A VR Idea: open source system
At least once a week for the past 4 months, I’ve been playing with the Oculus Rift S and it’s been a blast! Not only VR is so much fun as a consumer, but it also is becoming a huge sensation across the tech industry. There is a ton of places where VR in application could improve the usual workflow and become a game changer in conception and design as well as in practical work such as construction site. As all good things have their flaw, at the moment, VR is crucially proprietary. In this article, I want to share with you how can we merge the VR world and the open-source community together and how open-sourcing an operating system could be beneficial for the entire VR industry.
A lot of people talk about open-source in a bad way. I have heard all the arguments against open-source such as “It’s dangerous because everybody can look at the code and thus easily breakable” or “There is a lot of project that get abandoned as a lack of effort or resources”. I will just say that the security concerned is a bit misplaced because as a result of open-sourcing there is a much more likelihood that people notice the security flaws and report it than in proprietary software, where there is a lot less people who can notice the flaw. Then, the lack of resources could also happens in enterprise code which is usually more frequent but driven by profit instead of communautarial problems. If you look at project like Linux, the software suite used to drive PC hardware, it is now everywhere from smartphone to server across the world.
If we were to implement the Linux kernel in a VR Headset launching a brand new distribution or fork of Linux, this could have huge impact across the industry. By being able to choose the operating system you want for your brand new Quest 2, not only will you be able to play without a Facebook account, but you would be able to fully use the hardware you bought. Also, a lot of proprietary solution comes at the price of planned obsolescence of system. This exist because big techs wants you to buy their products again and again.
Linux has a great implication in today’s advancement of PC technology. It has proven to be a harsh competitor to proprietary operating system such as Windows or MacOS which has pushed existing proprietary solutions to do better than their free rival version. I also like to believe that linux has push the PC world to be more customizable and components driven then before. This is why I think that open source driver and operating system could had flexibility, maintanability and be in the best interest of VR.
There is the question of “how” and this is a big one as right now the market is saturated with proprietary solution. Making an operating system based on all the headsets would be challenging. There is a lot of different headset with each their own hardware packed into it there’s the lenses, the display, the processor, the tracking sensor, the externals camera, etc.(In some case like the quest 2, it’s his own computer which means cpu, memory, etc.) On top of that, a lot of driver software would have to be reimplemented like pass-trought cameras, tracking system, graphical environment (or principal menu) and much more. It certainly would be really challenging as there is nothing right now that is openly being made to drive all the hardware.
I think we must go this direction in the near future because VR is being taken more and more seriously by big techs and as a byproduct, store more and more informations on you to be analyzed by third parties. This means that all the data produced can be made to better target you for ads on other services like say Facebook. At the moment, it basically gives big tech access to your camera, your microphone, your movement, your VR play space, your hand size and many other information. Think about the future and how much disruptive this could be. Imagine a world in which the number of second your eye are fixed on an ad can be collected. The power over the people that VR and big data can have is a real threat and should not be taken lightly.
