What is the best way to store and show a virtual tour locally on a phone or tablet? It must have VR support, be able to work on Android devices (for resolution) and require no internet connection.

I've seen mention of Phonegap and offline browser-based readers. What have you found works best?

Thanks!

thanks "index",

Does Cordova support VR mode and local storage?

Cordova was formerly PhoneGap. But there seems to be a very active PhoneGap as well. Wonder what the differences are.

Howdy VRTourSoft,

When I started this thread eons ago I was looking for something that would run tours locally on a phone. I forgot that in the more recent posts to this thread. Turned out the best solution was the now discontinued Virtual Tour Pro. It was fine for running "Cardboard" tours but didn't work in the Oculus environment. James Tubbritt briefly considered making something similar for Oculus but quickly realized it would be more difficult than he felt worthwhile.

Today it is only worthwhile to develop something that would work with modern VR headset. My preference would be Oculus, at least. So, vrTourSoft, is that what you were thinking you could whip up? If you have that capability, we should talk.

Scott

Hi Daff,

I invested a lot of time a couple of years ago trying to develop an Oculus app that would play KRPano tours without going through a browser. That included much effort with Cordova. I don't remember exactly what the problem was but I came to the realization that Cordova would never work.

You can see some discussion of that effort here.

I then moved on to building something from scratch using Android Studio. As I recall, the stumbling block was that KRPano had to run in an HTML5 environment. Making that happen was next to impossible inside Android studio. The few workarounds were unworkable for our needs.

Another approach was to build a subset of a full web browser for VR headsets -- something that just played local content. Firefox Reality seemed like a great starting point but stripping down something as complex as that code was proving to be way more difficult than I thought. Starting from scratch using available components was likewise more difficult than I bargained for. If you looked at the efforts by some others they were pretty buggy. But the worst stumbling block was that the WebGL API (at the time) was only experimental, undocumented and unsupported. Basically, only a few programmers inside the Mozilla team seemed to really understand how to make it work.

I explored a couple of other avenues and came to a dead-end each time.

I haven't looked at this in a couple of years but a stand-alone WebXR capable HTML5 + javascript interpreting app that will run KRPano in a VR HMD is not something I've been able to find. Developing it is certainly possible but exceedingly difficult, in my experience.

Hi Daff,

Again, it has been a few years, but I thought there was a way around that if you were sideloading and not distributing via the Oculus store. It may have required being in developer mode so you could sideload. I wonder what kind of signing is needed for App Lab distribution.