I’ve been thinking about this lately (as are many people, I’d imagine, with all the Metaverse hoopla) and I think the adoption line for VR is text resolution. Once a headset is in play that can match out of headset text resolution, rapid adoption, tooling, etc. will follow.
Something I’ve been thinking about is tooling, though. Like if I had a browser and file storage in an environment with infinitely scalable windows/resolution I could do a lot of my work.
It’s hard to wrap my head around. Like an OS running in an OS. The answer can’t be just a horrific amount of manual labor porting a bunch of open source utilities over to some new VR based OS, right? I need to be able to connect my headset to my computer and use my existing tools in a VR environment. It’s almost like emulation. Unless Microsoft and Apple make VR compatible OS’s?
Step 1: Headset tech that doesn’t require horrific vendor lock-in (looking at you, metabook)
Step 2: Highly interactive, scalable browser (too many apps are Electron for it to be anything else)
I think with those two things I could migrate a lot of my work. Then you’d need to start fleshing it out. Creating your own little space, figuring out the tech to use your other tools in VR, creating VR focused Linux distro’s, self-hosting instances of your little corner of this new universe, giant statues of Neal Stephenson reciting passages from Snow Crash like scripture…
That’s very exciting, I think. Problems that can be solved by people outside of the ecosystem are exciting. I think as long as VR can be taken full advantage for display management, we can make due until more niche applications of the input systems can be developed.
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)
Oh this is very cool. I was thinking about game engines in this context, but couldn’t wrap my head around combining the OS and the engine. Browsers seemed much more accessible, but this project is kind if blowing my mind.
People ultimately need to be able to have choice. Their OS in their environment on their tech stack. I’m not sure how that happens, but open source operating system on an open source game engine seems like the right start.
Something I’ve been thinking about is tooling, though. Like if I had a browser and file storage in an environment with infinitely scalable windows/resolution I could do a lot of my work.
It’s hard to wrap my head around. Like an OS running in an OS. The answer can’t be just a horrific amount of manual labor porting a bunch of open source utilities over to some new VR based OS, right? I need to be able to connect my headset to my computer and use my existing tools in a VR environment. It’s almost like emulation. Unless Microsoft and Apple make VR compatible OS’s?
Step 1: Headset tech that doesn’t require horrific vendor lock-in (looking at you, metabook)
Step 2: Highly interactive, scalable browser (too many apps are Electron for it to be anything else)
I think with those two things I could migrate a lot of my work. Then you’d need to start fleshing it out. Creating your own little space, figuring out the tech to use your other tools in VR, creating VR focused Linux distro’s, self-hosting instances of your little corner of this new universe, giant statues of Neal Stephenson reciting passages from Snow Crash like scripture…