look-controls - Aframe

The look-controls component:

Rotates the entity when we rotate a VR head-mounted display (HMD).
Rotates the entity when we move the mouse.
Rotates the entity when we touch-drag the touchscreen.

Example

The look-controls component is usually used alongside the camera component.

html

<a-entity camera look-controls position="0 1.6 0"></a-entity>

Properties

Property	Description	Default Value
enabled	Whether look controls are enabled.	true
reverseMouseDrag	Whether to reverse mouse drag.	false
reverseTouchDrag	Whether to reverse touch drag.	false
touchEnabled	Whether to use touch controls in magic window mode.	true
mouseEnabled	Whether to use mouse to move the camera in 2D mode.	true
pointerLockEnabled	Whether to hide the cursor using the Pointer Lock API.	false
magicWindowTrackingEnabled	Whether gyroscope camera tracking is enabled on mobile devices.	true

Customizing look-controls

While A-Frame's look-controls component is primarily meant for VR with sensible defaults to work across platforms, many developers want to use A-Frame for non-VR use cases (e.g., desktop, touchscreen). We might want to modify the mouse and touch behaviors.

The best way to configure the behavior is to copy and customize the current look-controls component code. This allows us to configure the controls how we want (e.g., limit the pitch on touch, reverse one axis). If we were to include every possible configuration into the core component, we would be left maintaining a wide array of flags.

Caveats

If you want to create your own component for look controls, you will have to copy and paste the HMD-tracking bits into your component. In the future, we may have a system for people to more easily create their controls.