Wolvic 1.4.1 Released

Hello and welcome to the first bugfixing release of the 1.4.x series of Wolvic. The big advancement here is dramatically improved hand tracking, thanks to better aim-ray handling in systems that don’t have certain API extensions, and a filter upgrade to remove tracking jitter. In the process, we’ve added a gesture to exit Wolvic entirely: look at your right hand palm, then pinch your thumb and index finger together.

Streaming media have also gotten some updates, with fixes for YouTube, Apple TV+, and AirPano — plus the addition of support for Max (formerly HBO Max) and Paramount+. And for those of you in mainland China, we’re now using AppInChina for distribution.

There are various other changes and updates, which are listed in the notes below. If you’ve found a new problem or have another issue, please send us your feedback via the feedback form we introduced with Wolvic 1.4; or, if you prefer, you can file an issue on GitHub.

Notes

Highlights

• Drastically improved the precision of hand tracking.
• Introduced a new gesture to exit the application when using hand tracking.
• Fixes and improvements for many popular streaming services: YouTube, Apple TV, (HBO) Max, Paramount+, AirPano, etc.
• Improved Wolvic’s Android app lifecycle, specially on application finalization.
• Infrastructure for distribution in mainland China through AppInChina.

Streaming media

• Fixed media events in YouTube
• Fixed playback of DRM protected content on Apple TV+
• Fixed video playback on AirPano
• Added support for video playback on Max
• Added support for video playback on Paramount+

Hand tracking

• New gesture to exit Wolvic when using hand tracking: simply look at your right hand palm, then pinch your thumb and index finger together and a dialog will come up.
• Computing a better aim ray for hand tracking on systems that don’t support the XR_FB_hand_tracking_aim extension.
• Using the “one-euro-filter” to remove jitter from the hand tracking aim; see https://gery.casiez.net/1euro/ for additional details about this filter.

Lynx

• Removed some corrections which are now unnecessary with the new way to compute the aim ray.

UI

• Changed the application name to “Wolvic”, replacing “Wolvic VR Browser”.
• Increased the size of tooltips so they are easier to read.
• When the user triggers the Back action but the navigation history is empty, show a prompt to exit the app.
• New versions of the app icons with white background and 50% size reduction.
• Use localized welcome page.
• Updated translations: Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil).

Expanded availability

• Going forward we will use the services of AppInChina to publish Wolvic in mainland China. Among other things, this required us to make small changes to our build system and to include the appropriate user agreement and privacy policy documents.

Stability

• Reorganized the code managing the Android lifecycle of the application; among other benefits, this allows us to properly close the OpenXR resources when Wolvic finishes so that other apps in the system are not affected.
• Fixed crashes due to an unchecked recursive call.

Build system

• Cleaned up and refactor CMake includes for flavours using OpenXR.