May 11, 2020 – Collabora has recently announced the 0.14 release of xrdesktop, the open source project that enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR.
xrdesktop makes window managers aware of VR and is able to use VR runtimes to render desktop windows in 3D space, with the ability of manipulating them with VR controllers and generating mouse and keyboard input from VR.
Sponsored by Valve, this latest release brings the largest amount of changes yet, with many new features and architectural improvements – The main improvement being that xrdesktop is now able to run on XR runtimes providing the OpenXR API, which enables running xrdesktop on a full open source stack with Monado. In addition, Collabora states that it has improved and updated the OpenVR backend to OpenVR 1.11, providing full support and the best experience for the latest SteamVR version.
Also completed and enabled in this release is the scene mode, where xrdesktop renders the full environment in the platform’s internal Vulkan renderer, in addition to the existing overlay mode. Other changes include a new settings UI and support for the latest GNOME Shell and KWin versions. The full changelog and commit log can be found in the xrdesktop release notes.
Furthermore, packages are landing in Debian Sid and Collabora also provides a PPA for Ubuntu 20.04 with the current 0.14 release. Users of Arch Linux based distros can continue using the company’s AUR packages.
The above video shows xrdesktop running on Monado with the Valve Index and Index controllers with experimental libsurvive branch.
Video credit: Collabora / YouTube
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.