October update

I pushed a new update to Galaxy Express 999 Virtual Tour. There is nothing truly different, it’s more a maintenance release.

iOS and iPadOS incompatilibity

Before jumping into the details, I realised this VR experience doesn’t work on iOS or iPadOS. This is due to the way itch.io embeds web projects in an iframe that prevents Safari from requesting the device orientation API. I don’t think there is anything I can do on my end.

One workaround would be to access the inner iframe web page as top level, but it’s a bit technical and the location changes at each release.

Changes

The major change in this version consists of a new teleport navigation in VR mode. To use it, push the left thumbstick forward and point to where you’d like to go. Release the thumbstick to teleport there. If the desired location is not valid, the line will turn red. You can also rotate by 45 degress by moving the same thumbstick left or right. You will still use the white laser to interact with doors and portals.

It gives a much better navigation experience and reduces motion sickness a lot.

The title scene now has some snow. This is something I wanted to add earlier on, but due to an incompatibility with the way I was transitioning between scenes, I had to remove it. It does not add much to the experience, but makes the intro a bit more polished and reminds of the beginning of Galaxy Express when Tetsurō walks with his mother through snowy landscapes.

Update

I updated A-Frame to 1.6.0, the latest version. It means an improved support for recent VR headsets and a slightly faster loading time.

The rest is mostly bug fixes and minor improvements.

Even though the experience should run on a variety of different devices and capabilities, I would recommend to use a VR headset to get the best result. Unfortunately I don’t have the possibility to test on many different devices, but hopefully it should work just the same.