🎮 Monadeck

A SteamVR-style launcher, dashboard and desktop overlay for Monado and WiVRn on Linux

Built for a Monado + xrizer workflow.

Game library dashboard	Desktop screens & keyboard	Wrist watch
Controller bindings	Playspace tools	Desktop control panel

AI usage: This project was developed with AI assistance (Anthropic's Claude), under human direction, testing, and review.

What it does

Monadeck is two halves that share one configuration: an in-headset overlay you live in while you're in VR, and a small desktop control panel that looks after your Monado runtime.

• Launch games from a curved in-headset dashboard. Steam and non-Steam titles with their artwork, collections and playtime, plus flat Unreal Engine games through UEVR.
• Rebind any SteamVR game's controls in the headset. A SteamVR-style binding editor, in the headset and in the desktop app, that applies while the game runs and also sets Monadeck's own buttons.
• Bring your desktop into VR. Your monitors as movable, curved screens with a real mouse and a VR keyboard.
• A wrist watch that keeps you in the loop. Clock, batteries, notifications, media controls and quick buttons, on either wrist.
• Play flat games in VR with your VR controllers. Gaming mode turns them into an Xbox pad, with per-game remaps to keys and mouse.
• Let games talk to the overlay. An OSC listener lets VRChat avatars and tools like VRCOSC drive the watch, dashboard and screens, or raise a notification.
• Control the runtime without taking the headset off. Move your play area, pick which app the headset shows, freeze an app's controllers or set a timer.
• See what's alive at a glance. Switched-off and out-of-tracking controllers, trackers and gloves grey out, like in SteamVR.
• Set up Monado in one click. The desktop app installs prebuilt forks of Monado and xrizer, runs the service, and switches runtimes without breaking SteamVR.
• Or stream to a standalone headset with WiVRn. Monadeck can run WiVRn instead, with PIN pairing and the same overlay.

It deliberately doesn't build Monado from source or manage drivers. For that, Envision is the right tool; Monadeck can sit next to it.

Requirements

• Linux with a Wayland desktop (the screen mirror uses the desktop portal and PipeWire; KDE is what it's tested on).
• A Monado-based OpenXR runtime and xrizer for OpenVR games, though not up front: Monadeck can install prebuilt builds of its Monado and xrizer forks for you (Settings → General → Install built-in), or use your own. For a standalone headset, install WiVRn (26.6 or newer) and choose it as the runtime instead.
• Steam (with Proton for Windows games) for your library and cover art.
• Some features need the Monado fork: controller freeze, in-headset screenshots, device hotplug, switched-off and out-of-tracking device states, glove batteries, and letting go of switched-off controllers. They hide themselves on stock Monado.

Install

Grab the .rpm, .deb or .AppImage from the releases page, or build it yourself:

cd desktop
pnpm install
pnpm tauri build

The bundles land in desktop/src-tauri/target/release/bundle/. The in-headset overlay is inside the package, so there's nothing else to set up.

On NVIDIA's driver, Monadeck turns off WebKit's DMA-BUF renderer by itself (set WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=0 to keep it on). The deck is a fixed-size window, so tiling compositors such as Hyprland, Sway and niri float it on their own.

Using it

1. Open Settings → General. Install the built-in Monado and xrizer, or point Monadeck at your own build prefix and xrizer path (it also tries to autodetect both).
2. Start the runtime, then register xrizer/OpenXR. Your existing config is backed up automatically. If Monado lacks CAP_SYS_NICE, accept the prompt to apply it.
3. Put the headset on. Left system button summons or dismisses the dashboard, point + trigger selects, grip grabs and moves things.
4. To mirror your desktop, show a screen from the watch or the bottom bar and approve the share dialog once on the desktop; the approval is remembered. The full gesture list lives under Settings → Controllers in the headset.

Artwork tip: covers that came down as AVIF (some SteamGridDB downloads are, even with a .png name) won't decode. Re-save them as PNG/JPEG and hit Settings → Refresh library.

Development

# Desktop app (the control panel + UI)
cd desktop && pnpm install && pnpm tauri dev

# Overlay on its own (normally the desktop app launches it)
cargo run -p monadeck-overlay

A Rust workspace: crates/core (runtime orchestration, library and artwork scanning, shared config) and crates/overlay (the OpenXR overlay), plus desktop/, a Tauri 2 + SvelteKit (Svelte 5) app kept out of the root workspace so its webkit dependencies stay out of the core build. Config lives under ~/.config/monadeck/.

Optional: crates/overlay/translate.env and picsur.env (see the .example files) bake in a translation endpoint and a Picsur share target for screenshots. The overlay has self-tests for the capture path, keyboard, notifications and text-field focus (--desktop-selftest, --keyboard-selftest, --notify-selftest, --a11y-selftest), --toast-preview [dir] renders every notification card to PNGs without a headset, and MONADECK_OVERLAY_FLAT forces flat panels on runtimes without cylinder layers.

libmonado is loaded through the wayvr-org/libmonado-rs pin, which dlopens whatever libmonado.so the active runtime points at.

Credits

Monado (OpenXR runtime) and xrizer by Supreeeme (OpenVR on OpenXR); WiVRn by Guillaume Meunier and Patrick Nicolas (standalone-headset streaming, driven through its D-Bus interface); WayVR by galister and the wlx team, whose desktop overlay, watch and playspace drag this borrows from, plus the libmonado-rs pin; UEVR by praydog and the chihuahua injector by keton, run through protontricks; go-bsb-cams by Red-M (Beyond eye cameras); Envision for the ground it covered first. Default background: "Table Mountain 2" by Greg Zaal, Poly Haven (CC0). Icons: Phosphor.

License

MIT.