In XR editor functionalities

[vincentfretin]

@Utopiah is interested in a VR editor mode, components for that may leave in a separate repo as a plugin for aframe-editor (to be defined). If there are any change to do in this repo that would make easier to support that, we can do it.
Some notes on his repo:
https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/text-code-xr-engine/issues/99

[Utopiah]

Indeed, more than "interested" I'm working on it ;)

I'd rather not pollute this repository as it's in a good state. Still, keeping composability in mind is crucial (that's IMHO the main value of AFrame and ECS with components maintained and shared by the community) so considering a plugin could be a good architecture choice. A lot of functions would indeed be identical, namely adding entities, components, selecting existing ones, etc and I suppose "only" the UI and UX would differ, namely manipulating an entity via hand tracking rather than mouse and keyboard. Consequently such an immersive plugin for the editor would rely on the editor (and formally inspector) manipulation by code but provide another way, hopefully more direct while in XR, to edit content.

[Utopiah]

A specific constraint I do have, which is a personal design preference, is to be "no-build" in order to iterative faster. This is particularly important as I give workshops, including to non professional developers in order to make XR more accessible to a wider audience. For such a crowd, but even for myself I admit, being able to "just" edit the content and see a change without going first through intermediary steps (i.e installing node, npm, going through the command line, etc) is fundamental.

If going through a plugin solution, unless it's entirely impossible, I would much rather be able to avoid any build step.

[Utopiah]

Some progress on that, namely cloning primitives https://x.com/utopiah/status/1842195658637464037 , saving a history of modifications, replayable, and changing their color https://x.com/utopiah/status/1842198368438669389

[vincentfretin]

@Utopiah For your project https://nlnet.nl/project/ImmersiveXP/ if your XR interaction components to move elements and edit components on it rely on the commands documented here https://github.com/c-frame/aframe-editor/blob/dev/docs/commands.md instead of doing a createElement/setAttribute yourself, you will have some features out of the box, like undo/redo, incremental auto-save, and collaborative editing once I implement them in aframe-editor.
I could add an option in aframe-editor to not render the React UI so you can just use the core to have the commands. If you want to consume aframe-editor as a library via cdn, I could expose Events.off/Events.on if you need to listen on some events.

And inversely we could reuse your XR interaction components in aframe-editor.

As @kfarr mentioned in the linked issue, the three.js editor https://threejs.org/editor added rendering the transform controls and sidebar in XR
https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1758531748483485842
That's using HTMLMesh in https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/dev/editor/js/Viewport.XR.js
We may need to update the TransformControls we use in aframe-editor to have that working in XR.

Also see the recent changes in HTMLMesh for XR:

• Add support for input of type text and number in VR AdaRoseCannon/aframe-htmlmesh#25
• vanilla touch UI demo of touching button with indexfinger AdaRoseCannon/aframe-htmlmesh#24

So we could also render the components sidebar with aframe-htmlmesh, but probably do something more specific for XR, showing a flat UI with position/rotation/scale may not be needed, maybe add some UI on the wrist corresponding to the selected element.