Currently SteamVR has no explicit wayland support, it only works through xwayland.

Direct mode with xwayland is part of this current effort and people have been successful in using SteamVR with direct mode with xwayland. Not sure what exactly is needed for it to work but I believe it's the wayland protocol support, the protocol implementation in the wayland compositors and an implementation in xwayland.

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Quoting: GuestI'm really a noob on everything regarding vr.
Does that means i can use a cardboard viewer and a smartphone as a cheap interface to virtual reality with steam games?
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/monado-update-passing-conformance-android-support-and-more.html [External Link]

No, at least not yet. Monado can run OpenXR apps that run directly on android. Currently the only "real" example that I know of is this xrgears branch: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/monado/demos/xrgears/-/tree/android [External Link]

In the future (unrelated) projects like ALVR may create a native android OpenXR client. They face many challenging to make that work, for example with SteamVR on Linux.

Alternative streaming tech stacks for OpenVR games are a possibility, for example OpenVR games -> OpenComposite with OpenXR backend (not ready yet) -> Monado on PC -> streaming (does not exist yet) -> Monado on Android.

Once such a thing becomes possible we will probably make some noise about it.

Quoting: scaine

Quoting: ArdjeI hope this means I am finally going to be able to use my Oculus DK2.

I think that's the hope, assuming that Monado will support the DK2, then it will then become available as a device through SteamVR?

Oculus Rift DK2 and CV1 tracking is currently being implemented by thaytan (Jan Schmidt). His current WIP implementation lives in OpenHMD. More info and demo videos on his blog: https://noraisin.net/diary/ [External Link]

This implementation can be used in SteamVR with SteamVR-OpenHMD.

Monado by itself does not have its own Oculus driver today, but it can make use of OpenHMD for HMD support, so if Monado is compiled with OpenHMD support enabled, the DK2 and CV1 HMDs should work. Further, Monado also comes with another SteamVR plugin that can be used as an alternative to SteamVR-OpenHMD. https://monado.freedesktop.org/steamvr.html [External Link]

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Quoting: elgatilSteamVR is also very close to be OpenXR-conformant meaning (I guess) we will be able to run steam games with Monado.

Unfortunately it does not mean that.

OpenVR and OpenXR are somewhat similar APIs, but they are still different APIs. SteamVR adding support for OpenXR means that not only games/applications made for OpenVR can be run on SteamVR, but also those made for OpenXR.

But not to despair, the (independent) OpenComposite project https://gitlab.com/znixian/OpenOVR [External Link] is implementing OpenXR. It will then translate between OpenVR and OpenXR such that applications made for OpenVR can run on any OpenXR runtime, and not just SteamVR.

Monado and SteamVR sit on the same level of the XR software stack - you can see them as competitors or alternatives, whichever you prefer. :)
Valve will have had their reasons not to use Monado for OpenXR - an obvious would be that SteamVR is much more mature. Nobody has compared performance yet but from my experience alone I would expect to see Monado by itself using less CPU & GPU resources and running on much lower end systems than SteamVR, but in graphics intensive applications you will get a better experience with SteamVR due to their advanced features like asynchronous reprojection and high priority GPU contexts.

Monado's compositor is still quite basic but there is some exciting stuff in ILLIXR that they are interested in contributing.

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Quoting: ArdjeThe most interesting thing: will it work in SteamVR on linux?

They are planning to make a release for that.. eventually..

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Quoting: Cybolic

Quoting: ObsidianBlk[...] Valve hasn't done much better, with the exception that they never actually promised Linux would have the VR (or did they?). [...]

Oh they did; there was mention of Linux support right on the actual purchase page. It was pretty clearly false advertisement when it came out.

I heard a few people preordered because of that...

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Quoting: EikeI wonder which prices people expect, considering that every VR headset contains two gaming "monitors".

Especially the more recent ones often have two displays, but some do have one.
There's some high schoolers who did a more recent DYI one at https://github.com/relativty/Relativ [External Link]
But I'm rather thinking about buying one of the older GearVR models (~$25). Since it already has an IMU you just need to plop in a display from Aliexpress or so (~$100) and you have a pretty good basic HMD. The only problem is that there isn't really a cheap, high performance positional tracking system. Something like Nolo VR is still quite expensive...

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OpenHMD only supports the Nolo positional tracking + controllers for now. They do reverse engineering of the hardware and open source drivers for them, so it's not easy. Oculus Rift and Vive controllers + positional tracking could be ready soon-ish, if the developers find the time.
psmove controllers... maybe? I have two of those and I haven't even been able to pair them with psmoveapi for a long time, probably incompatibility with more recent bluez. The thing is that to pair psmove controllers you need to connect them via usb and exchange some keys which then get written directly to the bluez config, which bluez doesn't like very much.

There is https://github.com/cboulay/PSMoveService [External Link] which has long wanted to add linux support but I don't know what their status is...

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The SteamVR compositor runs exclusively with Vulkan (on the radv driver). If you start an OpenGL SteamVR application, it submits frames (as OpenGL ids) to the SteamVR compositor which then uses the EXT_external_objects OpenGL extension to import the frame into its own Vulkan context.

Apparently something in radv broke recently so that didn't work anymore and it segfaulted instead. Bug report over there: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/97 [External Link]
The segfault happened in
#1  0x00007fffe827a2fe in CSharedBufferLinux::CreateVulkanBufferForExport(void*, void*, unsigned long, unsigned int, bool) ()
   from /home/chris/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/vrclient.so
which is closed source so there's not much more info to be found what actually went wrong.

Vulkan SteamVR applications were not affected, it looks like it was specifically a problem with the OpenGL interop.

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For playing it in VR there are mainly two options:

https://github.com/Codes4Fun/RBDOOM-3-BFG [External Link] is a relatively basic VR adaption with few features. It supports OpenVR and compiles and runs unmodified on linux, but for me it had very bad performance.

https://github.com/KozGit/DOOM-3-BFG-VR [External Link] is doing a much more advanced VR port, but is using pretty bad, unportable style. It supports the Oculus SDK and OpenVR, but with no option to disable the former. For compiling and running on Linux, a lot of changes to the code are necessary, which I have documented at https://github.com/KozGit/DOOM-3-BFG-VR/issues/210 [External Link] and my fork https://github.com/ChristophHaag/DOOM-3-BFG-VR/ [External Link]. The main problem remaining is that the buttons of the Vive controllers do not work, but I'm not sure why yet. Possibly something with the SDL Keycodes. Also the entire speech recognition part is ifdef'ed out because it uses the Windows API. Other than that it should be playable on Linux.
So, if anyone wants to look into it...

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If they use Vulkan, https://github.com/roothorick/WineOpenVR [External Link] could become viable.

Still, I prefer no tux no bux.

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