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Not trying to proselytize an opinion here, but every time I think about VR Goggles + a virtual flat screen, I think about how entire industries exist to make us comfortable while we watch our real flat screens. A VR option would allow me to just lay comatose-like in my bed, goggles affixed to my face, as I watch whatever. It terrifies me, partly because of how good I bet it could feel.

I think even that's an understatement.

My tinfoil-hat take is that Lepton looks like it's just aimed at Facebook but will ultimately make Google's Android less... uniquely impenetrable. Certain hardware-dependent stuff will probably never fully work here (GPS for instance), but having a registry of what is and isn't compatible with a third-party Android derivative, on a specific reference device, will benefit every third-party Android derivative. And not that it won't have similar anticheat issues, but having a games ecosystem outside of Google Play will also cover some of the infrastructure that would require that dependency otherwise -- including payments.

And not that I don't see a net positive if gacha games never successfully make the jump... but as a Linux device there's also a lot of stuff where you just don't have to care about Play Integrity, because instead you can just run the PC version and/or a desktop browser.

(edit: shameless plug for my recent, longer writeup on this: bhmt.dev/blog/frame)

Admittedly my VR glasses are older, but for me this is a really terrible experience. If a game lacks native VR support, it's far more comfortable to just use my widescreen monitor in the real world.

Honestly as a VR enthusiast this is the least interesting feature by far.

If I want to game with glasses I'll just use my $200 xreal airs. I do sometimes on holidays using Samsung DeX and a gamepad, and GeForce now. Works well, I played through half of Cyberpunk that way.

How long is that comfortable? For sure not couple of hours in 1 go

> You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment

I can already run 100% of my Steam games on a flat screen in front of my real eyes

That's already true for most PC VR headsets.

I got a Legion Go 3y ago for this reason. Alyx and SteamOS were both draws as a lifelong Mac/Nintendo kid.

The race/flight sim market is still going strong, but I guess it's the exception that proves the rule. It's extremely difficult to make a non-vehicle-based game that actually plays well in VR.

Until the hardware is ubiquitous it will remain so. But low profile AR/VR glasses that actually look exactly like normal glasses or goggles could bring it back from the dead

I suspect that the current design of VR/AR is not likely to get cheap enough and light/small enough to catch on in a big way. Kind of seems like diminishing returns on headset improvements at this point.

I had the Oculus DK1, and now have a Meta Quest 2. I haven't had reason to boot it in the past... year?

I love the idea of the Apple Vision Pro 2, but its wildly expensive and it sounds too heavy to wear for very long throughout the day unless you're reclined. I'd just use it for virtual screens for development and in my workshop ideally - but that requires me moving around, and the weight makes that a no-go.

I'm into these things, but they still just aren't there yet- and the ecosystem is still lacking geniune investment beyond HL:A and some cool tech demos.

TBH in terms of intensity it maybe the best single-player game for me. The experience is so different from non-VR games that I struggle to even put it into the same category.

Yeah the games I most want to play on VR aren't only old... the servers have been shut down.

I don't think that's what GP means. They are likely using it in private settings.

To be clear, wearing a full VR headset has an "I am an idiot" vibe.

It's a compelling product niche, for sure - but still, awfully niche. I'm sure there's folks out there who will bite on the chance to have a top-line VR headset with Linux, but at the price point... gotta be a fairly small market segment.

Still, I'm happy they're doing this, it seems like a cool product and I bet it would be almost as much fun as a platform to hack around on as it will be for gaming.

Yeah, I've been Linux-only on the desktop since the early aughts and trying to get the Valve Index working was so frustrating and inconsistent I eventually gave up. It sits collecting dust and I've still never played more than the first fifteen minutes of HL: Alyx (because no game is worth installing Windows for).

Very much looking forward to maybe actually being able to use VR on my gaming computer.

Same here. I would gladly pay extra just to not be tied to Facebook.

Is there an example of foveated rendering implementation?

lol.. offended some zuckers

... You know, now there's an idea ...

But in seriousness, I've gone down this rabbithole ever year or two for about as long as I've had the darn thing (including one especially masochistic attempt at making it work on ppc64le), and any time I have gotten an open stack to drive it, the result has always been unusable with regard to input jitter and "general feel". Which is to say, yes, people have already figured out how to drive it on Linux.

It's just that the experience sucks.

Very impressive work by all the folks who hacked on it. But it seems like actually getting all the smoothing/filtering and interpolating sensor data is, for whatever reason, an unreasonably hard problem. Dunno if the LLMs could help at all, short of ... stealing the secret sauce from the proprietary runtime??

> There is some chatter about using the expansion port to add a 3rd party colour camera to get over this, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

The official product page above has a link to one you can already preorder: https://arcturus.vision/

Now I see that the page reveals this:

> Four high-resolution, monochrome cameras provide controller and headset tracking

(Emphasis mine)

So it's not really suitable for real AR out of the box. Thanks for the heads up!

You can use it really easily on Android devices through apps like Game Native and some of the more powerful Android gaming handhelds have support for Steam through Linux distros like Rocknix and Armada OS.

Not officially, but it's publicly available for download.

https://interfacinglinux.com/community/sbcsoftware/native-st...

Which means? We should buy the Meta Quest / Quest Pro headset? I don't think so.

Maybe that's the reason why the Meta Quest Pro is in "so much demand" that Meta is no longer selling them anymore. Apple is not even bothering to restock Vision Pro either.

So much demand /s

I am saying VR had a great run. We are not in the Covid era anymore which the Quest greatly benefited from this. VR has a very limited future and it shows.