Hello,
I am in offline collaborative mode with a friend.
I have a series of interactive components, such as doors. When I open one of them, my friend doesn’t see any changes.
Same with sun light adjustments. One only appears to see one’s own actions… is that normal? Thx
Hi!
Yes, the interactive component movements and many display options are not shared at the moment. (The interactive components are a “display option” and not an “actual change to the model” because it is implemented by changing where some faces are displayed, without doing any change in the model.)
We never really thought about these cases. We can certainly fix them on a case-by-case basis, similar to how we recently made the section plane shared (another display option instead of a change in the actual model). I’m adding them to our internal to-do list.
Just thinking aloud, but right now, if you adjust the light direction by setting a date and time, then it should work because this adjusts the date and time stored in the model. But if you set a sun direction manually, it won’t work because that is not stored in the model.
Thank you. Yes, please change interactive behaviour so that it is shared with others if you can. It is essential in guided tours for demonstration purposes and to help people understand how the space works etc. Same for the manual sun light adjustment.
This is valid for both offline and online. Thank you!
Also, probably just me but find collaboration setttings confusing and do not appear to find clear or complete instructions in documentation about how to move between the various modes easily and efficiently.
Sorry for the dump of questions but the documentation is very minimal. Thank you!
No problem, thank you for asking these questions. I actually appreciate it a lot. The current set of features was arrived at by incrementally adding more stuff on top of older stuff (and the basic features predate the existence of the Quest, too). We are thinking about redesigning the whole thing, but it’s hard to do it consistently while keeping the various options we have now.
This might be a bug, we’ll investigate.
Excellent question! We’d love to find an answer to that one. It’s the only reason for why you can’t view an arbitrary cloud model directly from the Quest. You need a PC or a Mac, with Sketchup and the VR Sketch extension installed, just to paste the model’s long URL in there.
No, the only point of associating a VR headset to your account is to browse and view the cloud models stored in this account. It’s not needed in the “collaborative editing” mode, or if you paste the model’s long URL from a PC/Mac.
You share a cloud model by getting its long URL (which you can get on a PC/Mac by going to https://vrsketch.eu/cloud.html and clicking the “Share” buttons). Anyone with a copy of this URL can view that model, unless you later delete that model altogether on the cloud web page. Of course, pasting that URL later will hit the issue in the point 2 above; there is no easier solution.
Adding to the mix of potential future redesigns, we’d like to become a bit more independent of Sketchup, so that you could also use VR Sketch without Sketchup. Internally, this means adding support for all editing operations right into the non-Sketchup version of the software—at the moment, all editing operations are ultimately performed by Sketchup itself. But beyond that, there are many questions similar to your own. Ideally we’d like to arrive at a more unified design, and not double the already-too-large number of modes yet again for the non-Sketchup version…
Sharing the manual light adjustment is easy and should be done now. It should also work in both collaborative-editing and cloud-viewing modes.
Sharing the dynamic component behavior is a bit more involved; I think I’ll delay it because of other changes needed around dynamic components which have already been done in the big in-development branch. It’s the one that will give major performance improvements, which I promised will come soon, but I need to come back to that branch and finish it instead of making more changes to the current version that will only end up making my job harder 
Thanks.
2/4. Ok, let’s assume that one is prepared to type the long address straight into the VR Sketch app for Quest, or copy/paste it from Quest’s native browser(where one can check one’s email), can we have a field where one can paste this information in one of the Cloud model tabs, so the model can then be accessed directly online without a PC/Mac appendice?
2/4. (continued) how about doing it on the phone into the Meta Quest app- no idea how, or maybe a small mobile companion app that only allows you to do this and perhaps also upload models from Drive or Files, so that it better justifies its existence?
Uh, I’ve got it and I have no idea why I didn’t think about it earlier (or else it’s too late for me to think straight): you would simply go to the URL in any web browser, for example on the Quest or on your phone, and there you’d see a field to type the 6-digit code of your Quest.
What am I missing?
I guess that’s what one would refer to as teamwork, right?
I still think that a small companion app would be a more elegant and handy solution. i do ‘t know about others but I imagine that few people who have a life outside VR use browsers to check their emails etc, to then paste the code. Typing it would work but it is error prone…
Anyway, let’s drink to it over the weekend
While talking about collaboration, would it be possible for an online collaboration mode to take place such that the account holder is locally connected to sketchup and able to make changes while a guest can access the same model, see everything that the account holder is doing but only have the limited online functionality (i.e. no edits, time of day sunlight etc)?
Thanks!
Hello, any thoughts on when some kind of link access directly in Quest would be implemented, please? Thank you !
It was actually implemented recently! We need some feedback over whether this is useful, but you can try it: just follow the URL of a cloud model in a normal browser (on any machine, e.g. it can be on your phone).
This solution avoids the need to transfer the URL somehow on your Quest, which has always been the tricky problem.
Amazing! So absolutely wonderful and simple. well done. Thank you!
Couple of points:
it would be very useful if once viewed by a guest (ie currently someone without an account), the model could be accessed without having to resend the link to quest. Currently, once you’ve left a session, the link needs to be manually resent to quest even if the model appears to be cached in the headset’s memory. If online, the app should perhaps still check that the link is still valid before opening the model and if it no longer exists, delete the cached content.
Would it be possible for a model to be updated under the same link? Quest would then check how up to date the link was before opening the model and if it was changed since the last viewing, the latest version would be updated.
Thanks!
PS. I appreciate that there are some privacy issues associated with sharing a model in real time (one may not want to have sudden uninvited guests who also happen to be in possession of the same link popping up while enjoying a viewing). A private viewing mode may therefore be useful… But then if the model
viewed is the cached one, that may not be an issue. I imagine that shared online sessions can only happen through a live model and be initiated by the model owner.
Right, that’s an old issue. It can occur if you send a URL from Sketchup to the Quest, too. I also think (but didn’t check yet) that the same occurs with PC VR, which caches models in the same way on the PC. As long as it is cached and you have the original URL, you can still view it.
Yes, it might be possible, but it needs to be done carefully. The problem is that in older versions of VR Sketch, we have no way to force it to reload a model once it has been locally cached. It would be quite confusing for the user to update his model (using a recent version of VR Sketch on PC) only to have his Quest continue to view the old model. (In a way, it’s the same problem as point 1: when the model is cached locally, it’s used directly without further checking of the server.)
About the PS.: The model’s URL should not be shared with people you don’t want to invite. This URL is impossible to guess; it’s far more secure than, say, a user-defined password. Moreover, you always have the alternative of collaborative editing sessions, which is better if you want to be sure that nobody can access the model after the fact.
Thank you! that would be great.
By the way, trouble with links is that other people share them a lot less reluctantly with their friends and relatives than they would do with a password so there is a probability that someone I do not know enters the space at the same time… But I can see what you are trying to achieve. Looking forward to v18
A quick update: now that v18 was released, I had some more time, and I just did a quick fix: if a cloud model is deleted, but we try to view it from a device where it is locally cached, then it will continue to work (we can still view the model) but as long as it is online then VR Sketch should also notice that the server is not recognizing the model—so we’ll get a message saying that the model was deleted. This should be in the next minor release, 18.0.3.
I thought about removing the local cached model from view (even if it is already partially or completely loaded at the point VR Sketch notices the problem), but I decided against that. I prefer to give a notification to the user without technically preventing him from still viewing the model.
That makes a lot of sense.
So, is 18 now compatible with Q?
Thank you!
If you mean Quest 1, then no, v18 still requires Quest 2 or Quest Pro. See this explanation about it and how to pick a working version for Quest 1 (which is 17.0.9 at the moment). (Also note that v18 works fine on Quest 1 if you’re using the tethered mode from PC VR.)