Justin

If a reasonable use case comes up, I’m sure the hardware will become affordable enough that an open source standalone VR headset project can come up. Right now the hardware is too custom and cutting edge for small-scale production to be possible. The economy of scale isn’t there.

The Valve index is probably the best example of a Linux friendly VR headset, but there needs to be development on the desktop environment.

Doing the camera passthrough and standalone operation you see with the Apple Vision and the Facebook Quest isn’t possible with a Raspberry pi. The raspi 5 might be fast enough to do the rendering, but there’s not that much overhead, and Linux support for realtime isn’t really that good yet. If you compare to the Apple Vision, they have two computers running the headset. One using an 8 core Apple M2 CPU that is 5 times as fast as a Raspberry Pi, and another realtime computer running on a custom camera+sensor processor, processing the video feeds. I think we’ll see comparable chips on the market with the io and speed to do both jobs in about 5 years, but it’s a way off.

Probably the hardest piece to get economy of scale on is the lenses. There’s companies that sell silicon, pcbs, and plastic parts at reasonable prices, but nobody’s making custom lenses.

Fun fact, the Steam deck runs on a repurposed VR headset chip.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ERm1StY-4uY

KDE support requires plasma 6 which is in alpha.

Fedora is pretty straight forward as an os for newbies, main benefit that popos has is installing Nvidia drivers