VR Support

[tyzbit]

Without knowing what kind of support the 3D rendering library has, it would be very cool to have VR support! This would help with being able to tell distances. Even just stereo rendering would be really cool. Thanks!!

[hook-365]

Hey @tyzbit — first pass at this just landed. There's now a Side-by-side stereo toggle under Settings → Stereo / VR, with an eye-separation strength slider. It splits the view into left/right-eye halves — works on any monitor, and pops into real 3D with a Google Cardboard or phone holder.

It's view-only for now (no full WebXR yet — that's a bigger lift since the labels need reworking), but it should already help with judging distances. Give it a try and let me know how the depth feels!

[tyzbit]

Sweet! I tried it out and it works great for crossed-eye viewing. I think the default value for 50 is a good default. I find it works best as a small window and more vertical than horizontal. I'll try getting it working in my VR headset soon!

[hook-365]

I can try to add more support if you'd like also, let me know how it goes! I don't have a VR headset to try on, so I'm doing my best with what I've got. I just also added theme support as well.

[hook-365]

Hey @tyzbit, full WebXR just landed in v0.3.0, so when you do try the headset there's now real immersive support waiting.

What's new:

• Enter VR in Settings → Stereo / VR opens an immersive-vr session for any connected headset. Head tracking works, controllers show up as laser pointers, and a world-space billboard floats above the selected aircraft with callsign, type, altitude, speed, and heading.
• Trigger pulls raycast aircraft picks. Same selection path as a mouse click, so the detail panel and follow-cam still light up.
• Wrist menu on your left hand. Point at it with the right laser and pull the trigger to cycle Theme, Basemap, or toggle Range rings / Labels / Alt lines. You never have to lift the headset to change anything.
• Locomotion: left thumbstick scales the world (tabletop or room-scale, persisted across sessions), right thumbstick snap-turns 30°, right A/X button recenters the scope in front of you.
• Enter AR if your device supports immersive-ar. Sky and basemap disappear and aircraft float in your living room via passthrough.

Still no headset on my end, so I'm flying blind on whether the wrist-menu angle, scale curve, and snap-turn step actually feel right in practice. If you get it on your headset, would love a sanity check on those especially. Easy to tune.

[tyzbit]

WOW! That's incredible! Thank you! I tried this in the default Meta browser and in Wolvic on my Quest 3 and neither were able to start VR or AR. I do see the UI responds to the controllers as expected so I don't think that's preventing it from working.

[hook-365]

Hey @tyzbit — I've got full WebXR logging enabled and just pushed it to the instance, so a fresh load should pick it up.

The core problem on my end was that the failure was invisible: when Enter VR/AR threw, the error was being swallowed with no feedback, so I had no way to see why it wasn't starting without a headset of my own. That's fixed now, plus there's verbose logging across the whole session lifecycle.

Two ways to grab what's happening when you next try:

1. On-screen (easiest): reload, open Settings → Stereo / VR, and tap Enter VR (or Enter AR). If it fails, the button's description line now shows the actual error, something like Could not start VR session — SecurityError: .... Just tell me what it says.

2. Full console (most useful): plug the Quest into a computer over USB, open chrome://inspect in desktop Chrome, and watch the console while you tap Enter VR. Everything is tagged [xr] — it logs the support probe, whether the session was requested, which features got granted, and the exact point it fails. Paste anything with that tag.

That should tell us exactly where it dies: never reaching the session request, rejected at the request itself, or failing when handing off to the renderer. My current guess is a permissions/header thing in the proxy chain, but the log will settle it. Thanks for being my test pilot on this one!

[tyzbit]

I tested on my Quest 3 in the default browser and Wolvic (I'm on Linux so I haven't yet figured out PC-powered WebXR):

Video:

Bugs

AR

AR Bug 1: AR starts in the default browser, but changing perspectives (moving your head) freezes rendering.
AR Bug 2: AR is not available on Wolvic. I tried to get console logs from Wolvic but it must be buried deep in a menu. I'll keep trying.

VR

VR Bug 1: Rendering is clipped too far away from the camera
VR Bug 2: Rotating the view with the right thumbstick doesn't orbit the center (or move in simple XYZ translation)
VR Bug 3: Rotating the view while an aircraft is selected does not orbit it
VR Bug 4: Menu is hidden by clipping and flipped the wrong way
VR Bug 5: Menus flicker (might be fixed by correcting the viewport clipping)
VR Bug 6 (not in the video): The render resolution was pretty low for distant objects. While it might be related to the viewport bug, being able to select resolutions (either explicitly or as quality levels) would be nice.

Also low priority but the container build for the viewer seems to have gotten hung up and needs to be restarted :)

[hook-365]

Hey @tyzbit, pushed a round of fixes based on your Quest 3 report. Here's where each item stands:

VR fixes (live now, just reload):

• VR DB error: "aircraft_positions" does not exist #1 (geometry clipped too close): Fixed. The camera near-plane was set to 1 metre, left over from the desktop view. In a headset that clips anything you lean toward. Dropped it to 5 cm while a session is active.
• VR Fix: Database initialization for new deployments (Issue #1) #2 / Hotfix: Aircraft rotation direction #3 (thumbstick didn't orbit center or selected aircraft): Fixed. The right thumbstick now orbits the airspace the same way the desktop view does, instead of turning you in place. With nothing selected it orbits the scope center; with an aircraft selected it orbits that aircraft, so following one in the headset feels like the desktop follow-cam.
• VR Sidebar Redesign with Mobile Improvements #4 (menu hidden and flipped): Fixed, both halves. The hidden part was the same near-plane clipping. On top of that, the menu plane was rotated to face down and away from you, so you were seeing its mirrored back face. It now faces up toward your head and reads correctly.
• VR ADS-B 3D Refactor: Improvements & Polish #5 (menu flicker): Fixed. You called it. Same root cause as the clipping, so it went away with the near-plane fix.

Still open, and I need your help to close them:

• AR DB error: "aircraft_positions" does not exist #1 (head movement freezes rendering): This is the one I most need logs for. Next time you're in the default browser, tether the Quest over USB, open chrome://inspect on a computer, and watch the console as AR runs and you turn your head. Everything is tagged [xr]. Paste anything around the moment it freezes and that should tell us whether it's the render loop, the pose update, or the passthrough handoff.
• AR Fix: Database initialization for new deployments (Issue #1) #2 (AR unavailable in Wolvic): Likely a Wolvic capability gap rather than our code, but the [xr] log from a Wolvic session would confirm it. No rush on this one.
• VR VR Support #6 (low resolution on distant objects): Noted. I'm going to add a framebuffer-scale / quality setting for this. Some of it may have improved on its own now that the near-plane is sane, so if you happen to notice a difference after reloading, let me know.

The hung viewer container was a separate ops thing, already restarted.

Thank you again for the video and the clean breakdown. Testing on hardware I don't have is the whole ballgame here, so this kind of report is worth its weight. Give it a reload when you can and let me know how the clipping, orbiting, and wrist menu feel now.

[tyzbit]

Bug report updates

LOTS of improvement here. Already this is cool as hell! VR is working a lot better, and AR works but there are still cases where rendering freezes. Going to higher quality definitely makes it freeze quicker. Thanks SO MUCH for all the effort you spent working on this!

AR#1 - I got the console from Wolvic but still need to figure out the Quest browser console

AR#2 - Here's Wolvic's console:

[xr] probing WebXR support 
Object { secureContext: true, hasNavigatorXr: true, origin: "https://adsb3d.hook.technology/", userAgent: "Mozilla/5.0 (Android 14; Mobile VR; rv:140.0) Gecko/140.0 Firefox/140.0 Wolvic/1.9" }
[xr.ts:57:11](https://adsb3d.hook.technology/src/core/xr.ts)
[xr] isSessionSupported result 
Object { "immersive-vr": true, "immersive-ar": false }

VR#6 - Not sure when the quality selector showed up but high quality is great! No further improvement necessary.

New bug reports

AR

Not really a bug: recommend loading previously loaded map instead of no map in AR mode
MINOR nitpick: the selection cone is placed off-center from the controller

AR#3 - The labels are not correctly sized. Maybe they should enlarge and shrink according to distance from headset to maintain a readable size? Or be no smaller than a minimum size and the user can travel to the label such as in AR?

AR#4 - (Nitpick) Menu does not update until the pointer is no longer pointing at it

Wishlist: able to place the map in an intentional place, like on a table

VR

VR#7 - Toggling labels does nothing
Wishlist: smooth movement as well as nausea-friendly instant movement
VR#8 - Rotation around objects is not calculated correctly. Rotating around one object then another can translate the map out of place
Random: Pressing A makes the screen go all black. Not sure what the intended behavior is.
Nice to have - the map initially is a little far away and therefore when you zoom in, it's usually at a low angle. Starting so the map is below you like a board game would be awesome.

Further Notes

• AR still freezes but I need to do testing specifically on that to see what determines if it freezes.

• I think after using the controls a little, I would make the suggestion that (If the trigger is not pulled)
  a. LeftStick left and right strafes left and right
  b. LeftStick up and down travels forward or backward from wherever the view is pointing
  c. RightStick left and right selects different aircraft from the list and points the camera towards it (at least in left/right terms)
  d. RightStick up and down increases and decreases altitude

And if you point the controller down at the map (not at an aircraft) and pull the trigger, it has the same behavior as the touchscreen controls, for consistency.

[tyzbit]

I did find out that AR freezes when you use the left thumbstick at all. Otherwise it's stable, I think.