Joe shared a link to a Cyberdeck project with me and it struck-up a conversation about various Cyberdeck projects I've experimented with over the years. From the first Commodore I spray-painted and hung from a strap to more recent experiments with phone-based head-mounted displays , I've been hacking on 'decks and other virtual reality computing systems for over 20 years .
My last attempt consisted of a 3d-printeed HMD using a phone for all of the electronics, and it worked surprisingly well but the closed nature of writing software for smartphones limited my options for developing the applications I wanted to use and I set the project aside. However I now have a Pinephone , a (mostly) open-hardware phone that runs Linux, so I want to revisit this approach and see how hard it would be to build a 'deck around this device.
Hardware-wise there's not a lot to do. I have a cheap smartphone HMD that I picked-up at Walgreens for about $10 that should work fine to hold the Pinephone, and this is enough to get started. I'll add a keyboard, and possibly a dataglove , but that can come after I've confirmed that I actually have the coding chops to write the software I want to make the whole thing useful.
To that end what I have in mind seems simple enough, but I've yet to find anyone whose written it already. I need a basic framework for creating and immersive 3d environment, capable of basic navigation and loading 3d objects using some standard format (I'm most familiar with STL from my 3d printing work but any standard is fine). The key thing that I need to be able to do to "bootstrap" the system is the ability to run terminal emulators inside the virtual environment.
This one simple feature makes the virtual reality immediately useful in a very practical sense, because it means I can have a portable computer with an infinate number and size of displays. More importantly it means that I can build the VR world from inside itself, and I beleive that this sort of immersive development process is essential to the evolution of virtual reality applications (I've written about this extensively but can't find the links at the moment...).
Right now I'm looking into Python-based options, and one that looks promising is BlenderVR . I don't know much about it yet but this is where I'm going to start looking. If it can do what I need, and if the performance is acceptable on the Pinephone, I may have something more interesting to demonstrate soon.