Lulled into a false sense of security, you'll think you can spot the artificial by the tells that it readily feeds to you. But what happens when deception is the goal?
This is the first standalone headset with an open ecosystem. That's a big deal.
Meta Quests & Apple Visions require developer verification to run your own software, and provide no root access, which slowed down innovation significantly.
There is but one issue with the Lynx XR1 - no one really got it. A few backers randomly got a few pieces but many others (including myself) are still waiting for their device to arrive (and will most likely wait for ever).
This has a serious impact on the developer ecosystem - there are still a few people who got their devices and are doing interesting work, but with so few users actually having devices the community is too small for much progress to be expected.
It's kinda similar to the old Jolla Tablet - it was a very interesting device (an x86 tablet running an open Linux distro in 2013!) but it ended up in too few hands due to funding issues & the amount of Sailfish OS apps actually supporting the tablet (eg. big screen, native x86 builds, etc.) reflected that.
Not to mention Meta abandoned the Quest 1 very quickly. I bought a game when it came out and never got around to playing it (had kids). I tried to play it recently and it no longer even works! £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck.
I guess I can't complain too much given that I got it for free.
I bought an Oculus Go last year for € 30. Its support has been dropped for quite some time, and you can only activate developer mode and sideloading through an old version of the Meta Horizons app [1]. But if you do that, there are 71 GiBs of games to explore on the Internet Archive [2]. Some need patching to remove an online check to a server that no longer exists, but that is easy enough to do with a (regrettably Windows) tool someone published.
The Go is not the best headset of course, but the games are a different style because of the 3DoF tracking without camera's. Somewhat slower paced and sitting down. A style I personally like more.
You can also unlock the device to get root on it [3], which is quite neat, although there doesn't seem to be any homebrew scene at all. Not even the most bare-bones launcher that doesn't require a Meta login.
[1] That doesn't even seem intentional, but it does mean that once the old version of the app can't communicate with Meta servers anymore, any uninitialized Go turns into a brick.
That's not quite true - when did you get your free Quest 1? Only January of this year did Meta officially stop allowing devs to support those devices which IMO is not nice, but probably necessary to put resources towards newer devices since it was extremely outdated and very hard to keep supporting. The Quest 1 launched in May 2019, so it got almost 6 years of updates and if you have one, you can still install older versions of existing apps that choose to support it (which admittedly is very rare). I shut off support for my game back in 2024 when they recommended it, since the device is less than half as powerful as the Quest 2, very few users still had one, and the Q1 was a hard target to hit performance-wise vs newer devices. If you spend $50 to get a Quest 2 you'll get a couple years of updates or even better, spend $299 to get a 3S which is an amazing piece of kit and will probably be supported for at least 5 more years since it just came out.
sorry, maybe i missed it. But how do you know the ecosystem is open?
from the link we don't know if the OS can be changed (might be locked like many Android phones) or if a connected machine is required to run their DRM/Steam. The drivers may also not be open source
from a cursory look
. it seems SteamVR is intended to be used with their DRM platform and isn't open source. Maybe its a bit less limiting vs Meta's offering?
i wouldnt characterize this as an "open ecosystem" though
The key takeaway is that you will rebuild the drivers less often:
1) The stack is mature now, we know what features can exist.
2) For me it's about having the same stack as on a 3588 SBC, so I don't need to download many GB of Android software just to build/run the game.
The distance to getting a open-source driver stack will probably be shorter because of these 2 things, meaning OpenVR/SteamVR being closed is less of a long term issue.
I'm confused. Why would you develop a game on a SBC (that's not powerful enough to do VR)? Why are you not just cross compiling?
It's possible that you can have a full open source stack some day on these goggles.. but I don't think that's something that's obviously going to happen. SteamVR sounds like their version of GooglePlay Services
yeah but is foveated streaming and whatnot going to be opensource, or are we going to have to wait a decade for some grad student to reimplement a half broken version?
Probably, but eye traction is never going to be the focus of indie engines specially if they run on the 3588.
Also about cross compiling that is meaningless as you need hardware to test on and then you should be able to compile on the device you are using to test. Alteast that is what I want, make devices that cannot compile illegal.
Android isn't "just Linux". It's a heavily modified kernel, it's often an even closed source bootloader in many cases and it's completely untrue for userspace, where it incorporates stuff from other OSs (BSDs, etc.). There are huge amounts of blobs.
Yes, there technically is a Linux kernel, but if it's "just Linux" then macOS is "just FreeBSD", because grep -V tells you so, because it has dtrace, because you run (ran?) Docker with effectively FreeBSD's bhyve, etc.
If you wanna spin it even further neither are Safari and Chrome or any other Webkit browsers just Konqueror because they took the layout engine code from KDE (KHTML).
And you can totally install Debian and even OpenBSD, etc. on a Steam Deck and at least the advertisement seems to indicate it won't be all that different for the VR headset.
The problem is that you're talking about the Linux desktop ecosystem whereas the op could be talking about the kernel. Both are just Linux (and the fact we've not evolved our nomenclature to differentiate the two is surprising). Also, fwiw, the android kernel is no longer heavily modified. Most of the custom stuff has been upstreamed.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
that doesn't in any way mean you can install an alternate OS. But i get your point that at least you can run Arch stuff. Isnt Arch ARM support unofficial? (its been ages since i tried) You dont hear of people running it on RPis for example
Well. It doesn't say in any docs or specs, but for what it's worth, Valve's hardware has always been open like that. You're free to install windows on your steam deck, for example.
Valve sponsored asahi linux which was a herculean exercise in running another OS on locked down hardware. They've also sponsored wine and fex. It would be a sudden, steep, and unexpected departure for them to go from being leaders in cross platform OS/hardware support to locking down their own hardware platform. It's just not in their nature. They know their nature is good and they know we know it. That's called trust.
They're being a little vague about it but this collaboration to improve Arch's build service/infrastructure is being done in part to faciliate support of multiple architectures.
iirc it was in Tested coverage that Valve said the hardware supports other OSes. It'd be out of character for Valve not to allow for this.
If it's anything like the Deck, then the version of SteamOS on it won't be locked down in any way whatsoever. You can install Windows or any other distro you want on the Deck with 0 issues (other than regular ones you'd experience anyways on any regular computer, nothing to do with Valve locking anything down).
The steam deck was not arm. Unlike the steam machine page, the steam frame page does not insinuate you can put a custom OS on it. On top of custom drivers which are not necessarily upstreamed, qualcomm socs always require closed source userspace daemons which are coupled to the kernel.
Valve have been working with Linaro to develop FOSS drivers for the Adreno 750. This is necessary, given how heavily Valve leans on having integrations with Mesa whereas Qualcomm's drivers are designed for an Android environment.
I don't see why they wouldn't unlock the bootloader, it wouldn't be the first Qualcomm-based product to allow it and in press interviews they have pressed, quite hard, that the Frame is still a PC.
Even just have direct access to hardware apis is already a big win. On Oculus quest. The closest you can get is running with webxr. But webxr suffer from all those performance problem of web platforms. (And bug of meta softwares. The recent quest browser have bug that prevent you from disabling spatial audio, rendering it not usable for watch video at all)
I just want a "dumb" headset that I can use as a portable private display for my laptop.
That's it.
I don't need 3D, I don't need VR, I don't need weirdass controllers trying to be special. Just give me a damn simple monitor the size of my eyes.
Fuck off with your XR OSes and "vision" for XR, not even Apple could get it fully right, the people in charge everywhere are too out of touch and have no clue where the fuck to go after smartphones.
HUD glasses kind of suck since having a display oriented to your head is uncomfortable. Adding 3DOF tracking only partially solves that, so you go 6DOF to maximize optical/vestibular comfort. Now you're rendering a virtual display within a virtual environment, but look at all that wasted space! So add more virtual monitors! Now you need some mechanism to manage them, so you add that and now you have a windowing system... so why are you rendering virtual monitors with fixed space desktops when you can just be rendering the application windows themselves?
The best portable private display for your laptop will inevitably be a 6DOF tracked headset with an XR native desktop.
Yes sorry about my excessive use of French in the comment, I didn't mean it has to be a fixed 1:1 slab of the realspace screen, desktop app windows in XR space would be ideal, but none of the products seem to be able to get it all right yet.
Apple's visionOS comes close but it's crippled by the trademark Apple overcontrolling.
Then this is actually much closer than previous headsets?
There is a lot going on to render the desktop in a tracked 3D space, all that has to happen somewhere. If you're expecting to plug a HDMI cable into a headset and have a good time then I think you're underestimating how much work is being done.
OpenVR and OpenXR are really great software layers that help that all work out.
I highly recommend this talk at the American Astronomical Society from last year, which talks about the engineering culture at NASA and why Artemis has been slower than Apollo so far.
This is Destin of SmarterEveryDay. This is a very good speech, very courageous and has implications for all of society.
American society seems to be more and more controlled by people in positions where they cannot fail. The example that originally put this idea in my head was the Mozilla CEO who, oversaw a year during which Firefox usership fell, and Mozilla workers were fired, and then the CEO received a pay raise. A job where it's not possible to fail. You get paid no matter what, probably get a raise.
In the video Destin keeps asking "we're going right?", throughout the whole video, and the truth is everyone in the room is hesitant to say yes.
Destin keeps narrating and apologizing for his own speech (because he doesn't want to burn every bridge he has with NASA), but history will make Destin look like a prophet I think. I think this speech is worthy of the history books.
Really? It’s eye opening. But Destin seems to miss the point.
We’re not trying to go back to the Moon, one and done. That was Apollo. We’re trying to build a system that reduces the repeat cost of Moon access, with medium-term plans for permanent settlement. (Like in Antarctica. Not The Expanse.)
His criticism of Artemis is on point. But his anchoring to Apollo is bewilderingly blind. If we’re just redoing Apollo, the programme should be defunded. (If a NASA administrator set that as a goal, I’d argue the NASA manned spaceflight programme might need to be overhauled.)
> everyone in the room is hesitant to say yes
This is like Trump complaining his generals won’t laugh at his jokes.
These are senior NASA scientists. They’re listening to a talk, not a rally.
Lol this is a rhetorical trick. A joke is expected in the middle of a speech. Audience responses to a question generally aren't. If you were speaking to all the mathematicians in the world and decided halfway through to say "What's the integral of e^x dx?" you'd likely get silence in response. "OMG most mathematicians don't know how to integrate e^x holy shit humanity is doomed".
He asked "what is this?" at some point, referring to a diagram, and someone immediately answers "a PID controller".
My claim remains that there are many who are working on Artemis that quietly believe it will not succeed. History will eventually reveal the truth about this; and yeah, I might be wrong, we will see.
I searched the transcript for "we're going, right?" and stopped it at the first section (here I rewound a little for you) https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?t=1270
I'll address this to the third parties in the room who are not me or you: Click through and listen and if you are convinced it's a question you can go with Buttons840. If you're not convinced it's a question you can go with me. But it'll take you 10 seconds max. Worth it for you to see it yourself. No need to let anyone convince you.
Genuine question : why are hyperscalers like OpenAI and Oracle raising hundreds of billions ? Isn't their current infra enough ?
Naive napkin math : a GB200 NVL72 is 3M$, can serve ~7000 concurrent users of gpt4o (rumored to be 1400B A200B), and ChatGPT has ~10M concurrent peak users. That's only ~4B$ of infra.
Are they trying to brute-force AGI with larger models, knowing that gpt4.5 failed at this, and deepseek & qwen3 proved small MoE can reach frontier performance ? Or is my math 2 orders of magnitude off ?
They are raising the money because they can. While these businesses may go bankrupt, many people who ran these businesses will make hundreds of millions of dollars.
Either that or AGI is not the goal, rather it’s they want to function for, and profit off of
, a surveillance state that might be much more valuable in the short term.
As a rule: inference is very profitable, frontier R&D is the money pit.
They need the money to keep pushing the envelope and building better AIs. And the better their AIs get, the more infra they'll need to keep up with the inference demand.
GPT-4.5's issue was that it wasn't deployable at scale - unlike the more experimental reasoning models, which delivered better task-specific performance without demanding that much more compute.
Scale is inevitable though - we'll see production AIs reach the scale of GPT-4.5 pretty soon. Newer hardware like GB200 enables that kind of thing.
Their valuation projection spreadsheets call for it. If they touch those spreadsheets, a bunch of other things break (including their ability to be super-duper-crazy-rich), so don’t touch them.
This is exciting, exceptionally the firmware & binary blob foundations that are the biggest roadblock.
Concerning the UI, I wish we had another attempt at a web-based mobile OS. FirefoxOS was too early, but APIs are much more mature now, and WASM offers great performance for low-level stuff. I might work on this full time when I retire.
It's being advertised as being used for generic disaster recovery, where it's beneficial to be human-shaped (human infrastructure is designed for humans, so its easier to interface with it if the robot is human-shaped too), so they just strapped some jets on it to take it to the disaster zone itself
>It's being advertised as being used for generic disaster recovery, where it's beneficial to be human-shaped (human infrastructure is designed for humans, so its easier to interface with it if the robot is human-shaped too)
Ummmm, disaster recovery is hard precisely because the infrastructure (e.g. a collapsed building) ceased to be suitable for humans.
The way in which it isn't suitable for humans depends on the disaster though. If somewhere is flooded or on fire, a humanoid robot will probably be able to navigate it better than a quadrupedal one. If the building is collapsed, sure
It's proably a popular word for tech workers fans of the american space race.