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I have a VR setup and would love a fully immersive desktop environment to develop/program in. The display quality of the new Index (for instance) is sufficient.

I have a VR setup and would love a fully immersive desktop environment to develop/program in. The display quality of the new Index (for instance) is sufficient... however, the critical show-stopper is not being able to use your hands to type onto a real keyboard (i.e. augmented reality-ish). A real keyboard that you can feel and see as you type on. Both hands would need to be tracked (in addition to the keyboard location) using something like leap motion not by wearing some gloves/controllers or attaching anything - no one is going to do any amount of typing on a virtual keyboard. When there's a good solution to this I suspect quite a few developers will give it a go when they want a fully immersive in-the-zone experience.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Once your hands are on the keys, you don't actually need to see them. So the real question is, how do you find your keyboard in VR? I think the Index's cameras would be sufficient. Alternately, you could place tracking pucks (or just controllers) on either side.
- shultays 7y ago
  Your real keyboard can have a virtual representation in your VR space, just like controllers are
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Well, it has to get tracked somehow. Or it has to be "calibrated" on every run, in case it was moved slightly when you tried to clean your desk or what have you.
mncharity 7y ago
> The display quality of the new Index (for instance) is sufficient... Is it? Are the lenses that much better? My Lenovo Explorer WMR is 1440^2 px/eye, and thus has a similar angular resolution to the wider FoV Index. Both are RGB, not Pentile. But I find each eye gets a central circular region something vaguely like 300 px diameter where subpixel rendering is worthwhile (I've a custom render stack), and less than 600 px before the lens blurs pixels together. That's 1980's VGA-like resolution. And it gets even worse as objects move in from infinity and thus out of these regions. If you disable the "oh, its an HMD, not a normal display" feature the OP speaks of, you can easily throw up a pixel-aligned test pattern image. The results are... blurry. So I use DJI's 1080p drone goggles. Readable 5 pt fonts, almost corner to corner. With shutter glasses, because DJI didn't expose the two panel feeds. :/ And reading glasses, because DJI's lenses... sigh. It's a placeholder kludge. Nreal's 1080p AR glasses could be available in a couple of months. > the critical show-stopper is not being able to use your hands to type onto a real keyboard I've been using my unremarkable laptop keyboard since Vive, by doing pass-through AR with a camera gaff-taped to the HMD. With a browser-as-compositor stack, it's two-video-dom-elements trivial. Though I've heard with a SteamVR stack, pass-through latency can be a challenge. Hand tracking is more problematic. It's a poster child for acquisitions wiping out market infrastructure. The sole hand-tracking survivor was Leap Motion, which fumbled its couple of Apple acquisition attempts. It's been Windows-only, stalled, kind of crufty, and now has finally been acquired, with uncertain consequences for future availability. And one can kludge. But it isn't pretty. > When there's a good solution to this I suspect quite a few developers will give it a go when they want a fully immersive in-the-zone experience. And shallow 3D seems to have interesting possibilities for IDEs.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > Is it? Are the lenses that much better? Yes, the lenses on the Index really are that much better. The difference is enormous. I'm still not sure the resolution is quite high enough that I'd want to use a VR desktop environment, but I absolutely could now, reasonably comfortably.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

Once your hands are on the keys, you don't actually need to see them. So the real question is, how do you find your keyboard in VR? I think the Index's cameras would be sufficient. Alternately, you could place tracking pucks (or just controllers) on either side.

shultays 7y ago
Your real keyboard can have a virtual representation in your VR space, just like controllers are
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Well, it has to get tracked somehow. Or it has to be "calibrated" on every run, in case it was moved slightly when you tried to clean your desk or what have you.

mncharity 7y ago

> The display quality of the new Index (for instance) is sufficient... Is it? Are the lenses that much better? My Lenovo Explorer WMR is 1440^2 px/eye, and thus has a similar angular resolution to the wider FoV Index. Both are RGB, not Pentile. But I find each eye gets a central circular region something vaguely like 300 px diameter where subpixel rendering is worthwhile (I've a custom render stack), and less than 600 px before the lens blurs pixels together. That's 1980's VGA-like resolution. And it gets even worse as objects move in from infinity and thus out of these regions. If you disable the "oh, its an HMD, not a normal display" feature the OP speaks of, you can easily throw up a pixel-aligned test pattern image. The results are... blurry. So I use DJI's 1080p drone goggles. Readable 5 pt fonts, almost corner to corner. With shutter glasses, because DJI didn't expose the two panel feeds. :/ And reading glasses, because DJI's lenses... sigh. It's a placeholder kludge. Nreal's 1080p AR glasses could be available in a couple of months. > the critical show-stopper is not being able to use your hands to type onto a real keyboard I've been using my unremarkable laptop keyboard since Vive, by doing pass-through AR with a camera gaff-taped to the HMD. With a browser-as-compositor stack, it's two-video-dom-elements trivial. Though I've heard with a SteamVR stack, pass-through latency can be a challenge. Hand tracking is more problematic. It's a poster child for acquisitions wiping out market infrastructure. The sole hand-tracking survivor was Leap Motion, which fumbled its couple of Apple acquisition attempts. It's been Windows-only, stalled, kind of crufty, and now has finally been acquired, with uncertain consequences for future availability. And one can kludge. But it isn't pretty. > When there's a good solution to this I suspect quite a few developers will give it a go when they want a fully immersive in-the-zone experience. And shallow 3D seems to have interesting possibilities for IDEs.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> Is it? Are the lenses that much better? Yes, the lenses on the Index really are that much better. The difference is enormous. I'm still not sure the resolution is quite high enough that I'd want to use a VR desktop environment, but I absolutely could now, reasonably comfortably.