Wolvic XR Browser

The goal of the Wolvic project is to create a full-featured browser exclusively AR and VR headsets.

You can find us in wolvic.com, Mastodon @WolvicXR, Twitter @wolvicxr, and at [email protected].

Want to learn more about Wolvic? Read our FAQ!

Setup instructions

For setup instructions using the development version of the Chromium backend check this instructions out instead

GeckoView local substitution

After PR #70, WebXR sessions won't work with the prebuilt maven GeckoView libraries because that PR introduced a change in the GeckoView protocol. So you have to build GeckoView manually by applying patches at this repository.

This could be done either by using a local maven repository (quite cumbersome), or via Gradle's dependency substitutions (not at all cumbersome!).

Currently, the substitution flow is streamlined for some of the core dependencies via configuration flags in local.properties. You can build against a local checkout of the following dependencies by specifying their local paths:

• GeckoView, specifying its path via dependencySubstitutions.geckoviewTopsrcdir=/path/to/mozilla-release (and, optionally, dependencySubstitutions.geckoviewTopobjdir=/path/to/topobjdir). See Bug 1533465.
  • This assumes that you have built, packaged, and published your local GeckoView -- but don't worry, the dependency substitution script has the latest instructions for doing that.
  • If you want to build for different architectures at the same time, you can specify the aarch64 path via dependencySubstitutions.geckoviewTopobjdir while the x86_64 path via dependencySubstitutions.geckoviewTopobjdirX64

Do not forget to run a Gradle sync in Android Studio after changing local.properties. If you specified any substitutions, they will be reflected in the modules list, and you'll be able to modify them from a single Android Studio window.

For step by step guide check here.

Clone Wolvic

git clone [email protected]:Igalia/wolvic.git
cd wolvic

Clone the third-party repo

If you're developing for the Oculus, Huawei, Pico, or VIVE, you need to clone the repo with third-party SDK files.

wolvic$ git clone [email protected]:Igalia/wolvic-third-parties.git third_party

This repo is only available to Igalia members. If you have access to the relevant SDK but not this repo, you can manually place them here:

• third_party/OVRPlatformSDK/ for Oculus (should contain a Android and Include folders)
• third_party/hvr/ for Huawei (should contain arm64-v8a, armeabi-v7a and include folders)
• third_party/wavesdk/ for Vive (should contain a build folder, among other things)
• third_party/picoxr Pico OpenXR Mobile SDK (should contain libs folders, among other things that are not necessary for Wolvic)
• third_party/spaces for Snapdragon Spaces(should contain libopenxr_loader.aar)
• third_party/aliceimu/ for Huawei Vision Glass (should contain an .aar file with the IMU library for the glasses)

The repo in third_party can be updated like so:

pushd third_party && git fetch && git checkout main && git rebase origin/main && popd

Fetch Git submodules

You may need to set up two-factor authentication for the command line.

wolvic/third_party$ git submodule update --init --recursive

You can build for different devices:

• oculusvr: Oculus Quest
• hvr: Huawei VR Glasses
• wavevr: VIVE Focus
• picoxr: Pico 4 and (untested) Pico Neo 3
• lynx: Lynx R1
• spaces: Lenovo A3
• visionglass: Huawei Vision Glass

For testing on a non-VR device:

• noapi: Runs on standard Android phones without a headset

Building for Huawei and WaveVR requires access to their respective SDKs which are not included in this repo.

The command line version of gradlew requires JDK 11. If you see an error that Gradle doesn't understand your Java version, check which version of you're using by running java -showversion or java -version. You're probably using and older JDK, which won't work.

Open the project with Android Studio then build and run it. Depending on what you already have installed in Android Studio, the build may fail and then may prompt you to install dependencies. Just keep doing as it suggests. To select the device to build for, go to Tool Windows > Build Variants and select a build variant corresponding to your device.

If you want to build Wolvic for WaveVR SDK:

Download the VIVE Wave SDK from the VIVE Developer Resources, and unzip it. Then, from the top-level project directory, run:

mkdir -p third_party/wavesdk
cp wave_3.2.0_native_1/repo/com/htc/vr/wvr_client/3.2.0/wvr_client-3.2.0.aar third_party/wavesdk/wvr_client.aar

Make certain to set the build flavor to wavevrDebug in Android Studio before building the project.

Local Development

By default Wolvic will try to download prebuilt GeckoView libraries from Mozilla's maven repositories, where WebXR won't work and that should be used just for testing the 2D browser or to download browser features. If you want to have this, just skip the GeckoView local substitution part of the Setup instructions.

Install dev and production builds on device simultaneously

You can enable a dev applicationID sufix to install both dev and production builds simultaneously. You just need to add this property to your user.properties file:

simultaneousDevProduction=true

Locally generate Android release builds

Local release builds can be useful to measure performance or debug issues only happening in release builds. Insead of dealing with release keys you can make the testing easier just adding this property to your user.properties file:

useDebugSigningOnRelease=true

Note: the release APKs generated with a debug keystore can't be used for production.

Generate builds with a static version code

By default, each build will be assigned an auto-generated version code, which is derived from the date when the build was created. This behavior interferes with Gradle's caching mechanism and unnecessarily re-runs tasks that depend on the version code, leading to longer build times. You can work around this by temporarily using a static version code that persists between builds. This can be done by setting this property in your user.properties file:

useStaticVersionCode=true

Compress assets

ETC2 compression is used to improve performance and memory usage. Raw assets are placed in the uncompressed_assets folder. You can generate the compressed textures using the compressor utility in tools/compressor. You need to set up etc2comp and make it available on your PATH before running the script. Run this command to generate the compressed assets:

cd tools/compressor
npm install
npm run compress

Locale support

For more info on localization, how it works in the Wolvic XR project, and how to correctly edit localizable text in the application, please see our localization wiki page.

Development troubleshooting

Device supports , but APK only supports armeabi-v7a[...]

Enable USB Remote Debugging on the device.

Firefox > Web Developer > WebIDE > Performance gets stuck with greyed out "stop and show profile"

Restart Wolvic XR and close and re-open the WebIDE page.

Tool Windows > Build Variants list is empty

1. If you're not on the latest version, update Android Studio from Android Studio > Check for Updates….
2. Run File > Sync Project with Gradle Files.

Debugging tips

• When using the native debugger you can ignore the first SIGSEGV: address access protected stop in GV thread. It's not a crash; you can click Resume to continue debugging.
• On some platforms such as Oculus Go the native debugger stops on each input event. You can set this LLDB post-attach command in Android Studio to fix the problem: pro hand -p true -s false SIGILL
• You can use adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.VIEW -d "https://aframe.io" com.igalia.wolvic/com.igalia.wolvic.VRBrowserActivity to load a URL from the command line
• You can use adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.VIEW -n com.igalia.wolvic/com.igalia.wolvic.VRBrowserActivity -e homepage "https://example.com" to override the homepage
• You can use adb shell setprop debug.oculus.enableVideoCapture 1 to record a video on the Oculus Go. Remember to run adb shell setprop debug.oculus.enableVideoCapture 0 to stop recording the video.
  • You can also record videos on the Oculus Go by exiting to the system library, and from the Oculus tray menu (toggle with the Oculus button on the controller): Sharing > Record Video
• You can set disableCrashRestart=true in the gradle user.properties to disable app relaunch on crash.