Ok @googlepixel and @googlevr let's see what you are made of. pic.twitter.com/1DvjoLWwun
— Joel Gethin Lewis (@JoelGethinLewis) October 24, 2016
Today my Google Pixel arrived in the post, along with a pair of Google Cardboard. I’ve also got a Google Daydream on order, but it looks like it will arrive too late to be useful for user testing.
First impressions were great, it’s certainly a very capable smartphone. After successfully running the A-Frame AR demo by Dietrich Ayala on Firefox for Android, I wanted to be able to screen record it so that the A-Frame community could see the framework’s performance on Google’s flagship phone.
I downloaded Android File Transfer as well as Android Studio to enable me to connect directly to the phone on my Apple MacBook Pro. Helpfully, Google have provided a command line utility called screencap that allows for direct screen recording. Screencap runs within Android Debug Bridge (ADB) which needs to be enabled in the following way:
To access these settings, open the Developer options in the system Settings. On Android 4.2 and higher, the Developer options screen is hidden by default. To make it visible, go toSettings > About phone and tap Build number seven times. Return to the previous screen to find Developer options at the bottom.
After pressing Build number seven times(!) I was able to enable debugging mode on the new Pixel phone. This tutorial was handy to describe how to actually run ADB on my computer, I had to start a terminal in the following folder: /Users/<user>/Library/Android/sdk/ and then run the following command:
./adb devices
I actually had to run it twice, one to get permission to connect to the Pixel, and once again to actually get it to connect and report the serial number of the Pixel.
After playing around in the command line for some time, I was finding it very difficult to actually save a file to the phone’s local filesystem:
ForceMacbookProRetina:platform-tools joel$ pwd /Users/joel/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools ForceMacbookProRetina:platform-tools joel$ ./adb devices List of devices attached FA69Y******* device ForceMacbookProRetina:platform-tools joel$ ./adb shell screenrecord demo.mp4 Unable to open 'demo.mp4': Read-only file system
After doing some more searching I found a great app called AndroidTool by Morten Just that enabled me to record screen captures (and even convert them to animated Gifs) with just one click. The results can be seen below:
The final step was to try running the demo with Google Cardboard. I’m pleased to say that it worked great in terms of a 3D effect – but unfortunately, Cardboard physically covers the forward facing camera as well as the VR mode disabling the live video. I managed to get Firefox running fullscreen in non VR mode by using an addon, but it would be great to have VR mode not disable the camera.
Below is a screenshot of the demo working in Firefox for Android:
But when you enable VR mode by pressing the icon in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, the live camera background is no longer displayed:
