VR Museum

Home page is a 360 degrees panoramic art display showroom. You can take your Google Cardboard to get VR experience.
Exhibit page, drag by your mouse to see the detail. Or you can open the page using the Google Cardboard which will give you VR experience.
Exhibit page, when you double click the dinosaur, it will toggle between 2D and 3D version dinosaur!

Inspiration

As an aspiring technology, I believe that WebVR has a lot of potential for development. Although in its primitive stages, WebVR is very powerful and can empower many art and technology projects! WebVR is truly a framework for the future and the possibilities of application are limitless.

What it does

This project has the ability to turn a boring static 2-Dimensional image into an exciting and dynamic virtual reality experience on the web! And this time JavaScript goes into VR world!

How I built it

Use Angular 2, ngrx, RxJS 5, A-Frame, and WebVR to build the VR version museum.

Challenges I ran into

Both WebVR and A-Frame are too new, which lack of documents. And Angular 2 final version just released. The first night and next morning are all trying Museum API. Tried API of Harvard Art Museums, succeed getting information of the exhibit using HTTP, but it won't let developers show their exhibits in there own website, which ran into this issue: https://github.com/harvardartmuseums/api-docs/issues/2. Then tried Pixabay API which provided free images. Succeed getting information of the exhibit using JSONP, but at last got same error. They allow you download for free, but you need host on your own server.

So at last downloaded the images and created a fake API which use images from our own server.

Check these days how I contribute for A-Frame on GitHub, you will know how many issues I ran into. lol https://github.com/Hongbo-Miao

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Probably first person who is really using Angular 2 and A-Frame together to build a project. Continue contributing on Angular 2 ecosystem. And now A-Frame. https://github.com/Hongbo-Miao

What I learned

I have used Angular 2 for a while. But I have never touched WebVR, A-Frame before. It is an amazing experience to be an very early adaptor to use those two technologies together and keep contributing to Angular 2 ecosystem and VR world on GitHub.