The next steps for Relativty — the Open-Source VR Headset
Over the past days, I’ve received a lot of emails asking about the future of Relativty’s maintainership. There were then messages posted on our Discord’s server asking about my absence from day-to-day decisions and how this was slowing down Relativty. From this, the community requested that I clarify my vision for the project’s future and initiate the debate about our decisional power structure. So that’s what this open letter is about.
Why Gabriel and I built Relativty,
In middle school, Gabriel and I were really interested in VR, and when we got to high school, we built our own VR headset from the ground up. It cost us around $100 and was the only way for us to afford a VR headset.
My theory is that VR democratization needs inexpensive hardware and abundant content. This framework can be seen with the computer mouse, which went from costing $300 to $15, and which went from being almost useless to being the norm.
We open-sourced our hardware architecture and SDK because we wanted to at least try to help create the building blocks of affordable hardware and tools for content production.
What we have achieved
Once the project was out there, we went from the two of us working alone in my bedroom to a community of hundreds. I spent the first months building a community and leading the project’s maintenance and improvement along with Gabriel.
With the community’s help, the list of games compatible with the headset grew from two to hundreds. Check out the relativty-OSVR-plugin.
Contributors came up with new and better designs — like TheYxxy’s distribution, which I appreciate a lot — and they quickly upgraded the core’s code and expanded compatibility with more Arduino boards.
It’s hard to tell exactly how many people built the headset — there are over 200 emails in my inbox of people mentioning their build of the headset. It’s easier to say that we inspired a lot of makers and VR enthusiasts, and half a million people went through our GitHub and Medium content.
Why I don’t have as much time for Relativty anymore
During all of this, I didn’t talk about my situation and I disappointed some of you, my community, by being increasingly in the shadows and slower to respond.
I like to focus and go deeply into subjects, and I’ve been working on a new project over the past months (I even dropped out of school) that has resulted in increasing unavailability.
I’m now diving more into the content aspect of my democratization framework. I spend my time studying Machine Learning and testing new ways to produce content. As VR hardware is becoming cheaper and cheaper, providing the infrastructure to help produce the content that will result in more incentives for the general public to buy HMDs is, I think, crucial.
The new governance model
The signals of dissatisfaction with the lack of an effective governance model were there: people created a Patreon account for Relativty, an alternative website, an alternative repository, and stopped using Relativty’s GitHub.
So here is Relativty’s new governance model. My role is now to embody Relativty’s philosophy of helping democratize VR by creating building blocks of affordable hardware architecture and tools to create content.
Then there is the Committee, consisting of a small group of contributors: TheYxxy, Lost Garden (Haruun), Hugo Garritsen, and Кзобьтовскый, who are able to make decisions and lead the community forward according to my philosophy.
This small group will work to achieve consensus, act as leaders, and when needed, will come back and talk to me.
What matters for the future of Relativty
I’m really enthusiastic about the future of Relativty. The amount of work yet to be accomplished is growing with the added ambitions of new contributors working alongside early ones.
I’ll be more active on the server and will be talking every week with the Commitee to ensure everything is going well and help them articulate and execute the vision.
Here are the goals for the next 3 months:
-Achieving more accurate 3D tracking of the headset based on 9DOF IMU and sensor fusion. Adding camera’s processing movements is definitely an option to consider.
-Release a pre-Alpha standalone Headset running on Android. It is easy to run the headset on an ARM Cortex A7 CPU using our custom Unity libraries, which Gabriel and Sensei have done in the past. The greater challenge is to achieve this for regular Android VR games.
A team is also working on substituting Fresnel Lenses with a Biconvex lens. They’re looking into this because Fresnel lenses have a discontinuous shape, which tends to cause scattering, resulting in lower contrast for the HMD. The goal is also to reduce the lenses’ focal length in order to shrink the headset.
I will write more often about what I’m working on and keep you updated, you can expect me to be more active on Twitter and on our Discord server. You can follow me on Twitter @maxim_xyz.
The wonderful illustrations come from the great Josan Gonzalez. His art has been a source of inspiration since the beginning of Relativty for both Gabriel and me.
Maxim
I’m Maxim Perumal (Maxim xyz), Co-Founder of Relativty.com, a VR headset I designed from scratch, of which I Open-sourced the code and the hardware. Follow me on Twitter @maxim_xyz.
