We have already written other articles in LxA about COLLABORATE and his interesting project xrdesktop in which Valve Software is also collaborating to improve and bring virtual reality technology to Linux desktops as well. There are already other interesting open source projects in this regard, which together with this one seem to have an interesting and promising future.
Now, the Collabora hackers have announced the result of their latest work, a new version of xrdesktop. Specifically, it is xrdesktop 0.14, which, although it is still a fairly early version, already has interesting features and functions for the virtual reality in traditional window managers for the desktop of GNU / Linux distros.
Thanks to xrdesktop it can also be used for the runtime of the virtual reality application, to represent its traditional windows within a 3D space, allowing interaction with them using virtual reality controllers supported.
Also, it now includes some nice improvements. One of the most important changes is that it is now able to run XR (mixed reality) runtime with OpenXR API. Now it also supports OpenVR 1.11, the new version of this other virtual reality API. Therefore, it would have to have full SteamVR support.
A scene mode has also been added, where xrdesktop represents the entire environment in the internal renderer using la Vulkan graphical API. There is also the existing overlay mode, as well as many other improvements and fixes over the previous version.