Virtual Reality is on its way to future. It gives us experience of greater magnitude. We can take a look at how html5 can incorporate VR experience. We know that html5 is gonna be future of the web. With the ES6 of Javascript and Hardware accelerated CSS3 rendering, web is on its way to far further than the original inventors thought of.
Virtual Reality and 360 degree experience.
VR and 360 degree experience shall become a cardinal pillar of entertinment / gaming industry in the future. VR Headsets, Cardbords, Controllers all are out in the market. On the other hand SDK’s like Oculus, Samsung GEAR VR, Unity are backing software technology. Despite of all of these, we know that web or html5 is someting thats having a huge market share in the planet. Most of VR technologies are tightly binded to native environment of the device. But native environmet brings a sort of restriction as you move across platform. And in this new world, people are trying to bring a unified platform for development. No doubt, html5 is a great platform to do that.
HTML5 and VR
Direct support for VR on html5 based devices are limited these days. How ever we could expect these things in the future. Yet there are few awesome frameworks and libraries available for this experience. krpano is one of the framework we can use to create 360 / VR experience
KRPANO [https://krpano.com/]
krpano is a web frame work that we can use to for a varity of purposes like.
- 360 degree VR Experience
- 360 degree video
- 360 degree images
- hotspots in images and video
- panormic views
- sound interface
- blending between scenes
Despite of these effects, krpano has its on scripting language which makes it very powerfull and customizable.
Getting started with krpano
krpano is availble free for download, but you may need a licence to publish or remove water mark from your project.
Installation
Once you pull out the setup, its fairly straight forward. Extract the folder in desired location, and you are done.
Running
Its always better to put it in your local server, and serve it there.
Scripting
Krpano usese XML based scripting. And there is serperate syntax developed for the tool. All the documentation of scripting is provided here , https://krpano.com/docu/actions .
Creating your own virtual tour.
Creating virtual tour is much easier with krpano, even without coding. On the other hand with coding, you can do much more tweaking and other things.
Examples
- With the krpano you have downloaded, you will get a bunch of examples.
- It can be server on your local server to view.
- All that examples are hosted online here
Limitation
We know that VR and 360 experience are still in evolving stage. Krpano have few limitation on mobile devices like.
- Autoplay of media isn’t possible, unless user interaction is detected.
- High resolution 360 videos are not supported in ios device because of a bug in safari.
- Devices without gyroscope cant get gyro feature.
- Sound is a bit delayed in mobile devices.
Conlusion
Dispite of its limitation, krpano is a great tool to get started with 360 and vr experince on html5. More over the scripting allows us to tweak it to a greater magnitude. And the extended support across different kind of devices make it a handy tool for quick deployment.