
Moving the Linux desktop to another reality - mfilion
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/moving-the-linux-desktop-to-another-reality.html
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davesmith1983
This is going to be another compiz cube. It looks cool, but I doubt it will be
very useful outside of showing off some cool tech.

Also Valve tbh have dropped a lot of their more interesting tech. I had one of
their steam links which isn't even sold anymore. The steam link was actually
pretty useful for steaming anything on your desktop, I am sure you can do the
same with a Raspberry Pi and some scripts but it worked pretty well if you
hooked up a mouse and keyboard.

~~~
skykooler
Compiz cube was what convinced me to try Linux in the first place - I had
always thought of it as a boring server OS, but then I saw the desktop cube
and wobbly windows and thought "that looks cool enough to try it out."
Hopefully this could have a similar result for some people who have VR
headsets.

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babarock
Same. And I like many, I turned that damn cube off after 2-3 months of use.

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panpanna
"came for the cube, stayed for the freedom"

This is more common than you would suspect

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georgewsinger
One of the authors of Simula[1] here (mentioned in this article).

xrdesktop looks very impressive. We've been working on our compositor (in
particular: XWayland support) for quite a while. Getting a prototype up and
running was relatively easy. But it has been incredibly difficult to get
everything actually stable/usable.

Congrats to your team.

[1] [https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula](https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula)

~~~
echelon
Thanks so much for working on this!

I really like multi-monitor setups, and in the limit this can far surpass
physical hardware and space limitations. You can scroll more than 360 degrees
for a near-infinite workspace. (Just spin around a hyper-sphere repeatedly.)

I really want to see this tech succeed. I'd look like an idiot using this at
work, but I'm already sold.

I'm forced to use a Mac at work -- do you know of similar tech for MacOS? I'm
gladly going to investigate this at home.

~~~
georgewsinger
Thanks. This gives us motivation to keep going. If you have any feature
suggestions or want to check on our progress, drop by our chatroom in discord
([https://discordapp.com/channels/603723949586644997/603723949...](https://discordapp.com/channels/603723949586644997/603723949586645005).

I don't know of any similar tech for MacOS at this time.

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catotheyoungest
Why do people think this worth trying to implement? Is it because it looked
cool in movies like _Minority Report_? What is the target demographic for
this? What is the use case? Why would I want to add additional and unnecessary
complexity to my workflow?

~~~
echelon
I want this _right now_.

I use four monitors at work and two 4K monitors at home. A high-resolution VR
setup gives you infinite workspace. Couple that with intelligent auto window
management and you can forget moving windows around _EVER_ again -- this is
the ultimate mouseless experience that a tiling window manager can't even get
close to.

This is a huge productivity gain. The micro context switches that stem from
moving between windows and tabs (or worse, virtual desktops each with windows
and tabs) goes away. Workspaces become spatial, and you can leverage your
brain's innate spatial reasoning to find and organize things.

Physical project workspaces are laid out logically. We've been constrained to
screens and haven't had the freedom of doing this for our virtual ones.

~~~
travbrack
Have you done a lot of VR gaming? My eyes are killing me after an hour. I
can't imagine doing 8 hours a day. Not saying this everyone's experience, and
I'm curious if others are more tolerant of spending long periods of time in
VR.

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choeger
That page crashes my Firefox mobile... Is that some kind of inside joke I
don't get?

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canada_dry
I have a VR setup and would love a fully immersive desktop environment to
develop/program in. The display quality of the new Index (for instance) is
sufficient... however, the critical show-stopper is not being able to use your
hands to type onto a real keyboard (i.e. augmented reality-ish).

A real keyboard that you can feel and see as you type on. Both hands would
need to be tracked (in addition to the keyboard location) using something like
leap motion not by wearing some gloves/controllers or attaching anything - no
one is going to do any amount of typing on a virtual keyboard.

When there's a good solution to this I suspect quite a few developers will
give it a go when they want a fully immersive in-the-zone experience.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Once your hands are on the keys, you don't actually need to see them. So the
real question is, how do you find your keyboard in VR?

I think the Index's cameras would be sufficient. Alternately, you could place
tracking pucks (or just controllers) on either side.

~~~
shultays
Your real keyboard can have a virtual representation in your VR space, just
like controllers are

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Well, it has to get tracked somehow. Or it has to be "calibrated" on every
run, in case it was moved slightly when you tried to clean your desk or what
have you.

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JoshTriplett
Looking at the screenshot of Wikipedia rendered on an angled window, this
_really_ needs sharper text rendering with [https://blog.mozvr.com/pathfinder-
a-first-look/](https://blog.mozvr.com/pathfinder-a-first-look/) or similar.

With something like that integrated into rendering libraries, I'd love to have
the field-of-view of a motion-sensitive environment. (I don't actually want
pseudo-3D, just a high-res 2D display attached to orientation sensors.)

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oldgun
In case you experience slow loading of this hackernews'ed website, here's the
archive:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190730153132/https://www.colla...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190730153132/https://www.collabora.com/news-
and-blog/news-and-events/moving-the-linux-desktop-to-another-reality.html)

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Zak
I've been wanting the option of a VR desktop for a while now. Last I looked,
it wasn't ready for prime time, and that's still my impression now. I find a
small 16:9 screen pretty unacceptable for coding, and the market currently
offers very limited options for anything taller in a laptop.

I'm eager to see where this goes, and may need to start shopping for a head-
mounted display.

~~~
gmueckl
The current generation of headsets is unsuited for showing large amounts of
reasonably sized text. The display resolution is not there yet. If you map
your desktop into a plane in VR space at the proper distance, your UI text
shows up heavily aliased and barely readable due to the texture resampling
that happens in that process. You need to increase resolution by another
factor of two or three to make that actually convenient.

And then there is the issue with holding 3d pointing devices for prolonged
amounts of time. This is taxing upper body strength if you do. The weight of
thenheadset itself is also straining the neck muscles.

All of this taken together usually means that I want out of VR after about 2
hours. I barely have sessions that are longer.

~~~
asark
> And then there is the issue with holding 3d pointing devices for prolonged
> amounts of time. This is taxing upper body strength if you do. The weight of
> the headset itself is also straining the neck muscles.

You could use a real mouse and keyboard, if you're presented with some kind of
virtual workstation. And even for navigation outside the workstation, of your
broader "environment", 3D video games have been using a mouse & keyboard to
navigate complex interfaces & environments for a long time, with more than a
little success. Granted that means you still need a surface of some sort, but
I think non-touch-typing text input inside a VR space would be kinda hellish
anyway, so you're at least gonna want a real keyboard regardless.

~~~
gmueckl
Navigation in VR is a barely solved problem. Most games have players teleport
between positions instantly because a continous motion would create a
sensation of conflict between balance reported by the inner ear and the
perceived motion. That means instant nausea.

Positioning objects in 3D precisely and conveniently without a 3D pointing
device is hard, too. The best option for that is a mouse and crutches like
handles oriented along coordinate axes. But that only works because the mouse
pointer has a reference plane it moves on (the projection plane for the 3D
view). In VR, this plane is tracking the head precisely. You cannot reasonably
put the mouse cursor on that plane. You would need a different reference plane
and then you're back to all the problems that 3D input on a 2D screen has. And
a positioning objects in 3D with a keyboard is even more tedious.

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aiscapehumanity
I can sort of see this as an incentivizing stepping stone through generally
alternate 3d interfaces to to really get at AR desktops, which could be used
in conjunction keyboads and gestures which is alot more viable to even code
with/in.

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snek
Goodness this website is slow

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amfsn
[https://www.collabora.com/assets/images/blog/xrdesktop/xrdes...](https://www.collabora.com/assets/images/blog/xrdesktop/xrdesktop_gnome.png)

Oh god... where's your anisotropic filtering? That looks like a screenshot
from Doom.

~~~
flyingfences
Some antialiasing wouldn't go amiss, either...

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skrowl
I really wish the "Yay, linux on the desktop" crowd would rally around
ChromeOS. ChromeOS is literally what the "linux on the desktop" crowd has been
wanted for decades now.

~~~
FigBug
Can you run a 'normal' Linux desktop application written in C or C++ on a
Chromebook? Or is it just Android Apps and Web Apps?

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dreamcompiler
You certainly can if you install Linux on your Chromebook. I've been using my
Chromebook this way for years. But I use a real Linux distro independent of
Google (my system will _not_ run Android apps). I have no idea if Google's
relatively recent Linux offering works as well.

