Comment by qup

3 years ago

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.

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qup

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pclmulqdq  3 years ago

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.

  • giobox  3 years ago

    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.

    • trogdor  3 years ago

      I agree completely. A few months ago, I purchased a Meta Quest Pro. Relative to the Quest 2, the Pro’s resolution blew me away. And it’s still not even close to usable for real work on virtual monitors.

    • alanwreath  3 years ago

      This, totally. I’m interested to see how this compares with the Varjo offerings wrt foveated rendering.

      Reading text in VR is generally a horrible experience, and “4K per eye” does not equal even a single 4K screen.

      That said I would be happy with 8 1080p screens.

      2 replies →

  • derefr  3 years ago

    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.

    • pclmulqdq  3 years ago

      For what it's worth, this was with an HTC Vive of some kind. However, the screen pixel densities don't change when you do foveated rendering, it's more of a performance trick - the GPU focuses most of its compute power on what you are looking at.

      4 replies →

  • elif  3 years ago

    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.

ehnto  3 years ago

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.

  • gpm  3 years ago

    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.

jnwatson  3 years ago

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.

  • kaba0  3 years ago

    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.

    • qup  3 years ago

      vim is a good IDE, so I'm not sure what you mean.

      I'm not mad about your IDE or anything. I've used some that I could like okay, with vim keystrokes. But vim lives where I live, in the terminal. I can't run your IDE in my environment. I can run vim anywhere.

  • ehnto  3 years ago

    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.