Admitting a VR Habitat

A participant may need a seated experience with captions; another may require a bounded room-scale space. Habitat admission establishes which exact virtual place can support the requested experience and how it must make exit available.

Bind the place and its capabilities

spectre.admit_habitat@1 begins with exact world/scene reference, engine/runtime capability snapshot, reference-space policy, comfort, accessibility, retention, and exit policy. It returns immutable VRHabitat@1 or refusal.

The record binds a world/build and capability epoch: adapter/runtime revision; requested, required, granted, missing, and revoked features; admitted spatial context/reference-space policy; comfort/accessibility; retention; disclosure; and exit. It does not own source project, engine build, headset, reference-space handle, multiplayer service, or persistent world.

Required capabilities refuse admission when missing; optional ones become explicit downgrades. Hands, haptics, room bounds, eye/face tracking, passthrough, anchors, and body tracking cannot be inferred from “VR.” Changed world/build digest, required features, reference-space, comfort/accessibility, retention, or exit contract requires a new Habitat revision or epoch. Runtime restart alone does not rewrite it.

Admit the space the participant will use

OpenXR reference spaces distinguish view-relative, seated/local, floor-relative, and room-scale arrangements. Pin required floor/stage bounds, recenter and reference-space-change policy, permitted locomotion, and downgrade/refusal when the runtime cannot supply them. Runtime handles and observed bounds remain volatile provider facts.

Seated, standing, captioned, controller-free, companion-screen, and audio-led routes enter only when explicitly supported. An Encounter records each person's actual modality. A flat/audio companion route can support access without claiming equivalent spatial tracking, reference space, haptics, privacy, or embodiment. Every admitted modality must preserve visible exit and its declared recovery path.

Foundry may supply an exact world/build/profile and playtest evidence; it retains project, controllers, derivatives, build judgment, and playability. Blockworld keeps persistent-world effects, and Reach keeps external social events, audience, platform delivery, and replies. Avatar may independently bind a Lich presentation to the Habitat, without owning runtime, locomotion, tracking, or entry.

Prism and Kinesis retain spatial and motion sources. The media ownership comparison follows separately admitted speech, music, dialogue, and sound handoffs; a shared VR runtime does not merge their judgments.

First integration hypothesis

The design uses OpenXR 1.1 as protocol baseline; an adapter still enumerates the actual runtime and extensions. Its first engine candidate is Godot, with a standalone Quest 3 application as the smallest hardware hypothesis. WiVRn and Monado remain later Linux/FOSS-first candidates; SteamVR/vendor runtimes are optional compatibility profiles. These are hypotheses, not newly proved hardware compatibility.

The minimum profile requires stereo view, head pose, a tested action/input profile, explicit reference space, visible exit, and runtime-loss handling. Additional tracking, passthrough, anchors, haptics, and room bounds remain optional and honestly absent when unavailable. Revision one's scope did not promise multiplayer, persistent social worlds, full-body embodiment, eye/face tracking, mixed-reality mapping, or a production hardware profile.

Continue with Encounter for participants, chronology, interruption, and exit, or return to Spectre.