Microsoft deprecated their VR framework (WMD), and therefore many VR headsets compatible with this standard are now effectively broken.
Luckily, the open source community has started reverse engineering the hardware and is now able to support most of these headsets through a project called Monado. Monado runs exclusively on linux at the moment.
Does anyone here have some experience with Monado? Is it worth getting a cheap VR headset and give it a try? I heard that it is still not very stable, but there isn’t much information available.
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You can take a look at the Linux VR Adventures Wiki, it’s the best resource available right now for VR on Linux (full disclosure: I’m biased since I’m part of the lvra community/devs 🤓)
Yes, albeit with Vive Pro. The good: much better motion smoothness and reprojection as opposed to Linux SteamVR
The neutral: Monado is just a runtime, you need to get additional software to it, like WlxOverlay-S for desktop preview
The bad: Most older games utilise OpenVR. Monado is an OpenXR runtime, meaning games have to be translated from one to another. A software for this - OpenComposite, is not feature complete and your game compatibility will be a hit or miss. VRChat works okay, H3VR and No Man’s Sky work but you can’t rebind your controls. Some games don’t work at all, like Boneworks.
Newer games however are running with OpenXR and there your mileage will be much better. Phasmophobia, Bonelab and Pavlov are such games and those work flawlessly
This might help, it runs openvr games with openxr: https://gitlab.com/znixian/OpenOVR
i used it before, it works pretty well.
It is exactly what I’ve mentioned
Sorry, i didn’t notice.
The last time I checked, which was not very long ago, Monado has partial experimental support for WMR headsets with head tracking only and does not support WMR controllers. You can probably work around this by using Vive controllers or similar, but then you’re back to using base stations just for the controllers and at that rate you may as well get an entire Vive/Valve setup and be done with it.
Their changelog on one of their last releases says
Added WinMR driver, it supports most headsets and controllers. Controllers can be connected both via host-Bluetooth and tunneled with the onboard radio chip. By default has 3DoF tracking, it can do 6DoF if used with the Basalt SLAM tracking software. Distortion is there but doesn’t work perfectly on all hardware, best results is on Reverb G2.
This isn’t really understandable for me as a VR newbie ;)
Edit: Maybe I’ll just get a Vive/Vive pro. They’re also cheap and probably enough to try it out without hours of hassle
Well, that’s encouraging. I happen to own a Reverb G2 so maybe I should check it out and report back.
Anyway, the 3DoF is three degrees of freedom, i.e. you can rotate your viewpoint on a fixed point in terms of pitch (up and down), yaw (side to side), and roll (tilt your head and look at things sideways and upside down). 6DoF adds the other three axes, i.e. in addition to all of the above you can also walk around and have a non-fixed viewpoint – which in terms of actual VR gameplay is almost certainly what you want. Enabling this via Basalt (there are two other SLAM options as well, apparently) is something I have no experience with.
The WMR controllers are connected to your machine via Bluetooth and at least in the case of the Reverb G2, there is a built in Bluetooth receiver in the headset itself which in normal operation, i.e. in Windows, means the entire ensemble can act as a single all in one solution without having to use any additional outboard hardware. Unless there is some kind of technical reason not to I can’t see why you wouldn’t use it that way versus using a secondary Bluetooth dongle, but I haven’t tired recently either.
Last time I looked the WMR support was in beta or something and it supported only the headsets, not the controllers. So at least this is progress.
Thanks for your explanation! Please let me know if you succeed with your Reverb G2.
