A developer has submitted a draft to the KDE team for KWin to hook up a full Plasma VR mode and it looks pretty awesome. As it’s currently a draft, it needs plenty more work before being accepted but the idea behind it and how it looks has me quite interested.
Could be something fun for the Steam Frame too.
dang, I hope they get that merged and make it work with steam frame
With the way they were talking I thought it already WAS working and that this PR just published the code.
Maybe working but not published into the public releases. Probably will continue to be worked on until Steam Frame is about to go on sale.
It works, but it’s still a draft with a lot to fix and clean up.
To my knowledge Steam Frame will use the Gamescope to render 2D stuff in VR
They omitted the video from the article for some reason. Looks more like AR than VR.
https://invent.kde.org/-/project/2612/uploads/2510c05531a2425070b007d50b1698e9/vr.mp4
That’s pretty slick.
It looks like they’re ‘just’ creating 2d planes and attaching Wayland Surface or TopLevel (Desktop, App, respectively).
I use XSOverlay and you can attach individual windows to the overlay (VR Smartwatch, kinda). This seems like a much more in-depth extension of that.
Attaching individual applications is way better than the whole desktop in my experience. The desktop experience works well with a high resolution monitor… but in VR headsets you’re still resolution limited, so having JUST the application window can make it much easier to read/navigate.
The only feature that I would like is the ability to pin windows to specific locations. I’d like to be able to pin a HomeAssistant application window over my thermostat, or have a monitor displaying the feed from my security camera next to my front door, etc.
There are already virtual desktop applications that can do the desktop/windows trick, but they all seem to be anchored on you instead of being aware of the space that you’re in.
Seems like a valve money backed project, would be surprise if this is not on the steam frame (maybe not at launch but later on)
This is part of the reason I want to get a Bigscreen Beyond 2. I’d love to have a VR headset light enough to try and do VR desktop just to see how functional it is for work. Currently I have the Vive Pro 2 and that shit is heavy. Also does anyone have a recommended VR desktop app? The one in the article isn’t released yet right?
https://github.com/wlx-team/wayvr
its pretty good!
I was testing out a friends (not latest) viture xr glasses and they were actually pretty good except for the a few screen placement issues like I couldn’t place a screen in a corner of the lenses or place desktop windows anywhere I liked like the video someone shared. If they fixed those things they would be almost perfect. They were light, comfortable, and plenty bright. Maybe not as large fov as vr but pretty good and always getting better.
Ooh!!
