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Yeah -- my actual area of research/work is VR, hopefully for practical use cases, and it's hard to see anything in current VR tech that would help for remote wo

Yeah -- my actual area of research/work is VR, hopefully for practical use cases, and it's hard to see anything in current VR tech that would help for remote working. For those who do remote teams, having something like Slack helps more, where casual channels for chatting can serve as the virtual water cooler. I wonder if there's any potential in building VR-based telepresence tools specifically for those doing graphics/gamedev/VR work itself. When working on complex graphics-related projects, you still have to download and build someone else's code; nothing yet that's as easy as just going over to someone else's cubicle and looking at their build on their monitor. Maybe one day we'll have a distributed multi-user layer on top of the Unity Editor or its equivalent.

abakker 8y ago
A personal theory of mine is that one reason telecommuting is hard is that is really screen-real-estate bound. I've been remote for 5 years, full time, and in that time I have come to rely on an iPad Pro, 2 laptops and 2 30 inch 4k monitors, all on all the time. I'm on the phone maybe 4 hours a day, sometimes up to 8. (I don't work in coding, FWIW). I have so many documents, projects, collaboration windows, schedules, emails, calendars, and checklists open all the time that it is easily more productive to add more screens. One thing I have learned is that collaboration and individual productivity are kind of opposing forces. To do one well, I do the other poorly. As a result I split my time between them (I manage a team, so I try to push for more collaboration so that they can work efficiently more of the time). When I am working solo, I prefer the untethered laptop with one screen. When I am collaborating, I would gladly double what I have now. I say this because I can see a day in (in my mind's eye), when I have augmented reality glasses that provide infinite, location/object-fixed screen real estate around my house and office that I can use to collaborate better, and then simply set aside when I don't need it. I really want to be free to have the room around me be a canvas on which to work and collaborate. I'm interested in VR, but I prefer the experience of the AR solutions I have seen so far since I don't need to contend as much with focus and motion sickness.
- walrus01 8y ago
  Go whole hog and buy a 43" LG 4K monitor ($700). Not a tv, has no tuner, has native display port inputs. Best thing I did all year for productivity. I found that at a certain point adding more screens looks cool to view from afar, when not sitting, or to impress non technical guests. But in practical reality, the wider you spread things out, the amount of body and neck swiveling (like watching a tennis match) becomes highly frustrating.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dajohnson89 8y ago
    how do you manage multiple windows on a single huge monitor? some window manager? is the quality of screen resolution for 4k noticeably helpful towards productivity?
    - walrus01 8y ago
      It's big enough that I manually tile things. The pixels per square cm (or ppi for americans) is about the same as 1920x1200, 16:10 aspect ratio, 24" display from 10 years ago. It's just a lot more real estate to work with. I'm using a fairly recent version of xfce4 and don't need to scale UI elements as would be necessary on a 28" or 30" size 4K display.
      - lostapathy 8y ago
        This. Once you get to 40” screens it seems like you naturally shift to away from the desire to take windows dull screen and the rest follows easily.

abakker 8y ago

A personal theory of mine is that one reason telecommuting is hard is that is really screen-real-estate bound. I've been remote for 5 years, full time, and in that time I have come to rely on an iPad Pro, 2 laptops and 2 30 inch 4k monitors, all on all the time. I'm on the phone maybe 4 hours a day, sometimes up to 8. (I don't work in coding, FWIW). I have so many documents, projects, collaboration windows, schedules, emails, calendars, and checklists open all the time that it is easily more productive to add more screens. One thing I have learned is that collaboration and individual productivity are kind of opposing forces. To do one well, I do the other poorly. As a result I split my time between them (I manage a team, so I try to push for more collaboration so that they can work efficiently more of the time). When I am working solo, I prefer the untethered laptop with one screen. When I am collaborating, I would gladly double what I have now. I say this because I can see a day in (in my mind's eye), when I have augmented reality glasses that provide infinite, location/object-fixed screen real estate around my house and office that I can use to collaborate better, and then simply set aside when I don't need it. I really want to be free to have the room around me be a canvas on which to work and collaborate. I'm interested in VR, but I prefer the experience of the AR solutions I have seen so far since I don't need to contend as much with focus and motion sickness.

walrus01 8y ago
Go whole hog and buy a 43" LG 4K monitor ($700). Not a tv, has no tuner, has native display port inputs. Best thing I did all year for productivity. I found that at a certain point adding more screens looks cool to view from afar, when not sitting, or to impress non technical guests. But in practical reality, the wider you spread things out, the amount of body and neck swiveling (like watching a tennis match) becomes highly frustrating.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dajohnson89 8y ago
  how do you manage multiple windows on a single huge monitor? some window manager? is the quality of screen resolution for 4k noticeably helpful towards productivity?
  - walrus01 8y ago
    It's big enough that I manually tile things. The pixels per square cm (or ppi for americans) is about the same as 1920x1200, 16:10 aspect ratio, 24" display from 10 years ago. It's just a lot more real estate to work with. I'm using a fairly recent version of xfce4 and don't need to scale UI elements as would be necessary on a 28" or 30" size 4K display.
    - lostapathy 8y ago
      This. Once you get to 40” screens it seems like you naturally shift to away from the desire to take windows dull screen and the rest follows easily.