Khronos Group open sources the OpenXR Conformance Test Suite for VR & AR

Here's how I hope VR will progress: Valve to make SteamVR good for Linux, as I'm still doing all my VR gaming exclusively on Windows... seriously, that's currently the only thing I use Windows for, VR gaming and nothing else.

Same problem here.. i have vive wireless, the intetl wireless card needed is not detected by linux. No linux drivers at all :( INTEL PLEASE!

This year I resigned myself to buying a vr viewer not only because we are discriminated against in Latin America for not wanting to sell ourselves. So I decided to improve the pc and buy a r9 3900.
The worst thing is that htc is undefined as the titanic and they do not want to make a minimum effort to put the cosmos on Linux at least they would have a good niche that is willing to buy and that's what they need to know that there are linux users willing to buy just like pimax in the forums ask about linux constantly. Not only with this of the viewers but also nvidia and amd are guilty of drivers of ....- You know!

I can't even use my Quest on Linux as it requires 3rd party streamer apps and oculus app, all of which ignore Linux's existence. :(

Taxes are a huge blocker to innovation and progress.

Lack of infrastructure is a far huger blocker to innovation and progress. So is lack of robust public-sector research. Both are paid for by taxes, however.

Taxes are a huge blocker to innovation and progress.

Lack of infrastructure is a far huger blocker to innovation and progress. So is lack of robust public-sector research. Both are paid for by taxes, however.

In an overpriced and monopolistic way, because the State does not allow for competition by nature. If these were provided by private companies, it would be cheaper and more efficient otherwise they would lose customers to competition. And their service would be a service, you would pay for what you get proportionally, not an infinite sink of money where you would sometimes see something appear as compensation. The same could be said about private sector research, if it were not for the State-enforced intellectual property laws.

We may see fairly eye to eye on intellectual property . . . except to me, the reduced profit incentive problem if "intellectual property" enforcement were relaxed is real, but largely an opportunity to move research away from the profit motive. If there were no intellectual property laws, but research was largely done by private companies, there would be somewhat less research and the companies would simply work harder to keep the fruits of their research secret so as to keep some barrier to competition up. Because while market theorists and even businesspeople believe in competition in general and in the abstract, the last thing any given firm wants in specific is competition.

Which brings us to monopoly. I'm sure you know what a monopoly is . . . you're just using the word to denigrate government in that knee-jerk way people who subscribe to free market ideologies do. But let's be clear, it's a category error; the point of monopoly is that profit-seeking firms, in the absence of price competition, can increase prices, charging economic "rent", gaining extreme profits. Government agencies aren't profit-seeking firms and don't do that, so the concept of monopoly doesn't apply.

There is in any case plenty of competition, to the extent the concept is relevant, both to and within government research. First, obviously in nearly all countries the government is not the only thing doing research, there is private sector research as well, and I've never heard of government "blocking" the private sector from doing it--to the contrary, they hand the private sector huge monopoly profits for any technology they research. But also, government agencies, universities and so on are not a single monolithic thing, they are a bunch of distinct entities. Furthermore, most governments tend to have agencies which give out research grants, to hundreds upon hundreds of mostly university-based researchers and research groups, who compete among themselves for the grants. And of course university researchers are very individually competitive--they want to publish top results which are widely cited, they want to get the reputation. The whole thing is a lot more dynamic than research at large corporations. And of course most of it is less encumbered by the intellectual property laws we agree are a problem, so public sector research is far more likely to be shared and built upon.

Well, except that increasingly, public sector research is handed over to the private sector so they can patent it. So for instance, the drug Remdesivir touted as a coronavirus treatment is owned by a big private pharmaceutical company, but most of the research leading to its discovery was done in the public sector. Virtually every technology that made up the iPhone was initially developed by government, and to the extent that Apple developed a couple themselves, they got government research grants to do so.

The problem with private sector research is that it tends to be very narrow and short term. The biggest exception sort of shows why: Bell Labs, where many groundbreaking technologies such as lasers were invented, came out of a firm that was a huge, heavily regulated monopoly which was unusually stable--Bell thought they would be The Phone Company forever, they almost acted like a quasi-government entity. So they could fund longer term research. But normal corporations don't. Small companies come up with clever ideas but don't do a lot of scientific research as such. Big companies spend most of their research money on stuff that's not very innovative, engineering improvements on existing tech. Big Pharma is a particularly clear case; they spend most of their research money finding variations on existing drugs (mainly so they can extend patents), new applications for existing drugs, and running clinical testing on drugs to establish efficacy and safety--which is necessary but not in itself innovative, and would be done better by firms which did not have a large financial stake in positive results. Basically, they cannot justify to their shareholders research which does not have a clear short term profit attached to it, and almost anything that represents any kind of fundamental progress doesn't look like clear short term profit. So it's inevitable that the private sector relies on the strength of research in the public sector. Tax cuts that end up gutting higher education and other sources of public research will make a country less competitive for that reason (and also because there's a need for an educated workforce). It's not a fast effect, and it doesn't swamp all other variables, but it's significant.