aframe-html-shader
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A shader to render DOM Element for A-Frame VR.
A-Frame HTML Shader
A shader to render 2D HTML and CSS to a texture for A-Frame.
Inspired by:
The screenshot of the HTML element is done via html2canvas
. To learn more about the library, check out html2canvas
's documentation
Properties
- A-Frame's basic material properties still supported (e.g.,
side
,transparent
). -
width
andheight
are sizes to capture. For example, if the HTML element's dimensions are640x480
andwidth: 200; height: 100
, then the rendered HTML canvas will be cropped to 200px width and 100px height from the left-top position. -
fps
is the framerate to render per second. If we only need to render once and be static, we can keep the value at0
. -
ratio
lets us use the HTML element's natural aspect ratio. If we keep the value asnull
, the generated canvas will scaled for fit to the entity's geometry. If we setratio: width
, the geometry's height will be changed to match the HTML element's ratio, and vice-versa forratio: height
.
Property | Description | Default Value |
---|---|---|
target | DOM element to render, given by a CSS selector (e.g., #foo ). |
null |
width | Width to capture. | Target's width |
height | height to capture. | Target's height |
fps | FPS to render. For example, providing 10 will refresh the material against the HTML 10 times per second. By default, the material will be static. | 0 |
ratio | Use target's ratio (i.e., width , height ). |
height |
debug | For debugging purposes, a DOM element which to append a rendered canvas to. Provided via a CSS selector (e.g., #debug ). debug DOM to append generated canvas from html2canvas |
null |
For reference, check out the following links:
Available options by html2canvas
will be ready for properties soon.
Limitations
We will often see that the rendered looks different from how the source HTML in 2D. The process takes trial-and-error and can also depend on the device.
To check what is actually rendered by html2canvas
, set the debug
property
to append and view the generated canvas. More for limitations, see
html2canvas
's documentation on
limitations.
Method
The following method is coming soon:
- render() (This is useful when you set
fps
as0
)
Events
The following events are coming soon:
-
html-ready
whenhtml2canvas
set and ready to render -
html-draw
each time it renders
Visibility
For the conversion to canvas to work, we need to make the target HTML element technically visible and within the viewport, but we also don't want it to get in the way of our scene. We usually want to give the HTML element a fixed position and z-index it under everything:
<div id="targetHTML" style="width: 100%; height: 100%; position: fixed; left: 0; top: 0; z-index: -1; overflow: hidden"></div>
Usage
Browser Installation
Install and use by directly including the browser files:
<head>
<title>My A-Frame Scene</title>
<script src="https://aframe.io/releases/0.5.0/aframe.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/dist/aframe-html-shader.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<a-scene>
<a-entity geometry="primitive: box" material="shader: html; target: #htmlElement"></a-entity>
</a-scene>
<div style="width: 100%; height: 100%; position: fixed; left: 0; top: 0; z-index: -1; overflow: hidden">
<div id="htmlElement" style="background: #F8F8F8; color: #333; font-size: 48px">Hello, HTML!</div>
</div>
</body>
NPM Installation
Install via NPM:
npm install --save aframe-html-shader
Then register and use.
import 'aframe'
import 'aframe-html-shader'