Canvatorium Recap Eight
New UI cards, revamped labs, and a new way to publish labs on vrhermit.com
It’s been a while since my last recap post. The biggest change since then is the way that I publish labs. Before this change I was publishing the labs on a Vercel server as a standalone web app. I would then share lab notes, photos, and video demos on my website and social media.
I’ve streamlined this process considerably. I modified vrhermit.com to allow me to embed labs on posts and pages. You can check out the new Canvatorium landing page or read more about the process in Canvatorium Project Update (July 2023).
The short version of this change is this:
- The labs are still hosted on Vercel, but I removed all chrome from the web app so the scenes will take up the available viewport.
- A new WordPress shortcode lets me embed the labs in a WordPress custom post type called Scenes. The iframe includes a couple of attributes vital to making this work with immersive content
allowfullscreen allow="xr-spatial-tracking". - Each Lab is a new Scene post where I can embed the lab content, write lab notes, share code snippets, and upload images and videos.
This new Scene post type opens up some possibilities.
- I can create labs for Canvatorium outside of the main Nuxt project on Vercel. I could even fire up several new projects to start doing labs in Three JS, A-Frame, or PlayCanvas.
- I can use the new Scenes section to add other projects to my website. I’ve published many 3D scenes of the years, but they are scattered all over the web. Now I can start to consolidate them in one place.
New Labs
In Labs 043 and 044 I wanted to learn how many Advanced Dynamic Textures I could add to a VR session. I used the Quest 2 Browser to test since that is the most used headset and I think it’s a good baseline.
I’ve been working on some new UI cards that I can use across the Canvatorium project. These cars will serve as the “window” component of the designs I’m working on for mixed reality and spatial computing projects. Most of the work on these cards was done in Lab 045, but you can see them throughout the project.
Revamped Legacy Labs
I also worked on rebuilding several legacy labs from the 2022 iteration of the Canvatorium project.
Labs 005 and 006 repeat a navigation test with slightly different results.
Lab 007 implements JavaScript console logging in VR using the new UI card from Lab 045.
What’s next?
Lab 045 is just the start. I’m going to start an entire series of labs that center around 2D content windows in 3D space.
You can keep up with the day-to-day progress on Canvatorium by following me on Threads.