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It occurs to me that there are a bunch of fairly simple things that could be changed to make wireless headsets more practical for actual work. My smartphone ha

It occurs to me that there are a bunch of fairly simple things that could be changed to make wireless headsets more practical for actual work. My smartphone hasn't been working, so I've been using the headset a lot more as a secondary computing device. The keyboard is not nearly as practical as it could be task switching requires quitting out of each application. The pass-through environment is only available in the base applications, and it's difficult to use when you have multiple guardians and are switching rooms. Also, the hand-tracking interface is really bad. If there were some way to just grab controls directly in 3D space instead of using the pinch-as-a-mouse mechanism, that'd be way nicer. it borrows the poor windowing support of mobile that was driven by screen real estate constraint, even tho there is less constraint on real estate even than desktop. If Oculus engineers have any notions of making the Quest 2 (or later headsets) into a general use platform, they should try doing all their work in one. Get rid of their laptop and smartphone and do everything in the headset. I'm sure we'd soon see better text rendering, better support for keyboard and mouse, better switching between applications and guardians, better copy/paste behavior between applications, ability to take pictures with the tracking cameras, more control over how the headset goes to sleep or content pauses (or doesn't) when donning and doffing the headset, etc.

sedatk 6y ago
> If there were some way to just grab controls directly in 3D space instead of using the pinch-as-a-mouse mechanism, You mean virtual controllers?
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  think of the scrubber bar on youtube videos. why cant i literlly grab and move it instead of the weird pinch mouse control? EDIT: Sorry, I was typing the above in VR using my controllers. (Honestly!)
jmiskovic 6y ago
They are working on it, it's just not there yet. Quest 1 has a bit too low resolution for readable text. The hand tracking is fairly recent and not fully integrated. They are inventing pinching keyboards[1]. It's all moving in the direction of AR glasses to fully replace your phone. I think Apple is moving the other way, they will probably drive AR through iPhone. The camera access is a huge privacy issue. I would also love to get access to cameras. It's in OpenXR standard, so we can hope they will implement it at some point. That said, Quest is already useful for productivity. There's a modern browser, keyboard support (usb or bluetooth), Termux app that gives you capable posix shell, also apps for streaming your PC monitors. I've built an in-VR live coding environment that I use to prototype and debug Lua 3D [2].There is also another environment by MrDoob [3]. I'm actually surprised how much Quest is open platform and usable as standalone headset. Very unhappy about FB account though. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BV1lYp04vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BV1lYp04vk [2] https://twitter.com/j_miskov/status/1275135068282007555 https://twitter.com/j_miskov/status/1275135068282007555 [3] https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1304465880462643200 https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1304465880462643200
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Yeah, Quest 2 has twice the usable subpixels (50% greater pixels plus a full RGB stripe, better than the pentile of Quest 1), so I suspect text rendering is pretty good. Yeah, Carmack mentioned some official tracked physical keyboard being announced soon, which is definitely the way to go for useful work. Good tracked keyboard and mouse support plus some decent windowing will make it dramatically better than a cellphone and perhaps even a typical tablet as far as productivity whereas by default (i.e. just controllers or default hand tracking) the Quest 1 is slower for precise input than a smartphone. I actually don't think it'll replace phones. More likely to replace large laptop displays for on-the-go productivity as resolution approaches retinal quality in the next few years.

sedatk 6y ago

> If there were some way to just grab controls directly in 3D space instead of using the pinch-as-a-mouse mechanism, You mean virtual controllers?

Robotbeat 6y ago
think of the scrubber bar on youtube videos. why cant i literlly grab and move it instead of the weird pinch mouse control? EDIT: Sorry, I was typing the above in VR using my controllers. (Honestly!)

jmiskovic 6y ago

They are working on it, it's just not there yet. Quest 1 has a bit too low resolution for readable text. The hand tracking is fairly recent and not fully integrated. They are inventing pinching keyboards[1]. It's all moving in the direction of AR glasses to fully replace your phone. I think Apple is moving the other way, they will probably drive AR through iPhone. The camera access is a huge privacy issue. I would also love to get access to cameras. It's in OpenXR standard, so we can hope they will implement it at some point. That said, Quest is already useful for productivity. There's a modern browser, keyboard support (usb or bluetooth), Termux app that gives you capable posix shell, also apps for streaming your PC monitors. I've built an in-VR live coding environment that I use to prototype and debug Lua 3D [2].There is also another environment by MrDoob [3]. I'm actually surprised how much Quest is open platform and usable as standalone headset. Very unhappy about FB account though. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BV1lYp04vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BV1lYp04vk [2] https://twitter.com/j_miskov/status/1275135068282007555 https://twitter.com/j_miskov/status/1275135068282007555 [3] https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1304465880462643200 https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1304465880462643200

Robotbeat 6y ago
Yeah, Quest 2 has twice the usable subpixels (50% greater pixels plus a full RGB stripe, better than the pentile of Quest 1), so I suspect text rendering is pretty good. Yeah, Carmack mentioned some official tracked physical keyboard being announced soon, which is definitely the way to go for useful work. Good tracked keyboard and mouse support plus some decent windowing will make it dramatically better than a cellphone and perhaps even a typical tablet as far as productivity whereas by default (i.e. just controllers or default hand tracking) the Quest 1 is slower for precise input than a smartphone. I actually don't think it'll replace phones. More likely to replace large laptop displays for on-the-go productivity as resolution approaches retinal quality in the next few years.