Comment by coryfklein
3 years ago
This "unlimited monitor space" is a complete non-selling point for me.
Being a wealthy software engineer, my monitor space is not bottlenecked by my budget or desk space, but by my literal neck. Constantly rotating my head back and forth from one monitor to another is, quite literally, a pain.
For me the sweet spot is a single curved monitor right in front of me. If I need more "desktop space" I add another Space with Mission Control. And with keyboard shortcuts I can move between Spaces nearly as fast as I can rotate my head around.
So what am I going to do with a VR headset if I ever got one? Put the active app straight in front of me just like I do with my normal monitor. I'm not going to put my terminal at some odd angle 25° above my head and crane my head back when I want to run a command in it. I won't put the Weather app 90° to my right, obscuring what is currently a nice picture window looking out on my yard.
For me, VR needs that "killer app" to justify the high pricing and inconvenience of use, and I just don't see one yet. I don't expect one any time soon either; if VR was going to get a killer app, it would have shown up by now.
You sound like someone who has a very stable and spacious office. Have you considered that "having more desk space than there is space in the room" is the killer app for many (wealthy!) people who either 1. travel a lot, or 2. live in countries like Hong Kong where space is at a premium?
The travel point is a legitimate one. This is less a device to look at code, and more a device to look at people and presentations. Practically every Fortune 500 executive will have one of these because they'll be able to immerse themselves while jetting around the world - neither limited to a laptop screen, nor to a cartoon environment where people don't have legs, but in a truly effective war room that interleaves live video conversations, presentations, dashboards/visualizations, and their physical travel companions.
Or, at least, they'll want the ability to brag to their peers that they can do these things! It's the Apple playbook, and it will create a tremendous amount of envy. If it's at a price that's profitable, it can sustainably anchor their reputation even if it never goes mainstream.
> Fortune 500 executive
> they'll be able to immerse themselves while jetting around the world
> a truly effective war room that interleaves live video conversations, presentations, dashboards/visualizations, and their physical travel companions
This is the world we make, and it's for them!
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F500 executives tend to have people who will show these presentations on big screens, in rooms they can just stroll into (and out of). And they don't want to strap anything to their face, particularly something that might (horror!) upset their carefully-placed hair.
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This sounds a lot like the use cases stated for the office metaverse thing FB was pushing that failed to materialize.
The last thing executives want is a "more immersive" PowerPoint or Zoom call. It's either Zoom or in-person with all the trimmings, e.g. nice dinner, round of golf.
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> Practically every Fortune 500 executive will have one of these
Even if that's true, that's only like ~50k people lol.
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I don’t think F500 execs spend as much time looking at monitors and slides as you may think. Also people travel to see them, so face to face is unlikely to be a benefit to them.
Also, it’s a huge expensive gadget in a time of austerity. If your 100+ execs get one of these, it won’t look good to shareholders IMO.
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How well do that work on planes? People who tested quest on planes found that the motion of the plane interfered and made it unusable.
So.. a whopping low 1000s devices will sold as per this business plan?
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I guess then sales of 5,000 of these are guaranteed. Somehow that’s a bit lower than I would guess apple hopes for.
Nah, it'll mess up their hair.
> This is less a device to look at code
why though?
Like the OP, I found I was more efficient/comfortable on a single screen compared to the 3 or 4 I have had at one point. Now in my 40s, I find myself more comfortable on a 13" laptop compared to a 34" screen. It's just easier to concentrate.
IMHO ideal computer use is to move things in front of your eyes instead of moving your eyes/head. Your area of focus is quite small with almost no value to filling your peripheral vision.
39 here, but I really cannot imagine ever leaving my triple-screen [tie-fighter](https://i.imgur.com/DkqkER7.jpeg)-style setup, unless it was for an unlimited number of unlimited-resolution screens.
If I could have one screen per application and surround myself in a galaxy of windows, I definitely would.
Would I look at them all on a regular basis? Of course not. 80% of them I would only look at once every hour or so.
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I hear you, I'm 38. I've been using a 14-in screen for the last ten years. Clients will ask why I don't use more monitors, but I can really only focus on one thing at a time, and my field of vision isn't that big. If I need to look at another screen, I just three-finger swipe.
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Random insert point, but all this 1:1 comparison to the existing extra monitor concept of operation is emblematic of resistance to XR in general. I see it as trying to shoe horn today's use cases as a template for something that is literally a phase change of capability -- much like how the first automobiles were framed by the lense of horseless carriages.
3D in 3D is different. And when you put 2D screens into a 3D digital space viewed as embodied in 3D XR you still get affordances you didn't have before. Sure you need to reimagine and rewrite from the ground up these long established and stable 2D apps, but there are places where real gains are there to harvest.
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The problem is wide monitors. Nobody need really wider monitors for work. Mostly you want to have more vertical space.On work I have a 32" monitor, at home even a 43" monitor. The cool thing is the vertical space. 16:9 is bs for work. A large 4:3 would be much better choice today.
That's so different from here. I'm 35 and when we finally got a large size TV last year I never went back to the small screen. Well except when I have to.
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My wife and I literally live out of 4 suitcases. We “nomad” 7 months out of the year and when we are “home” for five months, we still can’t accumulate anything that we can’t take with us since our condotel [1] unit that we own gets rented out when we aren’t there.
But I still have plenty of screen real estate that I can set out at my desk at home or in a hotel room between my 16 inch MacBook, my 17 inch USB powered/USB video portable external display and my iPad as a third monitor.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condo_hotel
The resolution might be sufficient, but all of my attempts across quite a few VR headsets has been sad when it comes to text. The crispness you really need is possible on static glasses (i.e. Nreal Air), but all of the anti aliasing on projected textures has often made long term work in VR hard for me.
But the displays are pretty high res. Guess we'll see.
Crisp text is also Apple's bread-and-butter. They've been typography nerds since the 80s, I've long assumed that their headset is this late to the game because they needed display technology to catch up to text rendering in VR
Yeah, getting a more flexible work environment seems like the only non-gimmicky selling point here. But there are much cheaper and lighter devices for that. Like NReal Air. (Haven't tried it but reviewers seem fairly happy)
I feel like an 13" MacBook Air is the ultimate in flexible work environments. Incredibly light, powerful, goes anywhere, long lasting battery. Perhaps I'm just a philistine and haven't yet gotten a taste of the new world yet...
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Nreal Air is good for resolution but bad for view angle. It's not for monitor alternative use.
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If you can afford a USD$3500 headset and live in HK, you are already wealthy and have a large apartment. Avg income here is around $2000/mo.
Hongkonger here. Lot of people can spend USD$3500 for a watch, gadget, or computer, AND still live in 200-300sqft apartments in HK. Doesn't make them "wealthy".
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Maybe cultural difference issue, but your logic sounds odd to me.
Surely with $2000/mo income (which you describe as average for HK) one can afford an occassional one-time purchase of $3500, after some saving (or, although I wouldn't personally do this, with a loan).
Or even more than that: my country has a similar average income, and average people spend 20K on a car without a second thought. And no, it's not that the car is needed as opposed to the headset, because the need of going from A to B can be satisfied by a 5K second-hand car, no one actually needs a new one.
It’s likely the price of one of these will drop faster than land in Hong Kong though.
That seems like such a narrow subset.
How about everyone taking a long flight or just staying at a hotel etc?
That IMO is where VR glasses are actually a pretty good fit. Carry lightweight laptop through the airport and still get to use a 32” monitor on the go. Granted the current hardware not exactly ideal, but it’s close enough to be a reasonable option.
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Not only swiveling your head around, but doing it with a couple pounds strapped to it. People's necks are going to be swole.
That being said, I've always wanted a wearable monitor so I can lay in bed (or stand, or lay in my hammock, or just have some variety). The chair is bad, and I've spent way too many years (literally) in it. I need options.
I'm a terminal nerd, though, so I don't care too much about all the 4k etc.
The ops folks at a company I used to work for tried a VR workspace to put all of their graphs and terminals in a big sphere around you. With 2k screens, the text got too pixelated to read very quickly. 4k should improve that somewhat, but I'm not sure it will be enough for a great text-based workflow.
Even at 4k per eye, if you imagine a screen at a typical viewing distance, the "dot pitch" of the display is going to just be massively less than a good quality high end monitor sitting on your desk.
We've been waiting like 10 years for that to change since Oculus Dev kit days, and its still not solved today. Advances in pixel density in this space have been incredibly slow.
I think it could be a very long time before a headset can simulate a really great display well enough for me, but other's mileage may vary.
Even with "foveated rendering" the peak dotpitch (the highest pixel density it can acomplish) simply isn't going to be good enough for me - it can't be any sharper than the dot pitch of the panel in front of the eye.
A 5k iMac has 14.7 million pixels - the pixel density needed to do this as well as a "real" display in VR could be pretty massive.
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Was this before the advent of VR headsets that do eye-tracking + foveated rendering? With the tech as it is these days, you're not looking at a rectangle of equally spaced little dots; almost all of "the pixels" are right in front of your pupil, showing you in detail whatever your pupil is trying to focus on.
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I think the key to that would be a design of interface which is a step beyond "a sphere of virtual monitors" where zooming was not just magnifying but rather a nuanced and responsive reallocation of both visual space and contextual information relevant to the specific domain.
Therein lies another problem with workspace VR, you still need a keyboard if you are doing any meaningful typing. So you still need a desk, or some kind of ergonomic platform for a lounge chair.
It is a great alternative for gaming in that sense however. Being able to game and be standing up and moving is great.
With screens detached from the input device, it should be perfectly possible to make a good keyboard + trackpad combo for use on your lap, on just about any chair/bed/beach.
4k is awesome for a terminal nerd.
The first time I used a 50 inch 4K screen in full screen tmux/vim, I realized this is the correct way to program.
With such a big terminal screen you might even recreate what an 720p screen can, with 256 colors!
I never really understood why we like to hack character arrays into pixels, when.. we can just manipulate the pixels themselves? I mean, I like and actually prefer the cli interface of many programs, but can’t ever imagine replacing a good IDE with vim.
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I use a 32" QHD for a more limited but similar effect. 32" 4k and the text was too small and thus the extra resolution just complicated everything but 32"QHD and a tiling window manager is awesome, I don't use a second monitor anymore after years of doing so.
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Aren't you a case in point then?
> the sweet spot is a single curved monitor right in front of me
So you can have that. Exactly the right monitor size, curvature, location - in every room of the house, on the train, at work, in the cafe etc. People with ergonomic challenges are, I would have thought, a perfect market for this.
Yup, this is the reason why I bought an Oculus Quest 2, to use Immersed[0]. The idea to have a huge multi-monitor setup that I could use on the go - carrying it in my backpack - felt really appealing[1].
With the pandemic I didn't really end up needing it that much, plus I had some lag issues which I never bothered solving (by buying a separate wifi dongle) so my usage never really took off, but the idea was solid.
The Oculus headset is a bit heavy/sweaty. Not a dealbreaker per se but with something lighter I could definitely see myself giving it another go.
[0] https://immersed.com/
[1] I work on a single 13" laptop, for portability. I like the setup but I do see the benefit of having large screens. It's just that I can't really move them from one place to another so I'd feel crippled on the road.
Yes I use Immersed regularly, commonly for a couple of hours each day with a Quest Pro. It's pretty good and quite usable. Definitely resolution is one area where improvement would be huge. It's ok currently but I need the monitors very large which creates its own issues (you get to the point where you need to turn your head to read across the screen and realise it's an ergonomic nightmare).
I enjoy it for an hour or two as a nice change, but I couldn't work there all day.
I think the problem is that the headset still seems too inconvenient to use in all of those locations.
I think this stuff will make more sense when these are the same form factor as a normal pair of glasses.
yeah, the friction is key. This is a step forward, I'm sure it'll be amazing that you can just literally put it on and look at your laptop and it pops up as a big screen in front of you. But I think the strap is a barrier. Like you say, glasses form factor is so much better than "strapping" it onto your face. It's rumored Apple has that in its sights for a future model.
No one will create the killer app because they won't have enough people to buy it. They aren't going to sell 100 million of these things. They will sell 1 million to prosumers. But you can't make a killer high-end game on a completely new system with completely new features with such a limited market, they would need to sell it everyone to make money. That's the real problem with AR/VR. You need critical mass in the number of users to justify people building mass-market appeal games and apps. The goggles need to not have a cord, be 1/3 as heavy, and 1/4 the price, and then we will get mass adoption. My gut says we are 3 generations away. But it will happen.
Yes, they are going to sell 1 million. In this generation. Next generation will have non pro model. You can sell ten millions of that. It is not going to kill phones, but it will absolutely slaughter laptops. This generation is basically just devkits.
I don't think it's hit people (including me) that this is not just a headset. It's a full-blown computer.
You can take just the device and a keyboard with you to work anywhere.
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If we agree then why are we arguing? I said it would take 3 more generations to hit 100 million, and I said it would happen. My point is that it won’t attract big time developers until then because it will be not be economical for them. But I think apple can grind it out, make it just good enough to attract just enough value to grow just enough hit big numbers in 5-7ish years.
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killer app sells systems, not the other way around.
That’s exactly what I said in a different way. No one will make the killer app because it isn’t economical to do so.
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Apple isn’t the only one with an XR device. Devs can still hone their ideas now that they have UX direction. The Apple AR SDK has been out for years now too.
The first iPhone also only had 1.4 million in sales. I’m not even sure the App Store was even out until the 2nd Gen.
The original iPhone sold some 6 million units from what I can google.
Steve Jobs himself said 200 days after the launch of the first iPhone that they sold 4 million units.
Source: https://www.macworld.com/article/188823/liveupdate-17.html
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The killer app imo is AR instruction. That is:
- you’re looking at some kind of physical thing in the real world you’re “working on” (whatever it may be) - your goggles are pointing out important aspects, telling you what to do next, etc etc.
I always thought something like this for auto repair would be really cool. Of course we need the software to catch up in this regard, since it would have to recognize and overlay fairly complex visual spaces.
Sports referees could also benefit, instant replay. Once there’s a cheaper, lighter versions you’ll see mums and dads running on the soccer/hockey fields with these.
I just think you are thinking of the monitors in an overly literal way.
Imagine a calendar on the wall, but with your meetings and everything dynamic instead of just a static calendar. And it adjusts to show your next meeting extra large as it approaches. No you see useful information in your periphery.
Or perhaps you have application monitoring dashboards on another wall. You don't look at them all the time, but a dedicated space wouldn't be a bad thing.
I see a lot of potential here in the future.
A digital calendar on the wall and a dedicated screen for monitoring are both possible with tech from 10 years ago.
The problem isn’t “we couldn’t do this before AR and now we can”, it’s “my computer already does calendars and monitoring well enough”.
My windows phone could already do everything an iPhone could do at launch, and in 3g no-less. But there is something to be said about putting it all together well and having it all just work seamlessly.
Until it is superseded. Ask Blackberry.
Maybe but every single photo is a person, alone, in a room.
While this is the case for a period of life, its certainly not the case for most of it or an end goal.
This is first-and-foremost a tool for doing work. They show people using it in their living rooms, but I get the impression that the key use-case is to use it in a home office (where you'd already be intentionally isolating yourself to get work done) — or in some other room (e.g. a bedroom) to turn it into a home-office-alike space.
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That niche is killed by their own watches.
Real estate costs more than this head set. I am a VR skeptic. But if someone truly solves the problems, a virtual desktop has obvious advantages even for the rich. I could literally clear out one room and shrink the remaining desk to fit a closed laptop, keyboard and coffee mug. And now my entire workstation is portable and exactly the way I want it where ever I go.
My immediate thought was working on a flight. This guy is like he's got some big curved monitor on his flight. No he doesn't, he's hunched over a laptop screen.
If I could work on a flight on a big screen I'd be thrilled. I really don't like the ergonomics of hunching over a laptop screen.
When I worked at Intel in 1997 we bought one of the first 42" plasma screens on the market to put in our game lab - and I put it on my desk and attempted to play Quake and Descent and other games on it and I couldnt handle it so close to me - it had ghosting and bad lag and poor angular visibility and it was $14,999.00
We turned it into a wall piece that rarely got used.
in 2016 I got a monitor for one of my OPs guys that was 4k and was ~34" and that was still to big to sit in front of - and my OPs guy gave it to me, I hated it and gave it to an eng, and he loved it.
Big screens are for certain people. I have a 70" screen in the living room that I never turn on, my brother uses it exclusively, and I use a 15" laptop as my personal screen.
But its very handy if you're a wealthy nomadic software engineer. I don't want to take monitors with me and I'd like to travel more while working. I'd like to do that with my 12" Macbook air.
Also being a wealthy software engineer, there still isn’t a better multi-monitor mobile solution than this at any price point. If you’re only working from home sure, but I like to cowork with friends in a variety of places.
I use 4 monitors arranged on arms to form a shape roughly like a curved 15360x 4320 display.
I also don't see how VR will come close to replicating the productivity I have in my home office, on any foreseeable timeline.
But when I go somewhere and just use my laptop screen, it's almost laughable how inefficient and annoying it is. The screen is tiny, I am constantly switching apps / virtual desktops, and there is no way to even see my debugger, documentation, and my app running at the same time.
To me, that's what I want VR to fix. The portable workspace. For us spoiled rich engineers sitting in our spacious home offices, the constraints that make VR (theoretically) appealing just don't exist.
(I'm skeptical there are enough people who want this badly enough to pay $3500 for it to fund an entire product category, though... I expected them to come out talking about fitness and health.)
The first question that pops into my head is why you’d work on a curved monitor (of which there still doesn’t exist a high resolution model) as a software engineer. Do you find the workspace on a single curved display sufficient?
My primary concern with the Apple headset is the relatively low resolution of 23M pixels. Our eyes can perceive so much more detail, and I’m afraid the low resolution will reintroduce pixellation as is commonly seen on low end and curved displays.
To me, curved monitor makes complete sense. Edges just become too far with flat displays up close.
It's not just that the edges of the screen are too far, it's that they're at an oblique viewing angle instead of perpendicular to the eye.
If it is 23M pixels per lens, that is still more resolution than a smartphone's screen. Each lens is smaller than a smartphone's screen and the resolution is per eye. I wouldn't be surprised if this actually exceeds the eye's ability to perceive pixels.
The difference between a monitor and the lens of a headset. If you look at a 4K monitor up closely within a region of the screen of two inches in radius, you are not seeing 4K in that region. 4K of pixel applies to the whole monitor not to the eye's field of view as it does to a headset.
If you were using the headset as a monitor, you could zoom in on text and the text can effectively have infinite resolution as it scales up into view.
> if it is 23M pixels per lens, that is still more resolution than a smartphone's screen.
But you don't use your smartphone 1-2" from your eye.
> of which there still doesn’t exist a high resolution model
QHD 32" works great, it's not quite two monitors but if you are using a tiling window manager or spend all your time in editor windows it's perfectly practical.
But the pixels are visible, and text on those displays is so much less legible than on a 200+ ppi display. I simply don’t get how some developers find those monitors to be acceptable and at the same time disregard the Apple headset. Perhaps it’s just lack of vision.
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Agreed about the non-selling point. I've only ever been able to get my eyes to focus on one thing at a time. So I prefer one monitor. CMD/Alt+tab works for me. If I need to have things side-by-side for some reason I use a window manager and some key combos to quickly rearrange windows. There are very few times that I wish I had another monitor.
Even beyond my neck, the limitation for me is my ability to keep track of the spatial location of that many things, and need to have them all displayed simultaneously. I've really just found the sweet spot to be two displays (with the cost sweet spot for me currently being 1440p, but I imagine 2x4k would be an improvement). Even a third monitor really doesn't improve my ability to do things, so I can't imagine "infinite" impressing either.
For me, the main appeal of VR is its potential for gaming, with a distant second place being more broadly "interacting with things in 3d" (such as 3d sculpting/modeling, or something like VR chat).
don't forget 3d reverse engineering too
being able to spatially interact with disasm code inside IDA pro is going to be a game changer for those who like to take a more topological approach to the art
You can already spatially interact with 3D content on a regular screen. Thousands of CAD people do it all day for a living, they even have specialised peripherals for 3D navigation like the 3DConnexion stuff.
You think Hex Rays is going to support Vision Pro? They barely support two dimensions lol
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I honestly don’t really see that working. Especially that apple didn’t innovate on the input-space and that is fundamentally 2D.
This. I used to be a multi monitor type of person but when desktop switching became good (I first experienced this in Linux) I started using a single larger monitor and never looked back.
Turning your head causes you pain? You need to go to the gym, get in shape, or figure out what the hell is causing a natural motion to induce pain and discomfort.
Sitting is a natural motion and hundreds of millions of people have spine problems from that alone.
sitting is natural.
Sitting on a chair, at a desk, staring at a screen, for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and then sitting in your car, and then sitting on your couch and never actually walking anywhere, isn't.
Most developers don't have mobility issues. They have 2 / 3 large monitors (or laptop + monitor).
And so in this case they have the ability to access them anywhere, anytime.
Not wanting to turn your head 90 degrees to see your 13th monitor is not a "mobility issue".
Or you could not be ridiculous and just use 2 or 3 monitors like everyone does today.
At least you have the option to put monitors above and below as well.
And completely swap configurations for different use cases e.g. coding versus gaming.
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I'm a digital nomad. I miss having a spacious multimonitor setup. tried making it work with an occulus quest and immersed VR but the results were disappointing. If they can make it seamless and match the resolution so my eyes don't hurt after a minuite of actually reading code, Its going to be an immediate shutup and take my money moment.
Why wouldn't you use gestures to move the right monitor to be directly in front if you, maintaining some concept on what's on adjacent ones from UI hints?
Really the whole concept of "monitors" feels skeumorphic here. Shouldn't it just be a sphere where you're looking at a concave part with your current app, and can rotate as needed to pull other apps into view?
I can see it being nice if it's like Minority Report, where you can swipe small screens away, etc. Talk and it types. Glance to the left to see how the builds are going, etc. It could also be a nice virtual whiteboard. Usually it's hard to know how nice hardware can be without the apps. And you don't have to be in your office.
>"Constantly rotating my head back and forth from one monitor to another is, quite literally, a pain."
60+yo fart here. Same problem as well. After dicking with 3 32" 4K monitor setup a good while ago I am now down to a single monitor. It is still 32" 4K at 100% scale and feels comfy enough.
As someone who used to have a cheap-ish 3x27" monitor setup, I can confirm neck strain on big triple monitor setups is most definitely a thing. Imagine combining this with carrying the weight a pair of technogoggles like these,and I think it could get tiresome really quickly.
What if the mapping between your neck angle and screen angle wasn’t 1-1?
Then you would likely become dizzy and puke.
Perhaps someone will invent a way to virtually move around within a virtual space. Seems far fetched, I know. But we can still dream.
Decoupling virtual from physical movement is the fastest way to get people puking and giving them headaches.
True. Scrolling windows triggers my nausea.
You don’t need to turn your neck tho, you can turn the environment. And nothing goes off screen, just out of foveal focus.
It's called Beat Saber. :-)
you, or someone in a situation like yours, might at times find it valuable to have like a giant whiteboard in front of you, that you can walk around in front of, and on which you could spatially arrange a bunch of details
putting it in 3D is also an opportunity to fix window management
How so? There have been plenty of 3D window managers and IMO was all just gimmicks, not really contributing to any increase in workflow.
Edit:typo
Scale and Expose both definitely improved workflow
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