aframe-keyboard
An Aframe component that renders a fully functional 3D keyboard, that works on mobile, desktop browsers, and VR headsets!
Noticing the lack of variety of libraries available for a-frame and WebVR in general, I decided to make my own library that can support customization to fit various projects (like adding your own keyboard key models to it, or setting font types and colors), and if possible, adding multi-lingual support by parsing through a JSON-formatted keyboard layout (see files in src/i18n for details)
The project is still very much in its infancy, so any feedback on what would create a better user experience or easier/more useful features for developers to use this library would be greatly appreciated!
Setup
This project is written purely with javascript, and it makes use of custom event handlers to return which key has been pressed by the user (what you want to do with the returned value however, is up to you to implement).
- Import aframe into your project (it should load before any other aframe lib)
- Add the file
dist/aframe-keyboard.min.jsto your project and load it into ascripttag - Following the example project in
examples/basic/index.js:
- Add a scene to your
htmldocument, and inside it at ana-entityelement - Set its
idtokeyboard, and add thea-keyboardattribute to it - Add a mouse entity to collide with the keyboard by adding an
a-entitywith the attributesraycaster="objects: .collidable" cursor="rayOrigin: mouse" - Add the
keyboard-shortcuts="enterVR: false"attribute to the scene element to prevent it from triggering the VR mode when pressingFon desktops (users can still enter it by pressing the button in the bottom-right corner) - Add an event listener for the
a-keyboard-updateevent, and add a handler method for it (a basic one has been provided in the example)
API
| Property | Description | Default value |
|---|---|---|
| audio | (WIP) Relative path to sounds that should be player when a key is pressed | '' |
| baseTexture | Relative path to a custom texture that will replace the default keyboard base | '' |
| color | The color of fonts used in the keyboard | '#fff' |
| dismissable | Allows the user to dismiss the keyboard before pressing the submit button | true |
| font | Either a stock font key provided by aframe, or the relative path for a custom font that will be displayed on the keyboard | 'monoid' |
| fontSize | Size of each character printed (in aframe units) | '0.35' |
| highlightColor | The color that keys should highlight to when hovered | '#1a79dc' |
| keyTexture | Relative path to a custom texture that will replace the default keys | '' |
| locale | Sets which keyboard will be utilized from the i18n folder. Currently only en is supported, but additional language support is planned |
'en' |
| verticalAlign | Setting the text's baseline, can be set as top, center, and bottom |
'center' |
Release History
Please see CHANGELOG.md for more information on releases.
License
Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.
Roadmap (order of priority)
- Changing positioning of Dismiss / Submit buttons to improve UX
- Adding
audiooption to add sound effects to keyboard - Adding symbols to
EnterandBackspacekeys instead of presenting text - Adding ability to move keyboard position in VR mode (by physically dragging it)
- Add option to keep keyboard always fixed in place
Contributing
- Fork it (https://github.com/WandererOU/aframe-keyboard/fork)
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b feature/fooBar) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some fooBar') - Push to the branch (
git push origin feature/fooBar) - Create a new Pull Request