Simula: A VR window manager for Linux

Post by jstanley » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC

greggman3 wrote: post #146

jstanley wrote: post #18

Possibly a stupid question, but is it possible to try this out on an Oculus Quest? E.g. with a link cable?

I have Rift not a Quest so I don't know if they're the same but you can pull your desktop and every window in your desktop up in VR on the default Rift OS, even in the middle of running another VR app. I had a browser open in the middle of playing Half Life: Alyx. Did the same on No Man's Sky VR Someone asked if I could watch all the Star Wars movies at the same time. I got 6 trailers running at once in 6 separate vi…

Post by ninkendo » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 10:56 AM UTC

IggleSniggle wrote: post #125

drusepth wrote: post #61

This looks absolutely awesome, but I think there's a bit more to be done RE neck strain and general ergonomics for the vast majority of people. If you are at a desk and/or without a swivel chair, you're pretty limited to a grid of ~9 screens directly in front of you, and even then it looks like you're turning your head a TON to see the outer layer. Some ideas that might help: 1) To use an analogy, could you increase…

Having spent some time in VR in the past, remapping inputs like "the mouse speed of your head" can be super disorienting when you return to the "real world," perhaps dangerously so if spent the majority of your workday in VR. Your brain adapts, and starts to believe at a primal level that "things fall this speed when I drop them," "I move this fast when I walk", "when I point over there, it's at this angle," etc. If…

Post by xtiansimon » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 12:09 PM UTC

georgewsinger wrote: post #9

In case people are curious what it's like to work in VR, here's a demo of me using Simula: https://youtu.be/FWLuwG91HnI I would argue that working in VR is fundamentally superior to working in PCs/laptops. It's basically 10x the screens, focus, and work immersion. Simula's text quality is also very good (getting around the eye fatigue present in older VR Desktops).

Post by ebg13 » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

georgewsinger wrote: post #141

ebg13 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows with affine transformations There's no reason you can't make the windows always perpendicular to the line of sight while still fixing their centers in space.

This actually used to be the default behavior in Simula a few months ago, and worked really well. There's a few use cases where it imposes a tradeoff though (specifically: it makes it hard hold windows in a specific orientation in space when you might accidentally look at them), so we now use a key binding to do this instead.

Post by gavinray » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

georgewsinger wrote: post #101

ianai wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity use for VR is way more compelling to me than any game I’ve ever seen. Maybe that’s why it’s never taken off. We probably need to have an email client people want to use in VR and an IDE before we worry about gamers.

Totally agreed. Our project's "secret": most people think that the future of VR is in games & entertainment, but it's actually in office work. I never would have even purchased a VR headset had it not been for the promise to start working on a productivity environment. But before we can start building the killer VR office apps, we have to get the basic 2D apps working crisply/perfectly, IMO.