Wolvic 1.3.4 Released

Welcome one and all to the fourth bug-fixing release of the 1.3 series! And in keeping with our past few releases, version 1.3.4 adds some new features to share with you.

One of the biggest is that we’ve changed the hand gesture for the “go back” action. Whereas it was a simple pinch of the thumb and ring (fourth) finger, now it involves turning your left palm toward your face and then pinching with your thumb and index (first) finger. There are two reasons for the change: one, the original gesture was very difficult for most sets to recognize; and two, the new gesture makes it much less likely to trigger the action by mistake.

The second major change is an update to several of the Android libraries we use. This will let Wolvic run on devices that use more modern APIs, and also avoid the crashes some users were experiencing. Further, we made some adjustments to deal with changes made by YouTube that made it harder to find immersive videos and broke some UI elements, and expanded support for 360° video/photo sites.

There are more fixes and changes listed in the notes below, but as always, if you’ve found a new problem or have another issue, please let us know on GitHub.

Notes

• Upgrade the versions of some Android support libraries
  • This allows us to target Android APIs >=31
  • Without that update we were hitting crashes caused by a change in PendingIntent in about to be released versions of some OS
• New go-back gesture for hand tracking. The previous gesture (pinching thumb and ring fingers) was quite difficult to detect for most of the hand tracking systems we know. Apart from that it was easily triggered by mistake by users when testing. Now in order to go back users have to turn the left palm towards their faces and then pinch with thumb and index. It’s slower but rather difficult to trigger by mistake. And it’s much more reliable (hand tracking systems do a great job detecting thumb+index)
• Fix package name for mainland China
• New dialog for App Lab users. This dialog encourages AppLab users to migrate to the official Meta Store version
• UI improvements
  • Fixed appearance of top bar widget after the Android libraries update
  • Remove semi-transparent border in top bar to unify the look of the private and regular modes
• Kiosk Mode
  • Hide the tray bar when in fullscreen or kiosk mode
  • Added basic navigation UI in kiosk mode. Users cannot switch between experiences or navigate to other pages but they can now move forward/backward. Also window resizing is now allowed
  • Kiosk mode exit trick. Clicking 7 times in the 3 dots button in less than 3s allows users to exit kiosk mode
• Workaround for YouTube videos: along the last weeks, server side changes in YouTube broke the automatic discovery of immersive videos in Wolvic. That resulted in broken UI, with some widgets overlapping some others. Added fallback code for when YouTube does not send us media related events
• Added support for some more 360° video/photo sites