aframe-sharedspace-component

A-Frame VR component to create multi-user experiences with WebRTC

Try the VR Chat on-line!

The sharedspace component provides a simple participation model in which participants join or leave a named room, send messages to other peers and publish audio streams. It runs on the top of WebRTC, with minimal signaling infrastructure relaying on peer-to-peer session management.

The sharedspace component covers an specific usecase. If you are looking for a more general solution to network-synchronized A-Frame scenes, take a look at networked-aframe by Hayden Lee.

HTTPS

WebRTC works with secure origins only, so your site must be served from localhost or HTTPS for the component to work. If you need to access your application from the Internet, use ngrok or build it completely on glitch. Both options work great.

Install

You will need node and npm installed in your system. Once installed, simply run the following command from the root of your project to install as a dependency:

$ npm install --save aframe-sharedspace-component

Or add the script tag to the component after including A-Frame:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/dist/aframe-sharedspace-component.min.js"></script>

Minimal setup

Once A-Frame and the sharedspace component are installed, this is all the HTML you need to create a chatroom (really!):

<a-scene>
  <a-entity sharedspace="audio: true" avatars>
  </a-entity>
</a-scene>
<template>
  <a-sphere radius="0.1"></a-sphere>
</template>

Unfortunately, the chatroom lacks from decoration and avatars will be spheres, which is not the best way of representing a human head. Instead, take a look at the VR Chat application on Glitch for a functional minimal setup.

Documentation

When installing sharedspace, four components are registered with A-Frame:

Component	Description
sharedspace	Provides the participation model.
avatars	Manage participants' avatars.
share	Controls the state of the participant to share.
position-around	Helper to position an entity around a central point.

Take a look at the Component Overview document while preparing a more webby version of the docs.

Contributing

If you want to contribute to the project, clone the repository and install the dependencies:

$ npm install

Issue the following command to run a local server with live-reload listening at port 8080 and a local WebRTC signaling server at port 9000:

$ npm start

To make the sharedspace component to use the local signaling server, use the provider property:

<a-entity sharedspace="provider: http://localhost:9000">
  <!-- Here is the content of your shared space -->
</a-entity>

Build

If you want to generate the JavaScript bundle for the library, run the following command and the package will be under the dist folder:

$ npm run build

Size analysis

You can set the SIZE_ANALYSIS environment variable to visualize the size of the bundle components.

$ SIZE_ANALYSIS=1 npm run build

Deploy

To deploy the demo coming with the library on GitHub Pages, use the following command. Remeber to change the origin remote to point to your own repository.

$ npm run deploy

Credits

Anime Face Model Stocking by stocking is licensed under CC Attribution