Simula

I really, really wanted the SimulaVR headset to work out because of th attention they were paying to text rendering. The hardware feels dead but the virtual desktop project might still have legs: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula As far as eye strain goes, I think there's room for argument: having virtual screens cinema-screen-distance away from you is less straining than something under a meter away, but only if the text rendering is up to the job.

If you want to stay in the land of monads there is https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula?tab=readme-ov-file "a VR window manager for Linux". Should've been called MetaMonad ;) but I guess that was already taken by the phylum metamonada, don't want to get on their bad side.

Okay, I am of course excited that KDE is making such fantastic strides forward. How-the-ever, GNOME is ahead of them because of the progress on high dynamic range color, non-fullscreen/partial scanouts, variable refresh rates, and the hidden work in GNOME extensions enabling things like PaperWM. Both KDE and GNOME are accelerating at a fantastic pace, but 1 of these projects are prioritizing the less visible (and hugely important) stuff. That is GNOME. I apologize for capitalizing Gnome, but that's what's comfortable. Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize we're so far behind the curve with "spatial computing". As VR-enabled desktop environments become a thing, we need to view DEs like physics/sandbox simulators. A lot of the design specs that Apple puts out essentially mirror what you would expect in an environment wit

He's _probably_ right that for the majority of people, the Quest would be better. Towards the end, when he starts talking about the open vs closed model, I find it pretty depressing that meta is the "open" model in this case. I'm pretty sure you still require a Meta account to use the headset. Not sure I consider that "open". I would love to have a headset that was running Simula (or something similar). I tried Simula with a Valve Index and the resolution was just too low for me. But I could definitely feel like it was "the future". I travel a lot now and work on one laptop screen. Having a small(ish) headset that I could travel with and then have a VR workspace instead of a single laptop monitor has the potential to be game changing (maybe). [0] https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

>before anyone else did Not disputing your claim per se, but Google had a project called Daydream back at least as early as 2017 (though seems earlier) and rolled that into Area 120 projects. They canned it at some point in 2021 I believe. Whereas SimulaVR seems to have started working on this in 2018 per their YC app (but perhaps earlier?) https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/wiki/YCW19-Application

It runs Linux using our custom VR Linux distro. The core of this distro is our VR window manager (https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula). It comes with 16GB-32GB of RAM and an Intel 12th Gen i7 processor. RE URLs: - Hacker News discussion[1] - More detailed spec overview [2] [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=simulavr.com [2] https://simulavr.com/blog/why-is-the-simula-one-so-expensive...

So, you might be interested in https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula . There have been a few examples of VR windows managers on Linux which don’t require an entire OS rewrite. Is that the solution Meta will go w/? almost certainly not. But replacing a WM for a different “view” of your OS is a pretty common thing on Linux. (For some distros like Arch, replace isn’t the right word. You have to install whichever one you’d like from the beginning)

We're still in preorder phase, aiming to ship most headsets in ~Q2 of 2023. This is our first foray into hardware, but we already developed a stable Linux VR Desktop (https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula) from 2017-2021. We try to provide frequent updates on our hardware engineering progress. For example, here's a recent post showing some videos of our review units: https://simulavr.com/blog/first-glimpse-of-review-units/ If you're interested in community discussion, you might also check out https://hn.algolia.com/?q=simulavr.com.

Yep, you can try out our software at https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula on the HTC Vive and Valve Index platforms. If you don't have one of those headsets, there are some videos of people (whom we have no affiliation with) on YouTube testing it out: https://youtu.be/8gVLF8SnK84?t=424 Here's also (a pretty old) video of me hacking on Simula, in Simula: https://youtu.be/FWLuwG91HnI. It's also true that we're more focused on hardware right now. We plan on reverting more towards software development in 2023. For more details: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/issues/180#issuecomment-1... Some things we have planned to implement include VR window tiling and some other UI stuff.

Their software is open source : https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula However it looks like they are more focused on hardware than software right now

Thanks for the shout-out :] It's true the Simula One is a work in progress, but we try to be transparent about our progress in the form of weekly blog updates. Our headset boards were recently assembled, so we're expecting review units within days or weeks.[1] Our software is also demoable on GitHub for HTC Vive & Valve Index platforms.[2] [1] https://simulavr.com/blog/first-batch-of-boards/ [2] https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

Yes. https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

Thanks for your support! RE our ambition: the bulk of our work lies in hardware stuff going forward. Our VR compositor is already pretty stable, and people have been using it on older Linux compatible headsets (HTC Vive, Valve Index) for a few years now.[1] Our Linux distro will be a NixOS fork which uses nix as our package manager, and which bolts our VR compositor on top as the window manager. This choice will allow users to roll back to working configurations pretty easily if some sort of disaster ever occurs. With that said, this is an ambitious project. We're posting weekly (mostly technical) updates to help build trust that this is a real project making progress towards its target ship date (Q4 2022 - Q1 2023; review units incoming in a month or two). If there's a topic or question in the back of your mind of what's going on behind

Yep, this is correct. We're moving from SteamVR/OpenVR to Monado (OpenXR) for the Simula One. With that said: our current compositor (https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula) still works well with OpenVR/SteamVR on the HTC Vive & Valve Index.