Feasability of using Framework Mainboard as VR headset "Thin-client"

Leave it to someone who is visually impaired to come up with this idea…

I’ve experimented with several ways to stream games to other less powerful devices from a PC. Steam Link, Nvidia Gamestream, the like. I also tinkered with the VR centric ones that revolve around apps on phones slotted into cheap enclosures, but never gotten those to work (probably because it was an old iphone and bad internet at the time).

I think the VR space needs a shot of adrenaline. I don’t know who is going to provide it but the idea of a headset with a framework mainboard “taped” to the front of it to power two displays (would be cool if USB-C expansion cards cold be slotted in on either side and short cables to the displays just linked them. Then create a gyroscope module and a wide angle camera module (the camera would be facing “down” in relation to how a typical expansion card would be oriented in the laptop) for something akin to inside-out tracking. and you have all the inputs and outputs needed for simple VR.

audio can be handled in the same way the laptop chassis does it as a daughterboard in the headset, and controllers could just be connected to the streaming PC to reduce bandwidth and latency between the streaming PC and the “thin-client” Framework.

A far-off idea, I know. I don’t know if the complexity is too much and if the software is there yet, but its an interesting take on the flexibility of Framework’s well… framework (ha!) they have provided. Not to mention the reduction in e-waste if headsets could be upgraded rather than being one-off, locked down platforms.

Would be a cool idea- I would wish for a later mainboard with stronger APUs that use DDR5 for something like this though!

The stopgap solution is that if the right software comes along, the strength of the onboard graphics wouldn’t really matter if you could let another computer do all the grunt work of rendering and sending to the framework powered headset, The APU onboard would only have to worry about decoding the incoming data as essentially a video and sending the information from the gyroscope and camera(s) back. Again think like SteamLink, Moonlight (Nvidia local machine game streaming on phones), even the front end of Stadia or Xbox Gamepass

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