Oculus Quest. It’s a cool step forward, no doubt: an all-in-one headset, with touch controllers, inside-out 6DOF tracking, no sensors, no wires, headphones and so on. Neat! I can’t wait to put my hands on it… but, there’s a but:

“It runs rift quality experiences”, that’s Zuckerberg’s words. And they’re twice wrong.

Rift device runs tethered to a PC, which is a x86 architecture based machine. The Quest will be running on a Snapdragon 8xx processor, which is a mobile processor, SoC architecture. There’s no way to compare the mobile architecture’s processing capabilities with the x86 one and its way more powerful CPUs / GPUs – roughly speaking, one focuses on power consumption while the other on performance.

Some state-of-the-art progress of the project we’re proudly working with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJB2pznc6iY

A few weeks ago we released Ozone-Wayland and now we’d like to detail for you the development process and strategy behind it… ah, and the title is not developing Chromium, the browser; it’s developing Chromium,** the project**! You will understand why next.

communities

There are three main projects involved in here: Chromium, Wayland and Ozone-Wayland. In Chromium, there is a very big and geek community that mainly produces Chrome browser and Chrome-OS. Very near to that one there’s Blink engine’s community, which interacts (and overlaps) a lot with the Chromium’s; I can’t tell exactly in numbers but there’s huge number of people, vendors and commercial involved in Chromium and, more important to us, there’s a lot of quality code being cooked in there for leveraging Web technologies in general.

The following message was sent out this morning – I’m copying it here and attaching a cute screenshot of my desktop :)

Ozone is a set of C++ classes in Chromium for abstracting different window systems on Linux. It provides abstraction for the construction of accelerated surfaces underlying Aura UI framework, input devices assignment and event handling.

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/ozone

Today we are launching publicly Ozone-Wayland, which is the implementation of Chromium’s Ozone for supporting Wayland graphics system. Different projects based on Chromium/Blink like the Chrome browser, ChromeOS, among others can be enabled now using Wayland.

Let’s forget for a second about video drivers, whether it has acceleration or not, and all the related issues with hardware support on Wayland. This is all solved. Let’s talk about the user interface (UI) and ways to customize it all over the computing continuum – from phones, tablets and TV box to desktop PCs, Invehicle Infotainment (IVI), aeroplane systems, among others.

(I’ve made a cheat sheet here also – Creative Commons Legal Code Attribution 2.0. for both figures)