Model-viewer: How should I do feature detection for AR support?

[milesgreen]

What’s the best way to do feature detection to check for AR support on a device?

Would like to display alternative content / messaging. Not sure best way to tell if SceneViewer is supported and available?

[cdata]

@milesgreen I would take a look at what we do for activating Scene Viewer: https://github.com/GoogleWebComponents/model-viewer/blob/2d4aaf35735397a1d89f7f5df28f8a0a080d569c/src/features/ar.ts#L38-L82

The important thing to understand is that there is no way to detect the availability of Scene Viewer up front. You _have_ to trigger an intent, and you can only trigger an intent when the user interacts with the page.

When the intent fails, it will navigate to a configured browser fallback URL if provided. In <model-viewer>, we look for a hashchange event to detect if the fallback URL was hit, and if it was, we know that Scene Viewer is not available. But, it's impossible to detect this until the user interacts with something.

<model-viewer> has a fallback mode where it goes fullscreen. You can check for <model-viewer> going fullscreen and then display your alternative content at that time. We don't have any good built-in option for folks who want to take specific, custom action in response to the Scene Viewer intent failing. You can request such a feature if you think there is a good way for us to help out there.

[milesgreen]

OK. Thanks.

So we can't predetermine if it'll work on a user's device, but we can detect if the intent fails. Got it.

With regards to listening for fullscreen; but doesn't <model-viewer> _always_ go fullscreen as the first step (tap on cube icon)? From there the user taps View in your space. I guess I'm not clear exactly where <model-viewer> ends and Scene Viewer begins, and at which point the intent is actually being triggered. 😖

Surfacing Scene Viewer intent failing as an event of <model-viewer> might be a helpful feature though?

[mkeblx]

@milesgreen When you see the View in your space non-AR screen that is within Scene Viewer: the intent has been successful and SV has been launched. It is a fullscreen Android view but different than model-viewer's Fullscreen API fallback view. The intent is triggered right when you click the cube icon.

Yes I would also find it useful to have an event triggered for intent failing.

[milesgreen]

Thanks for clarifying @mkeblx

[nicolocarpignoli]

@cdata Hi there,
what I'm trying to achieve is:

• when user clicks on the button to enter on the AR
• I can navigate to a fallback URL.

Questions:

• Is that possible?
• How can I listen for the intent failure, and then trigger a navigation?
• Also, this will work for both iOS and Android?

Thank you so much

[cdata]

Yes, that's possible with Android devices. Unfortunately, <model-viewer> has a built-in fallback right now and it requires that we use the fallback URL mechanism. However, you can see documentation on adding a fallback URL to an Android intent here: https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/intents#example

If you combine the documentation above with the documentation for launching Scene Viewer, you can achieve what you are trying to do: https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/java/scene-viewer

Separately, it would be feasible for us to dispatch an even when we fail to launch Scene Viewer. However, we do not do that today, so it would need to be a separate feature request.

[nicolocarpignoli]

@cdata is there any update on this with latest releases? the feature detection and event triggering about Scene Viewer launch fail is the same of the previous comments? Thanks

[elalish]

@nicolocarpignoli Things have improved a bit in this regard. We now expose an ar-status attribute & event which will change to "failed" when the user attempts to enter AR and can't. We no longer have the fullscreen fallback, so that flow is also simpler. We can't detect a failure on iOS, but so far that doesn't seem to be much of a problem (it's always available).

[nicolocarpignoli]

@nicolocarpignoli Things have improved a bit in this regard. We now expose an ar-status attribute & event which will change to "failed" when the user attempts to enter AR and can't. We no longer have the fullscreen fallback, so that flow is also simpler. We can't detect a failure on iOS, but so far that doesn't seem to be much of a problem (it's always available).

That's good to know, thanks!

About iOS: last time I tried it was available for iOS 13 - and now 14 (it was NOT working for iOS 12 even if they claim it does). I don't know if now they fixed it on iOS 12 but the more we go on the less is relevant. Probably now iOS 13 + iOS 14 covers pretty much the 80-85% of Apple's devices