A-Frame Goes Mainstream with a little help from Nicolas Cage

Mike Lacher and Chris Baker wanted to pay homage to actor Nicolas Cage by creating an immersive, virtual reality homage to the cult screen favorite. Alas, they had no experience building virtual reality (VR) apps and environments.

But they did have a mutual love for Cage’s cinematic works. “The inspiration was probably Face/Off, Con Air, and National Treasure. But every Cage movie offers something special and beautiful”, says Lacher.

Undaunted, Lacher and Baker taught themselves A-Frame. A-Frame is a web framework for building virtual reality experiences that is supported by Mozilla. The framework makes it easy for anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML — the main language used to code websites — to build and publish three-dimensional VR experiences online. Lacher, a developer used to complex tasks, was particularly impressed with ease learning and building VR using A-Frame.

It only took Lacher a few hours to create The Cage Cage. The experience is an immersive kaleidoscope of Cage clips — literally wall to wall Nic Cage as far as the user’s can see. The audio plays clips from Cage films as the user passes through the Cage Cage. The eccentric but endearing Cage Cage can be viewed on a VR device or on a web browser.

So why Nic Cage? “He’s our nation’s greatest actor,” deadpans Lacher, “and has the range necessary to deliver widely divergent performances across four screens simultaneously. And he tends to shout a lot.”

The Cage Cage is one of thousands of VR experiences already built with A-Frame. You can learn more about using A-Frame here. If you do build something in A-Frame, please share it with us at Mozilla. We’d love to see your work.