No flat pano display in Android 4.3

  • No, definitely not a minor fix!

    krpano is rendering the flat panos as very narrow spherical or cylindrical panos, so that the controlling and panning around is still internally a rotation (e.g. a image hfov=1.0 and viewing range from -0.5 to +0.5 degree). This way there is no need for an extra controlling and rendering method.

    But by rendering CSS3D this way, the scaling and rotation values are becoming very small and these old Android browsers are extremely buggy in this case! Only CSS3D transformed element within a small 3d deep range were drawn correctly, but often there are clipping or stacking bugs. By hacking around with different 3d scalings or a different orders of adding the elements and many other ugly stuff, it's partially possible to affect the rendering, but there are always some side effects - either the 3d elements will be drawn over all other elements (like the user interface) or there are problems with the mouse/touch detection and so on. Additionally there are also device/GPU-specific bugs there.

    I have already spend several hundred hours in trying to get something useful out of these buggy Android browsers, but often it was waste of time! That doesn't mean that I'm not still trying to improve thing here, but it's definitely not a minor fix - it's not coding or development - it's pure hacking to find way to force the Android browser to render the things as it should!

    There is definitely a reason why Google has stopped the development of that browser engine already some years ago!

    But when WebGL is available in these older browsers, then flat panos are working too of course, this allows to bypass CSS3D for the pano rendering.

    I would still recommend the detection and redirection for these browsers as explained here:
    https://krpano.com/html5multires/#supportedbrowsers

    Best regards,
    Klaus

  • Thanks for the in-depth reply. Helpful to better understand what is going on and why. And... a little more than impressed with what you accomplish yet again.

    You didn't exactly say it but I gather flat pano will remain a "no" for pre Android 4.4. In that case a conditional redirect will remain the best choice. At least that won't be needed with entirely spherical projects and that is very welcome.

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