The eleVR player lets you watch 360 flat and stereo video on your Oculus Rift or Android device with VR headset (Cardboard, Durovis Dive, etc.) from a web browser. It is written with js, html5, and webGL.
eleVR Web Player works with the native browser support currently being implemented by Firefox and Chromium. Please note that these experimental browsers may not have mp4 support.
The player depends on the open source libraries as noted in the 3rd Party Libraries section. With the advent of (experimental) direct webVR support by Firefox and Chromium, the player no longer depends on the vr.js plugin.
Videos shown in the player can be rotated using keyboard controls (a/d, w/s, and q/e), as well as by the Oculus Rift if you are running an experimental webVR browser. You may be able to decrease video judder by setting your Oculus Display refresh rate to 60 Hz (the browser refreshes at 60 Hz and the slower mismatch can cause judder).
The following table documents the keyboard controls currently available.
| Key | Control |
|---|---|
| p | play/pause |
| l | toggle looping |
| f | full screen webVR mode (with barrel distortion) |
| g | regular full screen mode (less lag) |
| w | up |
| a | left |
| s | down |
| d | right |
| q | rotate left |
| e | rotate right |
eleVR Player was developed by eleVR. eleVR is a project of the Communications Design Group and is supported by SAP. The contributors to the project are @hawksley and @amluto.
It currently supports spherical video with equirectangular projections and spherical 3D video with top/bottom equirectangular projections. eleVR Player Master does not come bundled with any video files, but you can get two small demo *.webm files from the gh-pages branch, one for each projection. Alternatively, you can use your own spherical video or can download larger mp4 files from the eleVR Downloads Page.
Using keyboard rotation controls, the player works on standard Firefox and Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It also runs on Safari (if webgl is enabled). I haven't tested it on other browsers.
Using Oculus headset controls, the player works on the experimental webVR builds of Firefox and Chromium.
Using device orientation controls, it has historically worked on Chrome on Android, however Chrome recently hacked a fix to a security issue by marking all video as cross-origin. For more details on the current status on mobile devices, please check out the issues tab.
The easiest way to run your own video is to click the folder icon and load your video from there. You may then need to choose the projection for your video from the projection selector.
You can load your own video from the javascript console, by typing loadVideo("0myVideo.mp4"). If your video is equirectangular 2D, preface your video by 0. If it is stereo top/bottom, preface it by 1. These numbers correspond to the projections in the projectionEnum declaration in elevr-player.js.
If you want to add your video to the drop-down, create a new option in the html video-select element that looks like:
<option value="0myVideo.mp4">My Video</option>If you want your video to be the video loaded initially, change the source of the video in the html video tag. You can also update the starting projection, if necessary, by changing the value of the projection variable on instantiation (and also changing the default value of the <select id="projection-select"> HTML tag).
Query-string key-value params:
http://player.elevr.com/?autoplay=1&video=http://cdn2.vrideo.com/prod_videos/v1/lSPg9ka_1080p_full.webm
Hash key-value params:
http://player.elevr.com/#video=http://cdn2.vrideo.com/prod_videos/v1/W7JUlEW_480p_full.mp4
Query-string JSON params:
[http://player.elevr.com/?{"video": "http://cdn2.vrideo.com/prod_videos/v1/3aM7Xd6_1080p_full.webm", "autoplay": "true", "projection": "mono"}](http://player.elevr.com/?{"video": "http://cdn2.vrideo.com/prod_videos/v1/3aM7Xd6_1080p_full.webm", "autoplay": "true", "projection": "mono"})
Hash JSON params:
[http://player.elevr.com/#{"autoplay": true, "video": "http://crossorigin.me/http://mobile.360heros.com/producers/4630608605686575/5579686187673361/video/video_7776b10db31f349ede5d253b7744e110.mp4"}](http://player.elevr.com/#{"autoplay": true, "video": "http://crossorigin.me/http://mobile.360heros.com/producers/4630608605686575/5579686187673361/video/video_7776b10db31f349ede5d253b7744e110.mp4"})
postMessage to the page from the JS console:
window.postMessage({video: 'http://cdn2.vrideo.com/prod_videos/v1/mYNVcD6_480p_full.mp4', autoplay: true, loop: true}, '*')postMessage from an iframe:
data:text/html,<iframe id='i' src='http://localhost:8080' style='border: 0; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; height: 100%; width: 100%' allowfullscreen></iframe><script>setTimeout(function () { i.contentWindow.postMessage({video: 'http://cdn2.vrideo.com/prod_videos/v1/mYNVcD6_480p_full.mp4', autoplay: true, loop: true}, '*'); }, 300);</script>Query-string key-value params:
postMessage to the page from the JS console (or from an iframe):
window.postMessage({controls: false}, '*')If autoplay is not explicitly passed as a parameter, autoplay is enabled by default when video controls are hidden (i.e., controls is falsy).
Query-string key-value params:
postMessage to the page from the JS console (or from an iframe):
window.postMessage({sound: 0}, '*')If you download and run the code yourself, you need to serve the content to localhost before you can view video (due to cross origin issues).
Similarly, if you try to run your own video, you may run into cross origin issues if your video is not at the same origin the player. Take a look at this doc from mozilla if you run into these issues.
You may also run into issues playing video if your browser does not support HTML5 video of the type that you are using. For example, Firefox on Mac does not support mp4 video, but does support webm. You can check what video types are supported for your browser here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Browser_support
For the time slider to work in Chrome, you must use a server that understands partial content requests. Many of the most basic ways of serving to localhost do not.
Make sure that you are using an experimental webVR version of the browser. If it still isn't being recognized, you can try restarting the browser and plugging/unplugging your device.
The following is a short subset of planned future work on the player.
The following assets are used by the eleVR Player: