openvr VS ALVR

I have been using C++ for a while but never really touched on using a full on SDK and now I want to use this SDK from Valve but my issue is that it isn't clear to me how to use it. What I mean by this is that it comes with a lot of subdirectories and extra stuff but how can I make a hello world program and able to call functions from the header file included in this SDK? I have used .h files before so I understand how the linker and all that works but with such a robust SDK I am not getting how this works on VSCode or maybe that I shouldn't even be using VSCode?

1) I considered switching a while back, but I was already really far in by the time I realized that OpenVR was outdated. If you search for SteamVR, OpenVR comes up as the API to use, and the github site does not mention it being deprecated anywhere. It's generally not obvious unless you are specifically searching for confirmation of obsolescence. In any case, my question is API agnostic.

OpenVR is open to anybody writing a driver to support their equipment there. Anybody can do it. Always has been. Citation, for my point: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr

This is awesome! I requested something similar back in 2019 (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr/issues/1262) but Valve never delivered.

https://github.com/alvr-org/alvr

They also achieve very low latency, I didn't follow every single optimization they added but it basically boils down to a few encoding tricks (better image in the center, accept blurriness in the peripheral vision), good network infrastructure, and hardware decoding / encoding being really fast.

To use steamvr on flatpak I used this tutorial . There was a disclaimer that nvidia GPUs are not supported, but the guy that suggested it has a 3090, so it might work for me too.

They have a Wiki page on GitHub with a settings tutorial and troubleshooting. A downside with a lot of open-source software is that it's relatively difficult to setup but it might fix some of your issues.

You can play wirelessly using Air Link, Virtual Desktop, or ALVR.

They also have a detailed wiki page on GitHub

https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR/wiki/Settings-guide Goes in-depth about a lot of the features/settings

Quest 2 needs some workarounds (dev mode account), but once you've done those you can just install ALVR (I recommend nightly). As for the games, check ProtonDB. Some VR games (Pavlov beta, for example) have EAC that blocks proton. Some VR games don't work with ALVR due to https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR/issues/1392, like the Pavlov beta and Crawlspace. Just install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and use Xorg and most things should work fine. Steam has Proton, which lets you play Windows games with high performance.