Browser integration

[AhmetHuseyinDOK]

First of all thanks for the great efforts to make such a complete and free app. This app is mostly seen as an art app, but I think it can be a great productivity tool too. Just by adding a browser integration, it can be much more beneficial for many use cases such as brain storming or doing some math etc. Talking about brain storming maybe if possible, images can also be added to sketch ?

[mikeskydev]

Hi! While I think it would be a useful addition, we hit some roadblocks right now because most browser integration solutions for Unity aren't open source, so we can't include them in the code. They also cost in the hundreds of dollars, which would be prohibitive for anyone wanting to work on Open Brush to buy. We would also need an asset that worked across every single target (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) I'd honestly love for that situation to change!

As a side note, I think XR runtimes could do with thinking about this sort of multi-app use case, and make it easier to have a system browser popup co-exist in an app's environment. Otherwise basically every XR app becomes a browser!

[andybak]

@AhmetHuseyinDOK - you can to varying degrees of success do this already. Both Steam and Meta/Oculus desktop apps allow you to bring a desktop app window into VR with you. I think Steam is more mature in this regard.

On the Quest you can open browser windows at the same time as Open Brush and click the system button to show/hide them. You can't paint with them visible however.

As @mikeskydev said - if there was an open source browser component that was easy to integrate and worked on at least most of our supported platforms then this would be an interesting thing to implement. It would open up some other possibilities as web pages can already interact with Open Brush via the HTTP API: https://docs.openbrush.app/user-guide/open-brush-api

[mikeskydev]

@AhmetHuseyinDOK at some point Quest added an experimental feature to keep 2d windows open simultaneously with your immersive app. turn that setting on, then when running Open Brush press your menu button and open whatever you like (browser perhaps?), then offset the window to a comfortable spot and click away from the menu. you should pop back into Open Brush but the window will still be up.

[mikeskydev]

TLabAltoh/TLabWebView#10 (comment) I found this excellent package and asked nicely for compositor layers support. compositor layers 1.0 is live, so we could investigate this now!