id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	blockedby	blocking	notify_on_close	platform	project
8129	Allow Quest 2 or other standalone headsets to join ChimeraX VR meetings	Tom Goddard	Tom Goddard	"Allow researchers to use ChimeraX virtual reality and join meetings using just a Quest 2 headset without a VR-capable PC.

Most of the virtual reality market has been taken over by the stand-alone VR headset Quest 2.  This has the enormous advantage that a Windows PC with expensive graphics cards is not needed.  The cost of the Quest 2 is about $400 while the cost of the Windows PC and graphics is about $1500 with the graphics card alone costing as much as the Quest 2 headset.

In order to allow ChimeraX virtual reality to be more widely used it would be great if it worked with rendering on the Quest 2.  The Quest 2 operating system is Android and ChimeraX will not run on it.  An alternative is ChimeraX can run on any computer (Mac, Linux, Windows) and send scenes to the the Quest 2.  The user could interact with the molecule models on the Quest 2, moving, zooming, and using mouse modes and communicate back to ChimeraX what was done.  Operations like moving or zooming would be done entirely on the headset so it is very responsive, while operations that change what is shown would send ChimeraX the button clicks and drags and ChimeraX would send an updated scene, so much slower updates, perhaps with a 1 second delay.

This method of ChimeraX sending scenes to the Quest 2 headset could be used for multi-person meetings.  ChimeraX would only run on a single computer.  This is different from the current meeting method where ChimeraX runs on each participant's computer.  This simplifies synchronization."	enhancement	assigned	moderate		VR								all	ChimeraX