aframe-keyboard

An Aframe component that renders a fully functional 3D keyboard, that works on mobile, desktop browers, 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.js to your project and load it into a script tag
Following the example project in examples/basic/index.js:

Add a scene to you html document, and inside it at an a-entity element
Set its id to keyboard, and add the a-keyboard attribute to it
Add a mouse entity to collide with the keyboard by adding an a-entity with the attributes raycaster="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 pressing F on desktops (users can still enter it by pressing the button in the bottom-right corner)
Add an event listener for the a-keyboard-update event, 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 audio option to add sound effects to keyboard
Adding symbols to Enter and Backspace keys 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

TheSpecialist4 / aframe-keyboard