4 ms·
So philosophy of the 'Metaverse' aside. As a developer the thing that sort of resonated in the demos I've seen was the displays on the 'walls' of your rooms. I
by fdye 5y ago
So philosophy of the 'Metaverse' aside. As a developer the thing that sort of resonated in the demos I've seen was the displays on the 'walls' of your rooms. I haven't really tried VR in its modern incarnation yet. However, my day-to-day developer life consists of two monitors (Macbook, and larger display above), within those are a half dozen virtual desktops, and within those are several terminals, vscode usually remote debugging, and various database clients, chrome (with a million tabs), etc. So the killer-app for me would be an awesome interface to N 'virtual desktops', along with some amazing eye-tracking/hotkeys to lock desktops to my PoV, split to side-by-side, 4x4, etc.
Bonus points if I can experience my work environment the same in a coffee shop, work trips, etc. I often find myself working on just my Macbook's monitor and spend 30%+ of my time just switching between views on different virtual desktops. The goggles for me now look to clunky to easily use in a coffee shop, although if portable and running off my laptop then perhaps would be fine for working on the road in a hotel room.
Bonus Bonus points if there is an easy way to share views among team mates. I work for a fully remote company and we regularly pair program via Zoom. This generally means one of us 'drives' displaying one of their monitors and switching back and forth between desktops, etc. We've gotten pretty good at it, but there is still the occasional game of telephone where the person(s) not driving are trying to get you to focus on something and the description is just not clicking. Zoom's assume input control is kind of clunky, so we usually spend a few minutes talking until it clicks and the 'driver' realizes what is being asked of them, etc. Often shouting out a line number of some code that looks suspicious is used, but occasionally it goes by fast and your telling the 'driver' to back track, etc. An experience where another individual can piggyback on your view, or take selective control of specific 'virtual desktops' or clone them to adjust the view or try something out would be ideal. Probably, just a clean switch of control from 'driver' to 'observer' would be enough to still count as a killer-app.
Final thoughts; I described my workflow which is probably somewhat similar to many other developers and remote teams. However, I can imagine other types of jobs that would enjoy multiple 'virtual desktops' without having to purchase physical monitors. Financial types come to mind as well, but really any field where you have to synthesize multiple streams of input a la multiple monitors.