Tutorial: Open Web Page with Entities

Entities are often used to add objects to your environment. However, you can do so much more with this when you use scripting to define their behavior. In this tutorial, we will use an entity as a button to open a web page on your tablet. You can use this tutorial to do things like directing your visitors to an external shop for purchasing an item.

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Prerequisites

Consider getting familiar with the following concepts before starting this tutorial:

Write a Script to Open a Web Page

The script used here opens a web page on the Tablet or the external web browser when a user clicks or triggers an entity. In this example, we've written a client entity script that opens the Overte documentation when an entity/item is triggered. The script looks for the URL in the 'User data' property of the entity.

You can get the script here.

Create an Entity to Use as a Button

The entity you create for your button has to be triggerable so that the script can detect when you trigger or push the button with your hand controllers.

  1. In Interface, pull up your HUD or Tablet and go to Create.

  2. Create an entity to be used as a button. This can be a 3D model, cube, or sphere entity.

  3. Go to the 'Properties' tab at the top and down to the 'Behavior' tab on the left of the window.

  4. Set it as 'Triggerable'.

  5. Next go to the 'Script' tab and paste the script URL. In this case, it is clickToOpenBrowser.js.

  6. Paste the following JSON data into the 'User data' field for your entity:

{
  "useConfirmDialog": true,
  "confirmDialogMessage": "Are you sure you want to open this link?",
  "url": "https://docs.overte.org/",
  // options are "interface" and "browser"
  // "interface" opens an overlay, "browser" opens the OS' external browser.
  "openIn": "interface",
  "dimensions": {
    "width": 1600,
    "height": 900
  }
}

  1. After you exit the Create app, test your script by clicking or triggering the button to open the web page.

See Also