Obscura not detecting immersive-vr support/poor performance

Configuration

Wolvic version: 0.9 Wolvic build ID: d8f85016 (AC 63.0.0)

Hardware: Oculus Quest 2 v37

Steps to Reproduce

1. Visit obscura.world from the Wolvic start page
2. Observe that it does not detect VR support to enter the experience and stays on the 3D model
3. Manually navigate to https://obscura.world/app to proceed to the experience and click Enter VR
4. Observe very sub-optimal performance.

Current Behavior

Obscura does not detect immersive-vr capabilities and performs very poorly in the actual app.

Expected Behavior

Site should detect capability and perform at an optimal framerate similar to Meta Browser.

Possible Solution

I’ve determined that the reason it is not displaying the “Enter Experience” button on the homepage is due to a mobile user agent check by Obscura that appears to exclude all Android/mobile devices besides Oculus/Meta devices. I’ll pass this along to the team members at Third Axis. I am unsure what is causing the poor performance. I would need to set up remote debugging and dig into it some more from there.

[svillar]

Checking the UA string is (and has been) generally a bad idea for a variety of reasons. Among other things it basically breaks the universal accessibility of the web and the web standards. I’ve worked on browser engines for more than a decade now, and we’ve had to add specific quirks for many sites tons of times even changing them over time. Our users were suddenly forbidden to access some sites just because there were changes in the server side wrt the UA filtering. In the end, if you think about it, web browsers end up pretending to be some others so the ultimate purpouse of UA filtering does not work.

Not only that but trying to get information from UA is also a very hard problem which usually leads to issues like the ones we have in Wolvic (we claim to run on Android so we’re filtered out because the server thinks we’re on a mobile phone). Also it’s super easy to fake the user agent (can be done in Wolvic with a Firefox extension without building from sources).

Summarizing a lot instead, of using UA filtering is way much better to look for specific features you might need. There are plenty of resources in the web to check that, but the one I’ve always found more interesting is this one from Mozilla https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Browser_detection_using_the_user_agent

Hope it helps

[svillar]

This should work in the next release. XR experience is not great though. Looks like the 3D models are very expensive to render in some devices (like Huawei glasses)