Web Browser in Oculus Go VR application built with Unity

Question

I am currently trying to find a way for having a web browser in a VR application. Basically the goal is to open a page like https://stackoverflow.com in a panel and to have it scrollable through the oculus go controller.

I already did some research on plugins for achieving this like this but none of them seems to work on the oculus go.

Answer 1

From what I could find, the best solution is this 3D browser plugin. It's not slow or buggy like the other options I tried and it just works by placing a prefab in your scene that you can click and scroll.

void CreateWebView(float width, float height, Vector3 position) {
    var prefab = WebViewPrefab.Instantiate(width, height);
    prefab.transform.position = position;
    prefab.transform.LookAt(Camera.main.transform);
    prefab.Initialized += (sender, args) => prefab.WebView.LoadUrl("https://stackoverflow.com");
}

Answer 2

This is a repo I made in the hopes we can implement a nice in-game browser. It's a bit buggy/slow but it works (most of the time).

It uses a Java plugin that renders an Android WebView to a Bitmap by overriding the view's Draw method, converts that to a png and passes it to a unity RawImage. There is plenty of work to do so feel free to improve it!

How to use it:

At the repo you can find the plugin (unitylibrary-debug.aar) you need to import to Assets/Plugins/Android/ and BrowserView.cs and UnityThread.cs which you can use to convert an Android WebView to a texture that Unity's RawImage can display. Fill BrowserView.cs's public fields appropriately. Make sure your API level is set to 25 in Unity's player settings.

Code samples

Here's overriding the WebView's Draw method to create the bitmap and PNG, and init-ing the variables you need:

public class BitmapWebView extends WebView{

    private void init(){
        stream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        array = new ReadData(new byte[]{});
        bm = Bitmap.createBitmap(outputWindowWidth,
             outputWindowHeight, Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888);
        bmCanvas = new Canvas(bm);
   }


    @Override
    public void draw( Canvas ){
        // draw onto a new canvas  
        super.draw(bmCanvas);
        bm.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.PNG, 100, stream);

        array.Buffer = stream.toByteArray();
        UnityBitmapCallback.onFrameUpdate(array,
            bm.getWidth(),
            bm.getHeight(),
            canGoBack,
            canGoForward );
        stream.reset();

    }
}  
// you need this class to communicate properly with unity
public class ReadData {
    public byte[] Buffer;
    public ReadData(byte[] buffer) {
        Buffer=buffer;
    }
}

Then we pass the png to a unity RawImage. Here's the Unity receiving side:

// class used for the callback with the texture
class AndroidBitmapPluginCallback : AndroidJavaProxy
{
    public AndroidBitmapPluginCallback() : base("com.unityexport.ian.unitylibrary.PluginInterfaceBitmap") { }
    public BrowserView BrowserView;

    public void onFrameUpdate(AndroidJavaObject jo, int width, int height, bool canGoBack, bool canGoForward)
        {
        AndroidJavaObject bufferObject = jo.Get<AndroidJavaObject>("Buffer");
        byte[] bytes = AndroidJNIHelper.ConvertFromJNIArray<byte[]>(bufferObject.GetRawObject());
        if (bytes == null)
            return;
        if (BrowserView != null)
        {
            UnityThread.executeInUpdate(()=> BrowserView.SetTexture(bytes,width,height,canGoBack,canGoForward));
        }
        else
            Debug.Log("TestAndroidPlugin is not set");

    }
 }


public class BrowserView : MonoBehaviour {
// Browser view needs a RawImage component to display webpages


   void Start () {
        _imageTexture2D = new Texture2D(Screen.width, Screen.height, TextureFormat.ARGB32, false);
        _rawImage = gameObject.GetComponent<RawImage>();
        _rawImage.texture = _imageTexture2D;

        #if !UNITY_EDITOR && UNITY_ANDROID
        // Get your Java class and create a new instance
        var tempAjc = new AndroidJavaClass("YOUR_LIBRARY.YOUR_CLASS")
        _ajc = tempAjc.CallStatic<AndroidJavaObject>("CreateInstance"); 
        // send the callback object to java to get frame updates
        AndroidBitmapPluginCallback androidPluginCallback = new AndroidBitmapPluginCallback {BrowserView = this};
        _ajc.Call("SetUnityBitmapCallback", androidPluginCallback);
        #endif

    }
   // Android callback to change our browser view texture
    public void SetTexture( byte[] bytes, int width, int height, bool canGoBack, bool canGoForward)
    {

        if (width != _imageTexture2D.width || height != _imageTexture2D.height)
            _imageTexture2D = new Texture2D(width, height, TextureFormat.ARGB32, false);

        _imageTexture2D.LoadImage(bytes);
        _imageTexture2D.Apply();
        _rawImage.texture = _imageTexture2D;
    }
}