Hands-On series!

[delapuente]

Hi @dmarcos, here are the articles for the Hands-On series. Three of them so far. The order must be:

1. Building Interactive Training With A-Frame
2. Simple Physical Behaviours In A-Frame
3. Grab & Drop Interactions In A-Frame

FYI: I realized the date is not being taken into account when ordering articles and I need to manually touch the articles in order for them to get published in the correct order.

[dmarcos]

The 3rd part is missing right?

[dmarcos]

I don't know if it's too late but It might be better to combine the three articles in a single one. The information will be more concise and we can get rid of the redundant information / reminders. What do you think?

[ngokevin]

Cool, I didn't get a response last time I mentioned this, can we get these articles more concise into one? This is nothing against the articles, but we have a responsibility to curate interesting content for the brand and control the signal-to-noise ratio on the social media side. We want to make sure it's worth people's time. Also less work to review and check for typos :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I hope we understand the reasons are that the A-Frame blog and community is a different audience than we might have on perhaps Mozilla Hacks. People visiting the blog will have some initial idea of A-Frame already and have seen a lot of same type of introductory articles/documentation already. For the A-Frame blog, we're looking more for fresh/novel/innovative examples versus 101 articles. Readers are looking for something new.

To get a good idea of the type of content, some articles we have rolling out are:

• Making A-Painter Multiuser
• New Motion Capture Development Workflow via the Inspector
• Mixed Reality Setups with Spectator Camera

Given that, some comments on the articles:

• The SPA skeleton seems a bit complicated to set up. Clone a repo, have npm, start a local server. I really almost enforce Glitch as a way for guiding people along, it has been very well-received in the community. I've had hands-on experiences at workshops where people were simply not able to get npm or know how to use a local server.
• With the demo here, it takes three articles to get to the point to pick up a couple flat-shaded sticks and some green plane. The visual quality is not quite there. I understand it's a prototype, but perhaps for a prototype demo, three articles is a bit much.
• There are much simpler implementations to get to the point of picking up a couple of objects (https://github.com/wmurphyrd/aframe-super-hands-component). I don't want to lead people down a more verbose/complicated path than necessary and using their time and get frustrated. I hope that's understandable.
• With having three articles, many things are restated (e.g., "check out the first article, if you forgot, here's how to set up this repo again"). The first article spends most of the time explaining how to set up a repo, and continually going into the exposition of the goal of the prototype (which never quite finishes), and restating things from the documentation (which is nearby given it's the A-Frame site). The second article has whole paragraphs explaining what ECS is, the Registry is, what Primitives are, these could at least be just links to the docs, or not even need to mention.

The proposed structure of a concise and easy-to-consume single article:

1. One quick sentence on the goal of the demo.
2. A Glitch link to the final demo.
3. A Glitch link to a starting point.
4. Adding Physics
5. Implementing Grabbing Components

The best part of the articles is the last part where you go into detail about how to implement grabbing at a low level. That is valuable to the community since people have asked for low-level guide on writing a component, including at the three.js level. Thanks!

[cvan]

:+1: to @ngokevin's excellent feedback.

@delapuente: I see the recent articles you've posted to Hacks (nice job, btw).

what do we want to do with these Hands-On series! PRs?

[delapuente]

Although I recognise the value of the feedback. I don't have enough time to change it right now so closing at the moment.