Hacking with XR:

It's 2025. Twenty Twenty-Five. Two Zero Two Five. Why does the world still revolve around flat panel displays like its the early 2000s? VR tech has been around for a while now, and there are even super promising AR solutions in the wild that you can buy right now on amazon for a not unreasonable price. So what gives, why aren't we all hacking like in the cyberpunk games and movies at this point? And more to that matter, now that VR/AR tech has advanced to this point... why do laptops still look like laptops from the 80s? Sure they're more sleek, but the basic design is more or less the same!

Well dear reader. I built an XR Cyberdeck and used it as my exclusive computer rig at defcon this year where I participated with my team in the Red Team Villiage CTF, Blacks in Cyber CTF, and Biohacking Village CTF. The only screens I used to get hacking done while at Defcon were AR/VR (going to just lump them together with XR from here on) and I have some thoughts about where we are today!

Wait XR Cyberdeck?!?!?!

Yeup. sure is. kinda.

So I haven't made a blog post about it, but it is on my github. I call it the fyerdeck! Its made out of primarily Framework13 laptop parts and 3d printed parts. It actually works super well, for the most part... more on that later. I opted for the AMD Ryzen AI 9 mainboard so that I could get 12 cores and 24 threads of compute goodness with a decent GPU to boot. No complaints here. its ROCK solid for power, though the battery goes pretty quick with those power hungry chips. The primary displays I use for this were intended to be either my Quest3, or xreal AR glasses. If you'd like to know more about that project check out my github repo for it here.

XR Productivity Setups

Now that the hardware is more or less discussed, let's get to the setups.

Quest 3

My first inclination was to use a project called StardustXR This is a Linux native 3d desktop environment. It aims to provide the basic building blocks to create new and exciting ways to interact with and use your computer, while still having the plumbing necessary to display legacy 2d applications. It does this well, for the most part. StardustXR is not quite finished yet, and there are problems and performance issues that I run into on my Cyberdeck. I have also tried it on my desktop to eliminate the performance issues of a mobile platform, and it works great there. Basically it lets you spawn windows for applications anywhere around you in 3d space! Who needs monitors when the world is your monitor? I then use WiVRn to wirelessly stream it to my quest 3 over WiFi. This setup works great on my desktop, but the Fyerdeck struggled with it a bit, and it tends to crash a bit more often that I would like to be usable as a hacking platform, but it is showing promise!

So StardustXR is super cool, but isn't quite ready yet. What else?

There's a software product out there called immersed. Which lets you mirror screens from your computer to your VR environment. Any screen your computer can see can be mirrored (with caveats). See I do have a small screen on the Fyerdeck, but its mainly just to display a clock and let me type my LUKS decryption key. So I don't necessarily want to mirror that screen, nor would it be big enough to be usable. Enter KDE desktop portals and a fun little XDG script I pulled off of the Immersed discord server. This python script lets you use the KDE screen share portal to create a new virtual monitor to share. The monitors are hard-coded to 1920x1080@60hz. Which is fine... but higher res would be appreciated. But there's a catch. Each Application name for the screen needs to be different or weird things happen. No worries, just add multiple copies of the application to your application list in plasma and boom you're good to go. You can spawn up to 5 displays and mirror them in Immersed!

This did work well. having 5 displays for a multimonitor setup while away from my house was incredible, but there was a major drawback. Comfort. See both StardustXR and Immersed require you to have a full VR headset in order to use them. No problem I have the quest 3 and even got a 3rd party head-strap that better distributes the weight. I've gamed with it for hours before so hacking in it shouldn't be a problem right? wrong.

It wasn't so much the weight distribution, but the heat. The eye-box of the Quest 3 gets pretty warm. You don't notice when your immersed in a game, but when you're trying to focus on hacking a system and getting flags in a CTF it becomes a huge problem.

The biggest saving grace the Quest 3 had was I would use my wireless mouse and keyboard from the couch while my cyber deck was plugged into the wall away from me and relax while hacking, which was cool... except for the proximity sensor on the quest 3 constantly thinking I had taken the headset off when it moves .00001mm farther away from my face.

Ok so the quest 3 didn't work out for CTFing. What else do we have?

Xreal Air Glasses

We have the AR glasses of course! These babies are 1920x1080p 120hz. No software required to run them, just plug into a USB-C port that supports display port alt mode and you're golden... with one catch. I have the Air 2 Pros, which are super cool, but they do not do any spatial compute on glasses. So they work, but the screen is just static, moving your head to look at things doesn't move the screen in your view-port. This has been fixed on the newer XrealOne glasses, but I haven't purchased a pair yet (I plan to).

Another problem with the Xreal glasses is the fact that its just one screen. you can't have multiple virtual monitors that you turn your head to look at. The XrealOnes do have an ultrawide mode that gives you a MASSIVE screen to position your windows in, which helps, but its still no replacement for being able to open apps anywhere around you in 3d space, or being able to spawn any number of virtual monitors to use. Maybe they'll figure out how to add that in later versions (display port daisy chaining is a thing so maybe they could utilize a virtual version of that somehow...), but for now one screen is all you get, and if you're on the older glasses like me, one screen that's just 1920x1080.

This setup let me do the CTFs and its what I used the most while at Defcon, but It would have been nice to have at least one more screen to spread my work space out over. I actually missed having the laptop screen to use as a second monitor while doing this.

Which brings us to:

Cyber deck vs laptop: FIGHT

I love this cyber deck. I really enjoyed designing it. But I have to admit... Its not very practical. My whole goal was to hopefully take up less space then a traditional laptop on our CTF table... but that didn't happen. The deck and keyboard were just too wide, and like I mentioned I missed having the full sized laptop screen to fall back on. So where does that leave us... am I just going to put my framework parts back in the framework case? probably for now, but this isn't the end.

I want to design my own Framework laptop lower case, specifically the type cover. See one of the many benefits of my current setup is I can use my preferred keyboard layout (alice) which keeps my shoulders at a nice neutral angle while typing. I would hate to lose that while I'm on the go. Sure I could just bring my desktop keyboard with me (its pretty light) but where's the fun in that?

So stay tuned, the FyerBook is coming soon. I'm going to mock it up with PLA to figure out the design I would like to use, then I'll send the designs to like PCBWay or something to have it CNC machined out of aluminum. I don't know if the entire lower shell will need to be redesigned, or if just the top cover will be, but I intend to find out! I'm also not 100% sure if I just want to make a snap on location for my desktop keyboard, or cannibalize one of KeyChron's low profile alice keyboards to put inside it... decisions decisions...

Conclusion:

To TLDR: the future of using XR tech as primary displays is bright, if not quite ready yet. I'm super excited to see where it goes in the next 5 years. For now I'm going to still used the Xreal glasses as a primary display when on the go, and use a laptop screen as a secondary display when needed. All in all it was a cool little experiment, and I've learned a ton about 3d modeling from it, but alas the laptop design seems to have stuck around because its a good design that works well for its use case.

Until next time readers, and as always go hack something!