Leads

High-level software: @Nathan Reilly

High-level software: @Reese Chong

Electrical: @Vincent Xie

Mechanical: @Isaac Chiu

Logistics: @Aiden Ma

Key Pages

[Standalone - Project Overview](https://uwrl.notion.site/Standalone-Project-Overview-14ebc072402f80c7bdf6de644ce42023)

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Project Northstar is an open-source mixed-reality headset originally developed by Leap Motion. As an open-source project, it remains relatively impressive with a great field-of-view, high resolution, and a straightforward setup.

Currently, the Northstar headset requires linking to external hardware (e.g. a PC) to be functional. Though this had been a common requirement in older headsets, newer headsets like the Meta Quest 3 have dropped this setup and have become standalone. That is, they no longer require any external hardware other than the headset itself.

So, at UWRL, we’ve decided to take it a step further and ask: How can we make Project Northstar standalone? Though seemingly a straightforward task, this has become an involved project requiring effort in both hardware design and software development.

Overall, completion will involve (from lowest to highest abstraction level):

• Designing a standalone derivative of an open-source PC-based headset (based on the Qualcomm RB5)
• Implementing and/or debugging drivers to ensure hardware compatibility (e.g. we’re writing a display driver from scratch)
• Installing and debugging an OpenXR Runtime so that our headset can run XR applications (we’ll be using Monado)
• Developing a custom XR launcher application to expose a base user interface (built with Godot)

Ongoing Wiki: ‣