Ray Casting

The PlayCanvas physics engine allows you to perform ray casts. A ray cast is a query that determines if a straight line between two arbitrary 3D points intersects with a rigid body.

One application of ray casting is picking, where the user can touch/click the screen and select an entity. Here is a script which performs a ray cast from the camera position into the scene through the screen touch/click position and returns the closest selected rigid body-enabled entity:

var Raycast = pc.createScript('raycast');

// initialize code called once per entity
Raycast.prototype.initialize = function() {
    if (!this.entity.camera) {
        console.error('This script must be applied to an entity with a camera component.');
        return;
    }

    // Add a mousedown event handler
    this.app.mouse.on(pc.EVENT_MOUSEDOWN, this.mouseDown, this);

    // Add touch event only if touch is available
    if (this.app.touch) {
        this.app.touch.on(pc.EVENT_TOUCHSTART, this.touchStart, this);
    }
};

Raycast.prototype.mouseDown = function (e) {
    this.doRaycast(e.x, e.y);
};

Raycast.prototype.touchStart = function (e) {
    // Only perform the raycast if there is one finger on the screen
    if (e.touches.length === 1) {
        this.doRaycast(e.touches[0].x, e.touches[0].y);
    }
    e.event.preventDefault();
};

Raycast.prototype.doRaycast = function (screenX, screenY) {
    // The pc.Vec3 to raycast from (the position of the camera)
    const from = this.entity.getPosition();

    // The pc.Vec3 to raycast to (the click position projected onto the camera's far clip plane)
    const to = this.entity.camera.screenToWorld(screenX, screenY, this.entity.camera.farClip);

    // Raycast between the two points and return the closest hit result
    const result = this.app.systems.rigidbody.raycastFirst(from, to);

    // If there was a hit, store the entity
    if (result) {
        const hitEntity = result.entity;
        console.log('You selected ' + hitEntity.name);
    }
};

You can find a project that uses ray casting for entity selection here.

Ray casting has other applications too. An entity can probe the environment by firing ray casts. For example, to determine if an entity is on the ground, it can fire a ray cast directly downwards some distance and check if it intersects with the environment.