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I've used or tried most of the major headsets available in the market. None of them is remotely close to a resolution where reading reasonably sized text isn't

I've used or tried most of the major headsets available in the market. None of them is remotely close to a resolution where reading reasonably sized text isn't straining. The large screen concept is a bit problematic. A large planar screen distorts the portions you're not in front of because you're only seeing them at pretty extreme angles. A cylindrical screen distorts projected content, e.g. photos or 3d graphics displayed on it. A better solution would be to treat each window as a flat rectangle that can be freely positioned in 3d. So you can arrange the most important window around you in ways that you can conveniently look at them by turning your head and you'd still look at them dead on. For implementing that, a 3D pointer is by far the best option.

Zak 7y ago
What about a flat rectangle that's automatically facing the user's face as if pinned to the inside of a sphere? Whatever window you're facing should have the right orientation.
mncharity 7y ago
> I've used or tried most of the major headsets available in the market. None of them is remotely close to a resolution where reading reasonably sized text isn't straining. I use DJI's 1080p drone goggles. With DIY shutter glasses, because DJI didn't expose independent panel inputs. :/ It looks like a 3D TV screen, not VR, but you get readable small fonts from corner-to-corner (almost, depending on whether you also need to use reading glasses with it). But with batteries, they indeed aren't light weight. Nreal's AR glasses could be available in a couple of months. > problematic [...] angles [...] positioned in 3d [...] arrange [...] around you The skeuomorphic design phase with phones was a short-lived part of onboarding an untrained user population. For non-novice professional user interfaces in XR, I suggest it's... silly. :) But oddly reoccurring, perhaps because of game tooling's availability?
- gmueckl 7y ago
  What I wrote has nothing to do with skeuomorphism, only with human anatomy, perception and pretty basic geometry. I am not proposing that windows get rendered with 3d modelled grips for grabbing and moving.
  - mncharity 7y ago
    When an artist draws with a display-less graphics tablet, the hand is in one place, but they watch and use an abstraction of it on a display, displaced in space, orientation, and scale. It can take some getting used to. Touchpads and cursors have similar non-trivial relationships. And similarly, there's no reason for your hands to be positioned at the end of your arms (as with "throwy hands"). Nor, with non-novice users, need any other physical correlation be maintained if it's useful to ignore it. When you use office apps, there's little attempt to maintain physical-world properties like say object permanence. Delete a word, and it "goes someplace, because it can't just vanish"? That would be silly. There's no need to emulate physical paper, or pens, or rubber erasers, or cut-and-paste with an xacto knife, paper fragments, and gooey paste from a jar. It can sometimes be useful or artistically fun to do so, but that's a UX choice. Or say you're looking at a whole-desktop "window", placed uncomfortably close and large, to be readable despite current HMD's limited angular resolution. When you turn your head, how much does it move? With what velocity profile? And with what alterations in appearance? Skeuomorphism suggests it appear as a real physical object, nailed in space. I found I preferred a quantized 2-3x displacement, to reduce head motion, and enabled it by transiently increased transparency (including "comfort mode" clipping from fov), with slightly delayed motion and added jiggle, so other visual cues could dominate wrt balance. And the shape distorted to maintain pixel alignment, because given my weak gpu, alignment was worth more than temporal antialiasing when reading small fonts. YMMV, as just what combinations of cues are fine vs intolerable varies so much among people. The common thread is aphysicallity. Skeuomorphism can be useful when onboarding novices, but is later often largely abandoned. As with phones. With the current focus on immersive games and novices, that second part tends to be neglected. I joke that while I use XR hardware, I'm not doing XR, because being focused on non-game non-novice UX, and using a custom non-gaming stack, I've no allegiance to the "R", to Reality. Resemblance to reality as UX design smell.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      Skeuomorphism is the wrong word for what you are criticizing, I think. You are talking about an simulated non-physical world that makes no semse at best and I'm certain that it is just a nausea and disorientation simulator for almost every single user if I understand your thoughts correctly. The thing with VR is that it messes with expectations about the physical world that people process subconsciously. Break them ever so so slightly and people react involuntarily to it. There is no consciously controllable component to getting uncomfortable in VR.

Zak 7y ago

What about a flat rectangle that's automatically facing the user's face as if pinned to the inside of a sphere? Whatever window you're facing should have the right orientation.

mncharity 7y ago

> I've used or tried most of the major headsets available in the market. None of them is remotely close to a resolution where reading reasonably sized text isn't straining. I use DJI's 1080p drone goggles. With DIY shutter glasses, because DJI didn't expose independent panel inputs. :/ It looks like a 3D TV screen, not VR, but you get readable small fonts from corner-to-corner (almost, depending on whether you also need to use reading glasses with it). But with batteries, they indeed aren't light weight. Nreal's AR glasses could be available in a couple of months. > problematic [...] angles [...] positioned in 3d [...] arrange [...] around you The skeuomorphic design phase with phones was a short-lived part of onboarding an untrained user population. For non-novice professional user interfaces in XR, I suggest it's... silly. :) But oddly reoccurring, perhaps because of game tooling's availability?

gmueckl 7y ago
What I wrote has nothing to do with skeuomorphism, only with human anatomy, perception and pretty basic geometry. I am not proposing that windows get rendered with 3d modelled grips for grabbing and moving.
- mncharity 7y ago
  When an artist draws with a display-less graphics tablet, the hand is in one place, but they watch and use an abstraction of it on a display, displaced in space, orientation, and scale. It can take some getting used to. Touchpads and cursors have similar non-trivial relationships. And similarly, there's no reason for your hands to be positioned at the end of your arms (as with "throwy hands"). Nor, with non-novice users, need any other physical correlation be maintained if it's useful to ignore it. When you use office apps, there's little attempt to maintain physical-world properties like say object permanence. Delete a word, and it "goes someplace, because it can't just vanish"? That would be silly. There's no need to emulate physical paper, or pens, or rubber erasers, or cut-and-paste with an xacto knife, paper fragments, and gooey paste from a jar. It can sometimes be useful or artistically fun to do so, but that's a UX choice. Or say you're looking at a whole-desktop "window", placed uncomfortably close and large, to be readable despite current HMD's limited angular resolution. When you turn your head, how much does it move? With what velocity profile? And with what alterations in appearance? Skeuomorphism suggests it appear as a real physical object, nailed in space. I found I preferred a quantized 2-3x displacement, to reduce head motion, and enabled it by transiently increased transparency (including "comfort mode" clipping from fov), with slightly delayed motion and added jiggle, so other visual cues could dominate wrt balance. And the shape distorted to maintain pixel alignment, because given my weak gpu, alignment was worth more than temporal antialiasing when reading small fonts. YMMV, as just what combinations of cues are fine vs intolerable varies so much among people. The common thread is aphysicallity. Skeuomorphism can be useful when onboarding novices, but is later often largely abandoned. As with phones. With the current focus on immersive games and novices, that second part tends to be neglected. I joke that while I use XR hardware, I'm not doing XR, because being focused on non-game non-novice UX, and using a custom non-gaming stack, I've no allegiance to the "R", to Reality. Resemblance to reality as UX design smell.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    Skeuomorphism is the wrong word for what you are criticizing, I think. You are talking about an simulated non-physical world that makes no semse at best and I'm certain that it is just a nausea and disorientation simulator for almost every single user if I understand your thoughts correctly. The thing with VR is that it messes with expectations about the physical world that people process subconsciously. Break them ever so so slightly and people react involuntarily to it. There is no consciously controllable component to getting uncomfortable in VR.