At least for pcvr and quest, the OpenXR standard seems to be well adopted
We're a non-profit, and our code is entirely under the Apache License. Not only nothing is monetized, but the architecture is extremely monetization-unfriendly, and we ripped out what little there was in the original code. Oddly enough the codebase was built by a company with commercial ambitions (High Fidelity), but unsurprisingly failed to make any money.
So we picked that up and are continuing development.
So if you want freedom, I believe we're at the top of the list. Everything is open, nothing is centralized. Not even accounts are required. You can just easily set this up on your own hardware with no outside dependencies and do whatever you want.
Vircadia started off well, but then the lead decided to go all in on crypto. Pretty much everyone just left and made a new project, while Vircadia as far as I can tell has almost no development going on. Or if there's anything it's not public.
Vircadia's web functionality technically works, and I think it's an okay effort for the tiny team that remains, but it's really at the proof of concept stage. It's slow, misses a whole lot of functionality including very basic things, and has extremely obvious bugs like falling through the floor and the camera getting stuck easily.
So far our take is that it's too broken to just merge as-is, somebody would need to have at least some interest in fixing it up a bit. And for the time being there isn't, and on Vircadia's side the development of it slowed down dramatically.
It's not impossible in the future, but so far things just don't line up right. And it'd be a huge project. The web client is its own thing written from scratch, it'd be an enormous amount of work to make it half as functional as the desktop one.
Since you seem rather active with the project, do you know whether openxr is on the roadmap, or if you're stuck with openvr for the foreseeable future?
Even that would take some work. We've made a few improvements to the core code that Vircadia didn't and that would involve adapting the web client code to match.
I'm also worried about the effects it could have on the project. Will people start demanding that it be fixed now? What about when there's a security issue found in it? Will there be drama with Vircadia?
Merging the code means taking on a responsibility, and at the very least we'd have to properly review it and make sure it's good enough people are going to want to work on it.
So far I believe that this has to approached with some good planning and somebody willing to work on that code to account for any problems that might arise. So it'd help a lot if anybody was interested in maintaining the code.
> Since you seem rather active with the project, do you know whether openxr is on the roadmap, or if you're stuck with openvr for the foreseeable future?
Good news! It's been in the works for a while, and a PR for OpenXR was opened 5 days ago: https://github.com/overte-org/overte/pull/1129
If you're interested in testing that, you're welcome to give it a try. If you need any help getting started, we have Matrix, Discord and an in-world meeting in 5 hours from the time of this post.
OpenXR is "Vulkan for VR" by the way, every major HMD vendors runtime supports it. Though only SteamVR supports Linux, and there's mess with support of advanced tech like asynchronous reprojection, I hope Monado which is "Mesa for VR" will succeed. And Firefox gets WebXR.
It feels like all the VR platforms are quite locked down and funneling users to app stores - so if you want something simple and not performant then a framework that works through the browser would in theory get traction more easily
Tangentially, I also always quite liked the idea of webpages being VR spaces. Has more of a "metaverse" vibe to it