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The first headset to give me virtual monitors that I can use day-to-day in lieu of my physical monitors will have my money in a heartbeat. I'd love to be able t

The first headset to give me virtual monitors that I can use day-to-day in lieu of my physical monitors will have my money in a heartbeat. I'd love to be able to carry a headset to/from work and have essentially the same multi-display experience at home/coffee shop/work/etc. I don't care if it's VR/AR.

simias 9y ago
The latest oculus software release lets you have a "virtual desktop", pin windows to your VR games etc... It's pretty brilliant. I've been playing some Elite Dangerous with a video pinned in my cockpit during the long trips, it's very immersive. Obviously the resolution is still not good enough to use for serious work though but who knows, maybe in a couple of iterations... Here's a random video of a similar setup I found on Youtube to give you an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL1BGgRAUPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL1BGgRAUPs
nradov 9y ago
Neither VR nor AR will provide effective alternatives to physical monitors for 8+ hours a day of software development or other knowledge work. VR blocks your view so you have to keep removing the headset to talk to a colleague or find your coffee cup. AR just overlays on the real world background making it really unpleasant to read or edit code or documents. I expect most of us will still be using 2-D physical monitors for most work in 20 years. VR and AR use will increase but they'll be limited to particular use cases.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  AR can also selectively block out the background to give you a virtual monitor. The advantage is that it can go transparent where required so that you can find that coffeecup or talk to your colleague without taking off the headset.
  - xanderstrike 9y ago
    But have you ever tried drinking from a mug while wearing a VR/AR headset?
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    I don't think AR can do full opacity yet, with is the problem. You couldn't block out the background enough
    - freehunter 9y ago
      Projectors can't block out the background entirely either, and they're in very wide use. We get around that by projecting onto flat, solid-color areas. As long as you understand that to use your "monitor", you need to be staring at a semi-smooth solid color area, it should work. If I moved my monitor out of the way, I'd be staring at a white wall. That doesn't need to be completely blacked out before displaying something else unless I was working on photo/video editing or design work where colors actually mattered.
      - ch4s3 9y ago
        Well sure, you could stare at a blank wall with a bulky headset on, but why not just have a monitor? Also the parent comment didn't seem to be talking about staring at a blank wall. I just don't see how this could be better than an nice wide monitor.
        freehunter 9y ago
        Well sure, you could stare at a tiny monitor, but why not just have a headset that turns all of your available wall space into one massive screen? Let's take one use case I've seen quite often: someone has three cubicle walls around them, and only uses one 21" wide section of it. Maybe two 21" wide sections, or one 27" wide section if they're lucky. The person has a chair that swivels 360 degrees. Nothing says "a nice wide monitor" more than a display area that's 20 feet wide by three feet tall.
        ch4s3 9y ago
        Think of ergonomics though. Can you comfortably read something 5 or 6 feet away that's in 16pt font? Can you find text on a surface that large easily? I'd be willing to guess people can't do that. Otherwise projectors would be more common displays.
gremlinsinc 9y ago
are you my clone? I've been wanting this exact thing for 4+ years now... I want to be able to add/subtract monitors at will and put them wherever in my view space...
make3 9y ago
doesn't that already exist for VR?
- phyller 9y ago
  Please tell me where I can send my money. I've heard of this, but at really low resolutions which I don't think would work well. Is there any existing VR solution that would be able to show an HD display?
al2o3cr 9y ago
This comes up a lot in VR/AR discussions, but IMO it's the least likely application in the near to medium term. There's just not enough pixels in the headset to accurately simulate multiple high-resolution monitors. For instance, the Hololens is rumored to have 1280x720 resolution per-eye - so a screen that consumes the entire visual field is only 720p, and "simulated displays" that were farther away would be worse.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  People keep saying this over and over but I don’t understand. Why does a HMD need the same resolution as a monitor in order to do the same job? Wouldn’t the HMD be equivalent to having like sixteen 1600x1200 displays all around you, and isn’t that at least as good as a single 4K monitor? You could have one virtual display with close to your face for high resolution information, and then dozens of peripheral displays further back for ambient information. Displays can move forward and back with subtle head movements. Why is the hardware resolution the limit? Isn’t it more of a UI problem? It’s like people are assuming the VR desktop is limited to being an exact replica of their physical monitor, but why would you do that?
  - Groxx 9y ago
    A good chunk of it is that text is unreadable in current headsets unless it's far larger than what most people are used to. So that 720p hololens gives you at best a 720p monitor's worth of text at a time[1]. Sure, you can have any number of virtual displays around you at any desirable resolution - they're just unusable until you get close enough that you only see a tiny piece at a time. To your specific example of "You could have one virtual display with close to your face for high resolution information, and then dozens of peripheral displays further back for ambient information.", yes, absolutely. That makes sense. But the "close to your face" one would show you less than a paragraph of text, if you could actually see the peripheral ones all the time. Useful at times, to be sure, but not equivalent in all (I'd argue "most") situations. [1]: plus some fudge-factor, because you can read a bit better than with a comparative screen - the change in how the text lands on pixels as you move gives you a slightly higher "effective" resolution... though text at this size is still plenty difficult to read, so you still don't want to rely on it.
criddell 9y ago
Coffee shop? I can't imagine there are very many people willing to wear that in public. That may say something bad about those people, but I believe it to be true.

simias 9y ago

The latest oculus software release lets you have a "virtual desktop", pin windows to your VR games etc... It's pretty brilliant. I've been playing some Elite Dangerous with a video pinned in my cockpit during the long trips, it's very immersive. Obviously the resolution is still not good enough to use for serious work though but who knows, maybe in a couple of iterations... Here's a random video of a similar setup I found on Youtube to give you an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL1BGgRAUPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL1BGgRAUPs

nradov 9y ago

Neither VR nor AR will provide effective alternatives to physical monitors for 8+ hours a day of software development or other knowledge work. VR blocks your view so you have to keep removing the headset to talk to a colleague or find your coffee cup. AR just overlays on the real world background making it really unpleasant to read or edit code or documents. I expect most of us will still be using 2-D physical monitors for most work in 20 years. VR and AR use will increase but they'll be limited to particular use cases.

jacquesm 9y ago
AR can also selectively block out the background to give you a virtual monitor. The advantage is that it can go transparent where required so that you can find that coffeecup or talk to your colleague without taking off the headset.
- xanderstrike 9y ago
  But have you ever tried drinking from a mug while wearing a VR/AR headset?
- ch4s3 9y ago
  I don't think AR can do full opacity yet, with is the problem. You couldn't block out the background enough
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Projectors can't block out the background entirely either, and they're in very wide use. We get around that by projecting onto flat, solid-color areas. As long as you understand that to use your "monitor", you need to be staring at a semi-smooth solid color area, it should work. If I moved my monitor out of the way, I'd be staring at a white wall. That doesn't need to be completely blacked out before displaying something else unless I was working on photo/video editing or design work where colors actually mattered.
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      Well sure, you could stare at a blank wall with a bulky headset on, but why not just have a monitor? Also the parent comment didn't seem to be talking about staring at a blank wall. I just don't see how this could be better than an nice wide monitor.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        Well sure, you could stare at a tiny monitor, but why not just have a headset that turns all of your available wall space into one massive screen? Let's take one use case I've seen quite often: someone has three cubicle walls around them, and only uses one 21" wide section of it. Maybe two 21" wide sections, or one 27" wide section if they're lucky. The person has a chair that swivels 360 degrees. Nothing says "a nice wide monitor" more than a display area that's 20 feet wide by three feet tall.
        ch4s3 9y ago
        Think of ergonomics though. Can you comfortably read something 5 or 6 feet away that's in 16pt font? Can you find text on a surface that large easily? I'd be willing to guess people can't do that. Otherwise projectors would be more common displays.

gremlinsinc 9y ago

are you my clone? I've been wanting this exact thing for 4+ years now... I want to be able to add/subtract monitors at will and put them wherever in my view space...

make3 9y ago

doesn't that already exist for VR?

phyller 9y ago
Please tell me where I can send my money. I've heard of this, but at really low resolutions which I don't think would work well. Is there any existing VR solution that would be able to show an HD display?

al2o3cr 9y ago

This comes up a lot in VR/AR discussions, but IMO it's the least likely application in the near to medium term. There's just not enough pixels in the headset to accurately simulate multiple high-resolution monitors. For instance, the Hololens is rumored to have 1280x720 resolution per-eye - so a screen that consumes the entire visual field is only 720p, and "simulated displays" that were farther away would be worse.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
People keep saying this over and over but I don’t understand. Why does a HMD need the same resolution as a monitor in order to do the same job? Wouldn’t the HMD be equivalent to having like sixteen 1600x1200 displays all around you, and isn’t that at least as good as a single 4K monitor? You could have one virtual display with close to your face for high resolution information, and then dozens of peripheral displays further back for ambient information. Displays can move forward and back with subtle head movements. Why is the hardware resolution the limit? Isn’t it more of a UI problem? It’s like people are assuming the VR desktop is limited to being an exact replica of their physical monitor, but why would you do that?
- Groxx 9y ago
  A good chunk of it is that text is unreadable in current headsets unless it's far larger than what most people are used to. So that 720p hololens gives you at best a 720p monitor's worth of text at a time[1]. Sure, you can have any number of virtual displays around you at any desirable resolution - they're just unusable until you get close enough that you only see a tiny piece at a time. To your specific example of "You could have one virtual display with close to your face for high resolution information, and then dozens of peripheral displays further back for ambient information.", yes, absolutely. That makes sense. But the "close to your face" one would show you less than a paragraph of text, if you could actually see the peripheral ones all the time. Useful at times, to be sure, but not equivalent in all (I'd argue "most") situations. [1]: plus some fudge-factor, because you can read a bit better than with a comparative screen - the change in how the text lands on pixels as you move gives you a slightly higher "effective" resolution... though text at this size is still plenty difficult to read, so you still don't want to rely on it.

criddell 9y ago

Coffee shop? I can't imagine there are very many people willing to wear that in public. That may say something bad about those people, but I believe it to be true.