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I tried this with the Viture Pro XR glasses last year and it sucks. Can't use it with Linux, except in dumb monitor mode. No head tracking unless you're using a

I tried this with the Viture Pro XR glasses last year and it sucks. Can't use it with Linux, except in dumb monitor mode. No head tracking unless you're using a supported OS. Android app sucks becaus you can't use it with any old app, eg productivity apps (their app is like a demo of head tracking that only supports stuff like YouTube and local media). Maybe I should have purchased the Xreals?

0x400000 2y ago
The open-source Breezy GNOME is worth a try. It has head tracking and multi-monitor in beta with GNOME DE. https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  open source that requires a commercial license. and the drivers link to a repo that 404. think i will pass.
  - mbreese 2y ago
    Which is particular odd to have a publicly available GPL repo. For this project, it looks like anyone could just comment out those sections of code that check for a license and redistribute. Or is there another binary somehow required and wasn’t clear in my 2 minutes of searching?
  - mzajc 2y ago
    It gets even worse, looks like their driver makes calls to google analytics.[1] I'd stay away. The README doesn't even mention it, and the promise that "your personal data will never be shared, sold, or distributed in any form." certainly sounds misleading when you consider this. [1] https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver/blob/main/src/plugins/metrics.c https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver/blob/main/src/plugi...
    - rendaw 2y ago
      https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver/discussions/89 https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver/discussions/89
  - rendaw 2y ago
    Which link? All the links I could find worked.
regularfry 2y ago
The first gen XReal glasses are similar in that you need software running on the host to get anything other than dumb monitor mode. With these newer models they've moved a bunch of the functionality into hardware on the glasses themselves, so you get virtual monitor and wider device support out of the box. There are a couple of projects that are trying to get better open source support of the Airs on linux; I've not kept up with their progress.
- arend321 2y ago
  Waiting for the XReal One Pro to vibe code using Aider and Samsung DeX in a Termux terminal while walking my countries national parks (just something I would like to try)
  - benjiro 2y ago
    > I’ve found that simply converting a standard, normalized PostgreSQL database doesn’t work well in practice. Instead, you need to design your database with YugabyteDB’s distributed architecture in mind. I wanted to reply to your previous posting but ycombinator does not allow for comments on older posts. To put it simply, we spend almost 3 weeks trying out YB for your own usage and ran into massive performance issues. The main issue seem to be that anything sharded (what it is by default), will perform sort/filter/and other operations only after retrieving sufficient data from those shards. The results is that this massive impacts data. The YB teams somewhat hides this by spending mass amounts of resources on Seq Scans, or require you to explicite design Index's pre-sorted. In our experience, a basic 3 node YB cluster barely does 7000 inserts/s, where as Pg instance does easily 100.000+ insert/second (with replication). Of course there is the cheating. Like "look how we insert 1 million / second" (3x), with 100 heavy AWS nodes. Ignoring that they are just inserting rows with no generated IDs ;) If you put that in front of pq, your easily hitting 150.000 insert / second on a single node. There are issue like trigrams taking up 8x the space compared to pg trigrams (no row level packing). Materialized joins that are pre-sorted, are not respected as inserts are done by hash distribution. So item 1 can be on node 3, item 2 on node 1, ... what needs to be fetched and resorted, killing the performance benefits. A optimized materialized join pulls out data between 0.2ms to 10ms, where we have seen YB doing between 6ms to minutes. On the exact same dataset, inserted the same way, ... on only 100 million rows of data. What you expect to be those databases their playgrounds. Plugs that are broken in the new 2.25 version. We lost multiple times t-master and t-server nodes. Ironically, the loss of the t-master was not even reported in the main UI. What can only be described as amateuristisch. CockroachDB is another series of similar issue with latency, insert speed, and more ... combined with the new horrible "we spy on you free license, that we may or may not extend every year." We found CRDB more mature in a sense and less a Frankenstein's monster of parts, but lacking in postgres features (or working differently). In essence, as long as you use them as mongoDB like denormalized databases that can run SQL, great. The issues really start when your combining normalization and expecting performance. And the resources that both use means you need to scale to a 20x cluster, just to reach the equivalent of a single pq node. And each of those YB/CRDB nodes, need to have twice the resources then the pq node. In general, my advice is to just run pq, replicate/patroni, maybe scale to more pq clusters where you separate tables to different clusters. Use the build in postgres_fdw to create materialized read nodes to offload pressure and load balance. Unless you are running reddit at scale, the benefits of YB/CRDB totally outway the tons of disadvantages. The uptime, easy of upgrading, and geo-distribution is handy, not going to lie. But its software that really only gets benefits for companies that reach a special demand or high scale and even then. I remember that reddit ran (still runs?) on barely a few DB servers. What is even worse, is that as you stated, you need to design your database so much around YB/CRDB. that you can use the above mentioned pq solutions to get way more gains. I hope this responds is of use.
gattr 2y ago
I'd like to try this kind of setup (coding from a lounge chair with just a keyboard tray & trackball, yay!), "dumb monitor" would be sufficient - but since switching to high-DPI displays in 2016 I really need this to be 4K.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
  If your monitor keeps following your head movements, even teeny tiny ones, it gets annoying very fast.
  - raffraffraff 2y ago
    Yep, can't get past it
- ytjohn 2y ago
  I did this with nreal air glasses (now xreal air), specifically for coding. Most uses cases for these type of glasses is around media consumption, so I was taking a bit of a leap when doing it for coding/heavy text usage. There are two modes. One is fixed so that the virtual monitor stays in one spot on the lenses. The single virtual monitor stays directly in front of you. The other is floating, which basically keeps the virtual monitor in one spot and you can turn your head to look away. This mode also lets you set up 3 virtual monitors side by side so you can turn to look at them. It uses head tracking to basically shift the image in the opposite direction you turn your head. In both cases, the screen does move, and this is super relevant when looking at text and down at status bars. The fixed one is better because it moves relative to your head, but both cases have some amount of jitter. I found the best case coding scenario is the fixed monitor (no head tracking), and being in a seat wth head rest and you can press your head back into it. This minimizes your head movement, which minimizes how much the text moves about. The downside is that we're used to looking up and down at the screen, so you want to set the monitor at a proper distance so you can look up and down with just your eyes. You really want to shrink the monitor to a size close to that of a laptop. I ultimately ended up not liking the experience very much. No matter what, you're gonna end up with some amount of text movement. There is also a bit of light saturation bleed through (old CRT style). Putting the blackout blinders on helps a lot, but the projected nature remains an issue. Essentially only usable long term in a recliner or a car seat with headrest. Unlike the author, I am using a work provided laptop and I have that with me anyways. There was coolness to leaving the laptop in my backpack and just bringing the glasses up via wire - but to actually do anything, I need a keyboard. Which means taking along a Lenovo's thinkpoint trackpad keyboard (really great backpack keyboard); or pulling out the laptop. The newer ones, like Xreal One from the article might be a better experience. A coworker had the air 2 pros and used them for travel. He said he didn't really notice the things I did, so maybe it was a improved experience even with that version. But he mostly worked in office documents and only occasional terminal work. When traveling and using the glasses, it was almost all "office docs", and only for short periods of time. For me - I am going to wait and be a slow adopter to move to a new version.
hoppp 2y ago
I have xreal air 2 that gets zero use. I dont recommend them that much, working on a laptop is better and since they constantly making newer versions its worth the wait to not buy anything current and wait for the next one which which will be better. I had the buyers regret, wishing I waited longer for the newer version but unless I buy a steam deck to play games Ill probably never use them.
- pridkett 2y ago
  Ditto. I bought them because I travel a lot for work and TVs at hotels are always a mess when it comes to HDMI in. I use them on maybe 1 of 4 flights I’m on (usually on SteamDeck with XR plug-in in Decky), and rarely at the hotels. The only time they were really helpful for me was one flight when I had to work on some sensitive content and the person next to me was obviously trying to shoulder surf me. Maybe it would be more productive if I had a newer iPhone with USB -C or the XReal One glasses. But having to use all the dongles to get to go from iPhone to lightning/HDMI adapter to HDMI to USB-C cable to original XReal Beam (which is way underpowered), to USB-C to glasses, that’s a ton of cables. And some forget, you’ve now got to pair your AirPods with the Beam! Ughh. It’s a little better with the Beam Pro. It’s faster and generally a good experience, but it’s still another device and still doesn’t have a good way to stream 3D content from Plex/NAS. Ugh. That being said, when I put in the effort, the picture is very nice.
  - NBJack 2y ago
    The iPhone sucks with most if not all AR glasses solutions. Most flagship Android devices just need a single cord. Apple made their choices, and it sucks.
    - pridkett 2y ago
      Newer iPhones and the XReal One glasses are just fine and in part with the admittedly mediocre experience of Android devices. Let’s not pretend that Nebula on Android is good. I’ve got a Beam Pro. It also is not great. SteamDeck is really the best experience I’ve found.
- 2y ago
georgewsinger 2y ago
SimulaVR[1][2] is releasing our standalone (belt-strappable) compute packs this year, which will (ii) come pre-installed with our FOSS Linux VR Desktop compositor and (ii) work with AR headsets like the Rokid Max series (and potentially the XReal headsets). So basically: you'll get full Linux Desktop apps in AR (not just Android ones) with actual VR window management (not just "dumb monitor mode"). [1] I know we're taking forever D: But we intend for this to be a way to release an intermediate product (which we've been making anyway for our full headsets). [2] Our next blog update will be about this. Here's a video video preview: https://youtube.com/shorts/Y67D8DkqScU?si=LpdSpjmfGn2k2rxP https://youtube.com/shorts/Y67D8DkqScU?si=LpdSpjmfGn2k2rxP
psyclobe 2y ago
No Linux? Full stop.
rendaw 2y ago
The drivers here https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver mark Viture as "recommended" with the best support. I do see some mention that head tracking is a desktop responsibility, but I presume that means some support in the driver... do you have more informatio non this?
vaxman 2y ago
If only there were credit-card sized, LiPol-battery powered 'puter with built-in wireless networking and a GPU-accelerated remote streaming app that output HDMI, all made and distributed by a Five Eyes alliance country for less than $15 each. If only... /s The choice of a trusted HMD is a little more complex, but very solvable ;)

0x400000 2y ago

The open-source Breezy GNOME is worth a try. It has head tracking and multi-monitor in beta with GNOME DE. https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop

1oooqooq 2y ago
open source that requires a commercial license. and the drivers link to a repo that 404. think i will pass.
- mbreese 2y ago
  Which is particular odd to have a publicly available GPL repo. For this project, it looks like anyone could just comment out those sections of code that check for a license and redistribute. Or is there another binary somehow required and wasn’t clear in my 2 minutes of searching?
- mzajc 2y ago
  It gets even worse, looks like their driver makes calls to google analytics.[1] I'd stay away. The README doesn't even mention it, and the promise that "your personal data will never be shared, sold, or distributed in any form." certainly sounds misleading when you consider this. [1] https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver/blob/main/src/plugins/metrics.c https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver/blob/main/src/plugi...
  - rendaw 2y ago
    https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver/discussions/89 https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver/discussions/89
- rendaw 2y ago
  Which link? All the links I could find worked.

regularfry 2y ago

The first gen XReal glasses are similar in that you need software running on the host to get anything other than dumb monitor mode. With these newer models they've moved a bunch of the functionality into hardware on the glasses themselves, so you get virtual monitor and wider device support out of the box. There are a couple of projects that are trying to get better open source support of the Airs on linux; I've not kept up with their progress.

arend321 2y ago
Waiting for the XReal One Pro to vibe code using Aider and Samsung DeX in a Termux terminal while walking my countries national parks (just something I would like to try)
- benjiro 2y ago
  > I’ve found that simply converting a standard, normalized PostgreSQL database doesn’t work well in practice. Instead, you need to design your database with YugabyteDB’s distributed architecture in mind. I wanted to reply to your previous posting but ycombinator does not allow for comments on older posts. To put it simply, we spend almost 3 weeks trying out YB for your own usage and ran into massive performance issues. The main issue seem to be that anything sharded (what it is by default), will perform sort/filter/and other operations only after retrieving sufficient data from those shards. The results is that this massive impacts data. The YB teams somewhat hides this by spending mass amounts of resources on Seq Scans, or require you to explicite design Index's pre-sorted. In our experience, a basic 3 node YB cluster barely does 7000 inserts/s, where as Pg instance does easily 100.000+ insert/second (with replication). Of course there is the cheating. Like "look how we insert 1 million / second" (3x), with 100 heavy AWS nodes. Ignoring that they are just inserting rows with no generated IDs ;) If you put that in front of pq, your easily hitting 150.000 insert / second on a single node. There are issue like trigrams taking up 8x the space compared to pg trigrams (no row level packing). Materialized joins that are pre-sorted, are not respected as inserts are done by hash distribution. So item 1 can be on node 3, item 2 on node 1, ... what needs to be fetched and resorted, killing the performance benefits. A optimized materialized join pulls out data between 0.2ms to 10ms, where we have seen YB doing between 6ms to minutes. On the exact same dataset, inserted the same way, ... on only 100 million rows of data. What you expect to be those databases their playgrounds. Plugs that are broken in the new 2.25 version. We lost multiple times t-master and t-server nodes. Ironically, the loss of the t-master was not even reported in the main UI. What can only be described as amateuristisch. CockroachDB is another series of similar issue with latency, insert speed, and more ... combined with the new horrible "we spy on you free license, that we may or may not extend every year." We found CRDB more mature in a sense and less a Frankenstein's monster of parts, but lacking in postgres features (or working differently). In essence, as long as you use them as mongoDB like denormalized databases that can run SQL, great. The issues really start when your combining normalization and expecting performance. And the resources that both use means you need to scale to a 20x cluster, just to reach the equivalent of a single pq node. And each of those YB/CRDB nodes, need to have twice the resources then the pq node. In general, my advice is to just run pq, replicate/patroni, maybe scale to more pq clusters where you separate tables to different clusters. Use the build in postgres_fdw to create materialized read nodes to offload pressure and load balance. Unless you are running reddit at scale, the benefits of YB/CRDB totally outway the tons of disadvantages. The uptime, easy of upgrading, and geo-distribution is handy, not going to lie. But its software that really only gets benefits for companies that reach a special demand or high scale and even then. I remember that reddit ran (still runs?) on barely a few DB servers. What is even worse, is that as you stated, you need to design your database so much around YB/CRDB. that you can use the above mentioned pq solutions to get way more gains. I hope this responds is of use.

gattr 2y ago

I'd like to try this kind of setup (coding from a lounge chair with just a keyboard tray & trackball, yay!), "dumb monitor" would be sufficient - but since switching to high-DPI displays in 2016 I really need this to be 4K.

WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
If your monitor keeps following your head movements, even teeny tiny ones, it gets annoying very fast.
- raffraffraff 2y ago
  Yep, can't get past it
ytjohn 2y ago
I did this with nreal air glasses (now xreal air), specifically for coding. Most uses cases for these type of glasses is around media consumption, so I was taking a bit of a leap when doing it for coding/heavy text usage. There are two modes. One is fixed so that the virtual monitor stays in one spot on the lenses. The single virtual monitor stays directly in front of you. The other is floating, which basically keeps the virtual monitor in one spot and you can turn your head to look away. This mode also lets you set up 3 virtual monitors side by side so you can turn to look at them. It uses head tracking to basically shift the image in the opposite direction you turn your head. In both cases, the screen does move, and this is super relevant when looking at text and down at status bars. The fixed one is better because it moves relative to your head, but both cases have some amount of jitter. I found the best case coding scenario is the fixed monitor (no head tracking), and being in a seat wth head rest and you can press your head back into it. This minimizes your head movement, which minimizes how much the text moves about. The downside is that we're used to looking up and down at the screen, so you want to set the monitor at a proper distance so you can look up and down with just your eyes. You really want to shrink the monitor to a size close to that of a laptop. I ultimately ended up not liking the experience very much. No matter what, you're gonna end up with some amount of text movement. There is also a bit of light saturation bleed through (old CRT style). Putting the blackout blinders on helps a lot, but the projected nature remains an issue. Essentially only usable long term in a recliner or a car seat with headrest. Unlike the author, I am using a work provided laptop and I have that with me anyways. There was coolness to leaving the laptop in my backpack and just bringing the glasses up via wire - but to actually do anything, I need a keyboard. Which means taking along a Lenovo's thinkpoint trackpad keyboard (really great backpack keyboard); or pulling out the laptop. The newer ones, like Xreal One from the article might be a better experience. A coworker had the air 2 pros and used them for travel. He said he didn't really notice the things I did, so maybe it was a improved experience even with that version. But he mostly worked in office documents and only occasional terminal work. When traveling and using the glasses, it was almost all "office docs", and only for short periods of time. For me - I am going to wait and be a slow adopter to move to a new version.

hoppp 2y ago

I have xreal air 2 that gets zero use. I dont recommend them that much, working on a laptop is better and since they constantly making newer versions its worth the wait to not buy anything current and wait for the next one which which will be better. I had the buyers regret, wishing I waited longer for the newer version but unless I buy a steam deck to play games Ill probably never use them.

pridkett 2y ago
Ditto. I bought them because I travel a lot for work and TVs at hotels are always a mess when it comes to HDMI in. I use them on maybe 1 of 4 flights I’m on (usually on SteamDeck with XR plug-in in Decky), and rarely at the hotels. The only time they were really helpful for me was one flight when I had to work on some sensitive content and the person next to me was obviously trying to shoulder surf me. Maybe it would be more productive if I had a newer iPhone with USB -C or the XReal One glasses. But having to use all the dongles to get to go from iPhone to lightning/HDMI adapter to HDMI to USB-C cable to original XReal Beam (which is way underpowered), to USB-C to glasses, that’s a ton of cables. And some forget, you’ve now got to pair your AirPods with the Beam! Ughh. It’s a little better with the Beam Pro. It’s faster and generally a good experience, but it’s still another device and still doesn’t have a good way to stream 3D content from Plex/NAS. Ugh. That being said, when I put in the effort, the picture is very nice.
- NBJack 2y ago
  The iPhone sucks with most if not all AR glasses solutions. Most flagship Android devices just need a single cord. Apple made their choices, and it sucks.
  - pridkett 2y ago
    Newer iPhones and the XReal One glasses are just fine and in part with the admittedly mediocre experience of Android devices. Let’s not pretend that Nebula on Android is good. I’ve got a Beam Pro. It also is not great. SteamDeck is really the best experience I’ve found.
2y ago

georgewsinger 2y ago

SimulaVR[1][2] is releasing our standalone (belt-strappable) compute packs this year, which will (ii) come pre-installed with our FOSS Linux VR Desktop compositor and (ii) work with AR headsets like the Rokid Max series (and potentially the XReal headsets). So basically: you'll get full Linux Desktop apps in AR (not just Android ones) with actual VR window management (not just "dumb monitor mode"). [1] I know we're taking forever D: But we intend for this to be a way to release an intermediate product (which we've been making anyway for our full headsets). [2] Our next blog update will be about this. Here's a video video preview: https://youtube.com/shorts/Y67D8DkqScU?si=LpdSpjmfGn2k2rxP https://youtube.com/shorts/Y67D8DkqScU?si=LpdSpjmfGn2k2rxP

psyclobe 2y ago

No Linux? Full stop.

rendaw 2y ago

The drivers here https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver https://github.com/wheaney/XRLinuxDriver mark Viture as "recommended" with the best support. I do see some mention that head tracking is a desktop responsibility, but I presume that means some support in the driver... do you have more informatio non this?

vaxman 2y ago

If only there were credit-card sized, LiPol-battery powered 'puter with built-in wireless networking and a GPU-accelerated remote streaming app that output HDMI, all made and distributed by a Five Eyes alliance country for less than $15 each. If only... /s The choice of a trusted HMD is a little more complex, but very solvable ;)