Nodes names not displayed about 3d-force-graph-vr

[vasturiano]

@micrology thanks for reaching out.

The difference in how the node/link labels are shown is different from 3d-force-graph because in that module the labels are simple absolute positioned div elements which are floating in front of the canvas, according to the pointers coordinates.

That approach is not possible in the VR/Aframe world because when entering the VR mode only Three objects belonging to the VR scene are actually shown. Any other DOM elements external to the scene, like div tooltips are excluded. Thus, the approach here is to have a-text tags that are used to display the label/desc content. They are part of the Aframe scene and thus shown in VR mode. These text objects are positioned in the VR coordinate system, not in terms of canvas pixels, therefore they are fixed into position and attached to the camera itself so their location doesn't change, relative to the user's point of view.

However, these labels should be showing both in and out of VR mode. This example has labels associated, and in my case it works in both modes. Could you check that it works the same for you, with labels even after entering VR mode?

[micrology]

Thank you for this very helpful explanation.

Although I see the labels before entering VR mode, I don't see then in VR mode. However, this may be because I am using the WebXR API emulator, rather than a real VR headset (an Oculus Quest 2 is on order, but hasn't arrived yet).

I had hoped to get something more like the 3d-force-graph behaviour, so I experimented with adding a hidden sprite to each node and an onNodeHover callback function that would reveal the sprite, but got an error: THREE.Sprite: "Raycaster.camera" needs to be set in order to raycast against sprites. when displaying the VR scene so perhaps this is not possible.

[vasturiano]

@micrology the cause of the issue is that Aframe has trouble raycasting against Sprite type objects.

ThreeJS recommends setting the raycaster to support sprites, but this needs to happen inside the Aframe raycaster source code.

Until then there's not a whole lot that can be done to get Sprites to work properly with raycasting (require to detect hover interactions in this module). Sorry about that.

[eviltik]

related to

aframevr/aframe#5042
aframevr/aframe#5035