We are very happy to tag version 0.1 of the Monado OpenXR runtime for Linux!

Ever since announcing the project at GDC 2019, we have been working on improving the full open source XR stack to a usable state. Do keep in mind, this is a first tag, not a final release so it will contain some tinkering and is not feature complete! To echo the common phrase 'Be warned, here be dragons!'.

Feel free to play around with Monado, and hit us up on our Discord to get help, report bugs or ask about contributing!

Some good things that have happened recently in the land of Monado, here they are:

• The Project North Star driver made by Nova was merged. This is for an open-source optical see-through AR headset. It supports positional tracking using the Intel RealSense T265 tracker. Leap Motion controller support will come at a later date, as UltraLeap hasn't (as of writing) released a Linux version of their driver. If you are interested in Project North Star, why not join their Discord server?
• Initially the Intel RealSense T265 driver was an inbuilt part of the North Star driver, but we seperated that into its own driver so that other devices can reuse it.
• Jakob created a set of scripts aimed at trying out Monado with a small set of demos rather than setting up a development environment. You can find the scripts here.
• Ryan finished up the xr-hardware udev rules and put them into a packagable form. These udev rules set up usb permissions for XR hardware so they can be accessed without root privileges. The rules are also useful for other libraries like OpenHMD. Debian packages, which should also work on Ubuntu, are available for each tag. Contributions and additional packaging welcome!
• Ryan also has worked on Debian packages for the OpenXR loader, layers, and SDK, which are nearly ready for submission. You can find the latest draft of the package on the Debian salsa project for openxr-sdk-source, with CI-built binary package snapshots in the artifacts of the "build" job. Experiences with testing, as well as help figuring out the reproducible-build failure, are welcome!
• Christoph created an initial Arch Linux package which is available for testing. It currently installs the latest development version, but tagged versions will happen in the future.

Project North Star in action. (Image courtesy of @analog_daiter_conversation.)

Of course there are a lot of other things going on, including researching the libsurvive driver and looking into further supporting lighthouse tracking in Monado, continued work on the PSVR and PS Move positional tracking, Wayland support in the compositor, and more to come!

Internships

We currently have internships available for the XR team, If you are interested in working on things like Open Source SLAM research or monoscopic "fish tank" setups, feel free to contact us.

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