I feel like we‘re gaining a lot of momentum in the linux world and gaming is going places.
Today I stumbled on this slightly ironic before you buy about the apple vision pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EifFVxcIat4
My takeaway: they made another vr headset and some (maybe key) things work out well and others dont.
As a linux user, gamer, hobby dev and admin, I can see how a bunch of cameras, a display, gyro and a pi could bring stuff like plasma big screen or kodi to a headset. Maybe we can make another glorified monitor to get end users to instead come to linux.
Anyone know if a project like this? What do you think?
We all are waiting for
godotProject DeckardI liked the godot joke. :)
Closest thing I know of would be SimulaVR.
Thats very awesome! Thanks for mentioning!
There have been wearable displays on the market for many years. Plenty work with Linux just fine. As far as all the camera motion tracking junk, it’s a gimmick without a real use-case being sold by Apple. It’s literally half the cost of the unit. I don’t know many companies who would rather include that versus keeping units cheaper.
Thanks for mentioning it. I didn’t know they were linux compatible.
The thing that got me was the app store with (somewhat) vr apps. Linux has this so I figured that would work well. The AR aspect probably makes it a bit more fancy I guess.
If a reasonable use case comes up, I’m sure the hardware will become affordable enough that an open source standalone VR headset project can come up. Right now the hardware is too custom and cutting edge for small-scale production to be possible. The economy of scale isn’t there.
The Valve index is probably the best example of a Linux friendly VR headset, but there needs to be development on the desktop environment.
Doing the camera passthrough and standalone operation you see with the Apple Vision and the Facebook Quest isn’t possible with a Raspberry pi. The raspi 5 might be fast enough to do the rendering, but there’s not that much overhead, and Linux support for realtime isn’t really that good yet. If you compare to the Apple Vision, they have two computers running the headset. One using an 8 core Apple M2 CPU that is 5 times as fast as a Raspberry Pi, and another realtime computer running on a custom camera+sensor processor, processing the video feeds. I think we’ll see comparable chips on the market with the io and speed to do both jobs in about 5 years, but it’s a way off.
Probably the hardest piece to get economy of scale on is the lenses. There’s companies that sell silicon, pcbs, and plastic parts at reasonable prices, but nobody’s making custom lenses.
Fun fact, the Steam deck runs on a repurposed VR headset chip.
