it hard to trigger the button? Can you elaborate on that please?

Also - teleportation is constantly tested on chrome stable/edge stable and an MS-MR device. On top of the oculus quest (using its native browser which is chrome). I haven’t tested it on firefox, but will do it later today to make sure everything works as expected.

@abs From my experience, HTC Vive (WebXR) works very well with:
Windows 10,
Babylon.js 4.1.0
Google Chrome beta x64 86.0.4240.68
SteamVR beta 1.15.1

Would be really great to know what you mean with the VR button triggering, as this worries me. There shouldn’t be any issue pressing an HTML button on any browser.

Would you be able to share a screencast of 4.1 and 4.2 for me to understand the different?

Hi all,

Let me do a screen recording and some lovely commentary :wink:

To rest your mind, selecting(triggering) html elements works fine :slight_smile: i.e. on the demo colour picker, I can select different colours.

The issue I am having is that try to use the controller to walk/navigate around the Env is not possible. its a real pain. Again, I will do a screen recording to show you what is happening :slight_smile:

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Awesome.

I am going to introduce movement with the thumbstick (as the teleportation counterpart) until 4.2 is released, maybe this is what you were looking for?

Yes totally,

I can’t promise a delivery date, but I can tell you it is on my todo list - [WebXR] Allow movement with controllers · Issue #7442 · BabylonJS/Babylon.js · GitHub

Fantastic, we will crack on and do the 3D GUI then and enable teleporting, while we wait for the controller support movement support. :slight_smile:

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