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There are two reasons why the field is focused on gaming and not productivity: fidelity and familiarity. It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardwa

by shimon 9y ago

There are two reasons why the field is focused on gaming and not productivity: fidelity and familiarity. It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. In gaming, on the other hand, the unfamiliarity of the tech is not a risk but an asset, making the experience more novel. The fidelity doesn't have to be sufficient to overtake an existing process, just to support a fun experience. That's a more scalable business with lower technological barriers to entry, so that's where businesses are focused. Same reason we had Pong before PCs. You might also see major tech advances in products for specific targets, like military use, medical, or advanced manufacturing, that then trickle down to mainstream productivity applications. But until they get the tech good and cheap enough, expect progressively better games!

phyller 9y ago
Those are valid points, especially your point about fidelity, current tech is good enough for gaming and apparently not good enough for work (or we haven't figured out how to use it right). So they can sell it for that right now. But this and other comments are vastly underestimating the resources that people would be willing to exchange to make their work better. For what I described, a "reasonable" price point could easily be around $10,000. Apple is selling their new iMac at a starting price of $5,000 and there is nothing particularly revolutionary about it, it's an upgrade of what is already available. When you are spending all day using it, and it is the tool you use to make your money, it is worth a lot.
- grogenaut 9y ago
  What is the rate of spending in industry on displays vs computers? My general feel is people skimp on displays and over spend on compute. So it would be hard to fight that trend. Secondly with VR as a desktop replacement... This is simple math. A 4k (or higher) 30" monitor will always be easier and cheaper to build and worst case the same. Except it's at 3' from your face. Shrink that monitor massively and stick it inches from your face. More expensive. Now do the trig on how many and how small of pixels would be required to pay that same resolution from 3' to 1"... Massive downscale... But great we'll get there on display density.... Except, and this is the kicker... For a lot less you can just upgrade the 4k monitor. Basically unless something fundamentally changes in display tech or we hit a Max resolution that people care about... Miniture displays will mathmatically lag large displays. Yes smartphones tipped the balance but it all got rolled into desktop displays and tvs. So you lose on econimics and math. A display tech with massive resolution but something that inherently keeps it from scaling would be a big kicker. Or as some people have said... Hitting 16k or so resolution on VR screens per eye and your dream is there. Till then gaming is a massive tech driver... Not people using spreadsheets
  - phyller 9y ago
    I don't need a virtual 4K monitor. I can turn my head to see more, just like I do in real life. How close do you have to be to see the pixels in a 4K monitor, and at that point, can you see the entire monitor without looking around? I want the portability, and then the resolution just has to be good enough. If we could get a virtual 1080p display that would be amazing and good enough. But to your point, the VR display would probably have to be 4K just to be able to properly represent a 1080p virtual display.
    - grogenaut 9y ago
      you're not doing the math... this is not meant as a slight but: how big is your virtual 1080p screen representing? and at what distance. give me those numbers and I can tell you what display tech it needs to be, but it's going to be on the order of 10-20x density. it's all about pixel radians. Also, 1080 is quite small for reading, macs have retina displays which is nearing print when running anti-aliasing. And don't think I'm attacking you, I want this too. It's just that I did the math.
      - phyller 9y ago
        I guess I'm ok with a virtual screen taking up most of the view. Of course it would be better if it didn't. But I'd still pay for one where I could pretty much only look at one screen at a time, with enough space around the edges to see if there was another screen to look at. And to avoid eye strain I'd need to not have to focus a few inches away. So if I could focus like it was 6 feet away but it was big enough it took up most of the screen from that distance, and it had a 1080p resolution, that would be good enough. And then I'd buy the upgrades when they came around :) The rough math I was doing in my head was that anything that wasn't 1:1 would need probably 4 pixels for every one virtual pixel. So 4K would about do it. I pick 1080p because most laptops today still have that resolution, and several laptops that I still use have less resolution than that and are still usable.
      - kayoone 9y ago
        a virtual 1080 display that looks like the real thing would be a big gamechanger. Most companies don't buy 4k displays for their employees because 1080p is generally a lot cheaper and also good enough, even for reading. I still have 2 Dell Ultrasharp 1200p IPS displays at home that are 12 years old but reading/writing text on them is totally fine at the normal viewing distance. I'd want 4K mostly for more real estate.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  > current tech is good enough for gaming Honestly, even that is debatable. Gaming has been the most successful application of this technology, but that doesn’t make it good. Like it or not, we’re still in the land of hype and tech demos.
koolba 9y ago
> It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. I doubt that. If you make a VR/AR/?R version of a Bloomberg terminal or Factset then finance firms will literally roll up wads of cash and throw them at you. It doesn't have to be massively better. It just can't be worse which is the real hurdle. Granted I'm not an expert on the subject but every VR/AR app I've seen that claims to be the "$APP Killer" simply sucks. This is the same reason nobody has dethroned Excel in finance. There's plenty of things that solve specific sub problems but the generic, "I have tabs of data and I want to slice and dice it" always goes back to an analyst exporting data to an Excel file.
- shimon 9y ago
  You might be able to collect a few wads of cash from finance firms who want a cooler-looking Bloomberg terminal, but I doubt this strategy could actually displace Bloomberg unless there's a technological edge that (1) delivers real, ongoing value and (2) can't be matched by Bloomberg within 1-2 years. Problem #1 is what you mentioned with VR/AR $APP Killers - they mostly suck. They create value via novelty, which wears off. Bloomberg delivers value by addressing a really consistent set of needs in a solution highly familiar to many users across a whole industry, to the point it's hard not to buy it if you're in finance. It's like the industry's craigslist - lousy in many ways but good enough to stay entrenched (though Bloomberg's entrenchment is driven more through familiarity and brand rather than network effect, which makes it somewhat easier to compete against). Problem #2 (being matched by Bloomberg) comes from Bloomberg having such domination of its market, and such deep pockets, that unless you are doing things they can't do they will just learn from and then kill you should you attain sufficient success. Although it might be easier to buy you!
  - gruturo 9y ago
    You're not going to displace Bloomberg - the amount, quality and timeliness of the information they provide is on a completely different level (and a completely different business). You're going to get wads of cash from people eager to consume their Bloomberg data in a better way.
TylerE 9y ago
And 3rdly... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#"Gorilla_arm" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#"Gorilla_arm"
Klathmon 9y ago
>And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. I'll admit that I might not be the "average person" that this is target, but I completely disagree. I've often said that developers should have powerful machines and tools, pretty much regardless of price. Salaries are often over $100k/yr, and at that price if something makes you a few percent more productive but costs a few thousand dollars, it will (in theory) pay for itself in less than a year. And for something like this, it would easily make me more than a few percent more productive. Just being able to take the equivalent of 3 monitors with me when I'm on a plane, or am working somewhere other than my normal workstation alone would be worth it. Plus the fact that i'm no longer limited to screen realestate means that when i'm actually "in the zone" and really getting shit done, I'm not going to be struggling with frustration at needing 3 console windows open, plus 2 editors, 2 browser windows, and a chat window. Just being able to throw a console or 3 at a spot where I can glance without having to take my hands off the keyboard or alt+tab through several windows in some cases would be a giant QoL improvement! For me, this would truly be revolutionary. A headset that lives up to the promise of "a 1080p screen, but everywhere" would change so much of how I work it would be completely revolutionary. And I'd easily be willing to throw a few thousand at a product like this without even thinking about it (with the caveat that it would need to look like it's going to be supported for a while, and won't just ship a device and never release software for it again).
- phyller 9y ago
  This, exactly, you described it better than I could.
cabalamat 9y ago
> And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. If it took up less space than multiple large monitors, it would already be better by one criterion.
nine_k 9y ago
>> You could effectively work anywhere in any position, laying in a hammock, on a crowded train, at night in bed when inspiration hits > have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors Just read these two quotations, and you have the answer. Yes, high-resolution low-hassle googles would be massively better than 3-4 decent monitors for quite some people. At $500 for 2K resolution, that would be an instant hit. I think that it's a convenient text input device that is missing from the picture. A lot of power users can't touch-type yet. Another problem is the hassles: either cables or poor battery life. Bandwidth is important outside of gaming, too, else you'll hear the complaints about janky page scrolling instantly.
- jjeaff 9y ago
  That is why AR Would be the ultimate virtual screen tech. You could still glance down at your keyboard or even some post it notes on your desk.
crooked-v 9y ago
> It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. It's more than that. With the current state of the art, it's impossible to make a "virtual monitor" that can match the display density of even a plain 1920x1080 display. You can make "giant spreadsheets", but only because you have to blow up everything to multiples of normal screen size for text to be readable in the VR environment.

by shimon 9y ago

phyller 9y ago

Those are valid points, especially your point about fidelity, current tech is good enough for gaming and apparently not good enough for work (or we haven't figured out how to use it right). So they can sell it for that right now. But this and other comments are vastly underestimating the resources that people would be willing to exchange to make their work better. For what I described, a "reasonable" price point could easily be around $10,000. Apple is selling their new iMac at a starting price of $5,000 and there is nothing particularly revolutionary about it, it's an upgrade of what is already available. When you are spending all day using it, and it is the tool you use to make your money, it is worth a lot.

grogenaut 9y ago
What is the rate of spending in industry on displays vs computers? My general feel is people skimp on displays and over spend on compute. So it would be hard to fight that trend. Secondly with VR as a desktop replacement... This is simple math. A 4k (or higher) 30" monitor will always be easier and cheaper to build and worst case the same. Except it's at 3' from your face. Shrink that monitor massively and stick it inches from your face. More expensive. Now do the trig on how many and how small of pixels would be required to pay that same resolution from 3' to 1"... Massive downscale... But great we'll get there on display density.... Except, and this is the kicker... For a lot less you can just upgrade the 4k monitor. Basically unless something fundamentally changes in display tech or we hit a Max resolution that people care about... Miniture displays will mathmatically lag large displays. Yes smartphones tipped the balance but it all got rolled into desktop displays and tvs. So you lose on econimics and math. A display tech with massive resolution but something that inherently keeps it from scaling would be a big kicker. Or as some people have said... Hitting 16k or so resolution on VR screens per eye and your dream is there. Till then gaming is a massive tech driver... Not people using spreadsheets
- phyller 9y ago
  I don't need a virtual 4K monitor. I can turn my head to see more, just like I do in real life. How close do you have to be to see the pixels in a 4K monitor, and at that point, can you see the entire monitor without looking around? I want the portability, and then the resolution just has to be good enough. If we could get a virtual 1080p display that would be amazing and good enough. But to your point, the VR display would probably have to be 4K just to be able to properly represent a 1080p virtual display.
  - grogenaut 9y ago
    you're not doing the math... this is not meant as a slight but: how big is your virtual 1080p screen representing? and at what distance. give me those numbers and I can tell you what display tech it needs to be, but it's going to be on the order of 10-20x density. it's all about pixel radians. Also, 1080 is quite small for reading, macs have retina displays which is nearing print when running anti-aliasing. And don't think I'm attacking you, I want this too. It's just that I did the math.
    - phyller 9y ago
      I guess I'm ok with a virtual screen taking up most of the view. Of course it would be better if it didn't. But I'd still pay for one where I could pretty much only look at one screen at a time, with enough space around the edges to see if there was another screen to look at. And to avoid eye strain I'd need to not have to focus a few inches away. So if I could focus like it was 6 feet away but it was big enough it took up most of the screen from that distance, and it had a 1080p resolution, that would be good enough. And then I'd buy the upgrades when they came around :) The rough math I was doing in my head was that anything that wasn't 1:1 would need probably 4 pixels for every one virtual pixel. So 4K would about do it. I pick 1080p because most laptops today still have that resolution, and several laptops that I still use have less resolution than that and are still usable.
    - kayoone 9y ago
      a virtual 1080 display that looks like the real thing would be a big gamechanger. Most companies don't buy 4k displays for their employees because 1080p is generally a lot cheaper and also good enough, even for reading. I still have 2 Dell Ultrasharp 1200p IPS displays at home that are 12 years old but reading/writing text on them is totally fine at the normal viewing distance. I'd want 4K mostly for more real estate.
madeofpalk 9y ago
> current tech is good enough for gaming Honestly, even that is debatable. Gaming has been the most successful application of this technology, but that doesn’t make it good. Like it or not, we’re still in the land of hype and tech demos.

koolba 9y ago

> It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. I doubt that. If you make a VR/AR/?R version of a Bloomberg terminal or Factset then finance firms will literally roll up wads of cash and throw them at you. It doesn't have to be massively better. It just can't be worse which is the real hurdle. Granted I'm not an expert on the subject but every VR/AR app I've seen that claims to be the "$APP Killer" simply sucks. This is the same reason nobody has dethroned Excel in finance. There's plenty of things that solve specific sub problems but the generic, "I have tabs of data and I want to slice and dice it" always goes back to an analyst exporting data to an Excel file.

shimon 9y ago
You might be able to collect a few wads of cash from finance firms who want a cooler-looking Bloomberg terminal, but I doubt this strategy could actually displace Bloomberg unless there's a technological edge that (1) delivers real, ongoing value and (2) can't be matched by Bloomberg within 1-2 years. Problem #1 is what you mentioned with VR/AR $APP Killers - they mostly suck. They create value via novelty, which wears off. Bloomberg delivers value by addressing a really consistent set of needs in a solution highly familiar to many users across a whole industry, to the point it's hard not to buy it if you're in finance. It's like the industry's craigslist - lousy in many ways but good enough to stay entrenched (though Bloomberg's entrenchment is driven more through familiarity and brand rather than network effect, which makes it somewhat easier to compete against). Problem #2 (being matched by Bloomberg) comes from Bloomberg having such domination of its market, and such deep pockets, that unless you are doing things they can't do they will just learn from and then kill you should you attain sufficient success. Although it might be easier to buy you!
- gruturo 9y ago
  You're not going to displace Bloomberg - the amount, quality and timeliness of the information they provide is on a completely different level (and a completely different business). You're going to get wads of cash from people eager to consume their Bloomberg data in a better way.

TylerE 9y ago

And 3rdly... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#"Gorilla_arm" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#"Gorilla_arm"

Klathmon 9y ago

>And even if you did make VR goggles that were great for giant spreadsheets at $1000, it would be a weird enough idea that it would have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors to get people interested. I'll admit that I might not be the "average person" that this is target, but I completely disagree. I've often said that developers should have powerful machines and tools, pretty much regardless of price. Salaries are often over $100k/yr, and at that price if something makes you a few percent more productive but costs a few thousand dollars, it will (in theory) pay for itself in less than a year. And for something like this, it would easily make me more than a few percent more productive. Just being able to take the equivalent of 3 monitors with me when I'm on a plane, or am working somewhere other than my normal workstation alone would be worth it. Plus the fact that i'm no longer limited to screen realestate means that when i'm actually "in the zone" and really getting shit done, I'm not going to be struggling with frustration at needing 3 console windows open, plus 2 editors, 2 browser windows, and a chat window. Just being able to throw a console or 3 at a spot where I can glance without having to take my hands off the keyboard or alt+tab through several windows in some cases would be a giant QoL improvement! For me, this would truly be revolutionary. A headset that lives up to the promise of "a 1080p screen, but everywhere" would change so much of how I work it would be completely revolutionary. And I'd easily be willing to throw a few thousand at a product like this without even thinking about it (with the caveat that it would need to look like it's going to be supported for a while, and won't just ship a device and never release software for it again).

phyller 9y ago
This, exactly, you described it better than I could.

cabalamat 9y ago

nine_k 9y ago

>> You could effectively work anywhere in any position, laying in a hammock, on a crowded train, at night in bed when inspiration hits > have to be massively better than $1000 worth of monitors Just read these two quotations, and you have the answer. Yes, high-resolution low-hassle googles would be massively better than 3-4 decent monitors for quite some people. At $500 for 2K resolution, that would be an instant hit. I think that it's a convenient text input device that is missing from the picture. A lot of power users can't touch-type yet. Another problem is the hassles: either cables or poor battery life. Bandwidth is important outside of gaming, too, else you'll hear the complaints about janky page scrolling instantly.

jjeaff 9y ago
That is why AR Would be the ultimate virtual screen tech. You could still glance down at your keyboard or even some post it notes on your desk.

crooked-v 9y ago

> It's hard to build high-enough fidelity into the hardware at a reasonable price point. It's more than that. With the current state of the art, it's impossible to make a "virtual monitor" that can match the display density of even a plain 1920x1080 display. You can make "giant spreadsheets", but only because you have to blow up everything to multiples of normal screen size for text to be readable in the VR environment.