Simula One: an office-focused, standalone VR headset built on top of Linux
Their approach of having a desktop metaphor within the VR environment is one that I have argued for a long time is the &quot;right&quot; approach to eventually grow VR as a general purpose compute platform.<p>The only two other examples of this going right now are Microsoft&#x27;s Windows Mixed Reality platform with Windows Holographic and the Magic Leap One&#x27;s interface. Windows MR works really well, Magic Leap is extremely half-baked and has had very little effort put into it (well, at least that was the case a year ago. I ended up selling my headset for lack of use).<p>Being that I&#x27;ve been a Windows developer for 20 years, it&#x27;s extremely frustrating to me that Microsoft won&#x27;t make a standalone VR headset. They have all the technical capability to do it. The HoloLens 2 is a sufficiently powerful compute platform and runs the full Windows MR experience. The PC-tethered Windows MR headsets are very high resolution and some of them are even quite comfortable (I regularly use a Samsung Oddyssey+ for work). But they seem hell-bent on pushing difractive waveguide displays for any mobile devices, which I think by now have pretty handily proven to be straight up garbage.<p>How a Linux headset could succeed here where others are really stagnating is to develop:<p>A) Hotswappable batteries. You&#x27;re not going to get all-day usage out of a single battery pack anytime soon (my Quest 2 with the Elite Strap doubles the battery life to a whole TWO HOURS OMG!), and having to connect a wire to a device that is supposed to be standalone just for power is kind of like playing with one of those line-tethered model airplanes: what you really want is an RC model airplane, so you&#x27;re just stuck being disappointed all the time.<p>B) A really good spatialized audio system. Spatialized audio is an often overlooked component of making a believable VR scene. All of the ambisonic audio drivers are platform-specific right now, and they each have their pros and cons. I really like Microsoft&#x27;s HFRT as it seems more realistic than Oculus&#x27;. It&#x27;d be especially nice to have work put into Chromium and Firefox to upgrade the WebAudio system to use the system&#x27;s spatializer rather than implement their own (Google&#x27;s Resonance is particularly bad).<p>C) Really big emphasis on accelerated 2D rendering. 3D rendering is great for games, but work is all text and text is all 2D rendering. Some of the most costly components of my VR projects are the text rendering. You can go a long way with low-fi 3D as an aesthetic, but 2D absolutely needs to be crisp and tight. And it&#x27;s not just about the resolution of the display. Your 2D buffers aren&#x27;t going to ever map one-to-one to the display&#x27;s pixels, because your head is moving around, you&#x27;ll be looking at things at slight angles and in motion, etc., and most mipmapping algorithms are designed for gradients, not sharp edges. So making clear text is really hard. Oculus has a hack where 2D quads can be rendered in a separate pass from the rest of the 3D environment, but there are issues with it regarding scene compositing and hit testing.<p>D) A native scene graph, something akin to extending the desktop metaphor into 3-dimensions, not just for compositing 2D windows but for allowing 3D applications to mix and match objects. Windows MR and SteamVR are the only systems that really even attempt to do this, with neither really seeing enough emphasis. Every VR app right now runs in a completely exclusive, retained mode. That&#x27;s fine for games, but it&#x27;s completely unnecessary for things like teleconferencing apps. Why shouldn&#x27;t you be able to &quot;spaceshare&quot; like we do screen-sharing? Then you&#x27;d be able to have your teleconferencing app separate from your whiteboard app.