Lubosz Sarnecki
May 08, 2020
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Today, we are excited to announce the 0.14 release of xrdesktop, the Open Source project which 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.
Most importantly, the most exciting improvement is 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, we also 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 our 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 our release notes.
A lot of progress has happened in terms of packaging, as our packages are landing in Debian Sid. We also provide a PPA for Ubuntu 20.04 with the current 0.14 release. Users of Arch Linux based distros can continue using our well maintained AUR packages.
Here's a short video showing xrdesktop running on Monado with the Valve Index and Index controllers with Christoph's experimental libsurvive branch.
More information on how to run xrdesktop can be found in our wiki. You can also join our Discord channel to ask questions or discuss this latest release.
If you are interested in 3DUI and the desktop in XR, and would like to further support the development and advancement of xrdesktop, please contact us!
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