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I built a 3D terminal emulator in Rust!
(programming.dev)
For a larger project requiring the ability to work with my computer in 3D, I developed a 3D terminal emulator. It uses the wonderful alacritty_terminal crate from the Alacritty terminal for VTE parsing and PTY initialization, and it uses wgpu and rend3 for the rendering code. The actual text rendering is done using multichannel SDF rendering, generated lazily at runtime to a texture atlas using the msdfgen crate.
A project like this would've been impossible if not for Rust's friendly library ecosystem and the Alacritty project's efforts to make their core terminal emulator code reusable for other means.
Are you making a vr desktop/wm?
Almost! I'm developing an experimental actor-based VR runtime geared towards supporting hot-reload as a first-class development workflow. The idea is that by letting all functionality, executed as WebAssembly, be added, reloaded, or removed at runtime, it should eventually become possible to develop the space entirely within the space, i.e. without ever needing to remove your VR headset.
A preliminary requirement to that is some "bootstrapping" environment that doesn't need the space to have pre-existing VR tooling for writing new behavior and compiling to WebAssembly. I decided that a terminal emulator had the highest flexibility to time investment ratio based on my experiences building another prototype terminal emulator using alacritty_terminal.
Chances are that the native terminal emulator will come in handy over the entire lifetime of my project's development, given that I and the other contributors are regular modal editor users and from what I know there are currently no self-hosting WebAssembly compilers that could be invoked without some kind of access to the native OS.
Sounds like a pretty amazing project tbh. Any chance you will show that off or demo at any point? Is it an open project or are you planning to sell it or is it just for internal use?
I plan on publishing the majority of my project's source code under the Affero GPL v3, but this terminal emulator and other associated projects that could be made independent from my project will be published under Apache.
This is more of a hobby/passion project for me and the other contributors than anything else, so our primary goal is just to make something that's functional and usable to everyone. We don't plan on ever making a profit off of this unless we get the opportunity to keep the copyleft license while doing so. We hope that the AGPL license always lets free software enthusiasts have the opportunity to use our software over existing VR tech stacks like Unity, VRChat, or Neos, which are all non-freedom-respecting, non-self-hosting, and depending on who you ask, very poorly moderated.
However, right now, the project is so early-stage that I'm not comfortable seriously publicly promoting it just yet. Our documentation is currently in a state of disarray and we're trying to find a way to advance the project in our very limited free time.
I've love to share the source code, but we can't just yet. Hold on tight!
I can’t speak for others but I am saddened by the current state of VR. I was hopeful we’d have all kinds of desktop environments and applications to go with it. I break out my HMD every so often and I’m still holding out hope something like Monado can provide a good experience. I imagine booting my headless machine with only my tethered HMD but I guess that’s a pipedream haha.
Anyway thanks for sharing and keep us posted 👍