Firefox Reality for PC-connected VR platforms
Firefox Reality PC Preview (FxRPC) is a new VR web browser that provides 2D overlay browsing alongside immersive apps and supports web-based immersive experiences for PC-connected VR headsets.
This experimental browser consists of two components:
- A Launcher written in Unity,
FirefoxReality.exe
. This is responsible for launching a bundled, custom build of Firefox (for Preview or Local builds) or for downloading/installing Firefox. The first run of the launcher also has additional operations for set up, such as creating an FxRPC-specific profile and installing VR-specific webextensions. - A custom build of Firefox with additional VR code. This build of Firefox is forked from the latest Release build in this repo. This fork is provisional for faster prototyping and development until all of the code in this branch is landed in Firefox Nightly and shipped in a release build of Firefox.
Building FxRPC involves building both components mentioned above, which also involves installing tools for both components.
Comprehensive instructions for building Desktop Firefox on Windows is available here.
The only divergence from the instructions is to account for Git instead of Mercurial:
- In the section "Getting the source", please clone instead from the Github fork:
git clone https://github.com/MozillaReality/gecko-dev.git
- Ensure that git is in your path so that you can make git commands in the mozilla build environment.
Note: After building, you will need the path to the folder that contains firefox.exe
for the Launcher. To find this path, run
./mach environment
to find the object directory. The executable will be in the subdirectory dist\bin
- Install Unity Hub: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GettingStartedInstallingHub.html
- Install 2019.3.0b9, with Windows Build Support: unityhub://2019.3.0b9/de32b4c0dd7a
- Clone this repo
- In Unity Hub, open this project in subfolder
Source\FirefoxRealityUnity
with Unity version 2019.3.0b9 - If Unity warns about version matching, click 'Continue'
- After the project loads, there will be a custom menu item named 'FxR' (between Component and Window). Click on 'Windows Build' inside that menu.
- In the following prompts, select the folder that contains
firefox.exe
(see Note in section above), a folder for the profile, and a folder for the build output. The title of the dialogs indicate which type folder to select.
To run FxRPC, simply launch FirefoxReality.exe
from the output folder in step 7 above.