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Comment by mumphster | Hacker News Reader

Any reason this was built instead of contributing to aframe[0]?

I tried out ReactVR for a prototype and I liked that I was able to use my familiarity with React to set up a simple VR project in a few hours with no prior VR experience and without having to learn any new syntax, just a few new classes.

I tried out A-Frame for a prototype and I liked that I was able to set up a simple VR project in a few minutes with no prior VR experience and without having to learn React. I'm sticking to A-Frame

Two nice things about A-Frame are that it uses the Entity–component–system[1] architecture and includes a component registry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93component%E2%80...

https://github.com/ngokevin/aframe-react

Why?/Commercial: Facebook is putting a lot of effort into VR. It owns Oculus. It uses React. And so it needs some React + VR. Why not aframe-react or react-three or react-three-renderer? Control of your own core tech can be important.

Carmel might be another example of this. Chromium/Firefox WebVR support on Linux and Mac has been an unstaffed joke. Even on Windows, it's been moving very slowly. As Facebook pushes to be a dominant player in social vr, it needs platforms it can rapidly advance.

Why?/Technical: Why ReactVR rather than aframe-react? A-Frame makes several architecture bets in a new and unfamiliar domain. It reminds me of early Angular. Angular devs said "revolutionary! it's the future! google!". And what I heard was "This is a new thing, so of course we're making bad architectural choices! This generation is an exploratory throw-away! You should skip it! And we're so inexperienced we don't even realize that's what we're saying!" :) Maybe the bets will all win. Maybe. But ReactVR is much more incremental progress. And if both become popular, and if there's need for A-Frame components in ReactVR, I expect someone will write glue. Or even sooner.

And since it sometimes comes up, why is the comparison ReactVR vs aframe-react (or something like it), and not ReactVR vs A-Frame? While React began life as a dinky virtual-dom library with delusions of grandeur, it has become an ecosystem for managing complex applications. So when A-Frame says "we're HTML and Components, for VR!", it's also saying "we're no more sufficient for creating complex apps than html is!" and "we're yet another attempt to create web components!" (a path littered with corpses, with the survivors tied to particular frameworks). So one could argue for angular-aframe, or ember-aframe, but complex A-Frame apps will need to be aframe plus something.

tl;dr: Perhaps control of development; and it's not clear A-Frame is the right thing.

Same reason Mozilla created A-Frame instead of contributing to my framework Primrose. No corporation is going to build a core project in someone else's backyard.

A-Frame and WebVR were born in parallel. At Mozilla we were doing experiments with JS and custom elements before WebVR was even called WebVR :)

If we're counting experiments before WebVR was called WebVR, I was making stereo view apps in the browser on smartphones with a cardboard box as a viewer 6 years before it was called Google Cardboard.

Or Primrose[0].

[0]https://www.primrosevr.com/

Or VRML? It's almost like we can have more than one thing!

More than one is great—but ideally we'd have at least one which has reached a level of completeness, stability, desirability etc. to be a sort of standard people are happy with (again more than one such standard would be great). So if the tradeoff is completing a small amount or starting a larger amount, I'd rather have the small number of more complete options.

I guess if you're already happy with VRML, you're set though ;)

VRML is pretty much not merely deprecated but actually obsoleted in favor of X3D/X3DOM.

VRML was largely just 3D model format. WebVR is API-level access to VR hardware. WebVR frameworks are application frameworks that incorporate the ability to load many model formats, as well as provide different levels of configuration and convention.

Both A-Frame and VRML use an XML based approach to describe the scene graph but the similarities stop there. As someone mentioned, A-Frame is an entity component system that makes extensibility very easy. A-Frame is also not a standard but a JS library allowing us to iterate on the API much quicker and based on real world usage. With the lessons learned we might want to consolidate the API in a standard in the future. jQuery and its crystallization on the querySelector API is a precedent of this approach

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