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One day, there will be a VR desktop environment with floating windows that I can use. People have been playing with it - but it's got a ways to go still. I wo

• hirundo 3y ago
  I bought the new HTC Vive XR Elite last month for just this use case. I had never tried VR before so I really didn't have a feel for whether it would work. It did not. There was so much glare and blurriness that I had to scale the font to huge headline size to read without strain. I returned the system. I'm more than willing to try again if there's a chance it might work. In real life I do not have issues with motion sickness or claustrophobia. Both of these hit me when wearing the headset, particularly the claustrophobia. The nausea was mild but definite. Even so it was an extraordinary experience, and I may be more excited about the potential of AR than before.
• ilaksh 3y ago
  Floating windows are cool but VR operating systems will be much more interesting when they start integrating 3d tactile widgets and mixed reality. For example, to access your disk it could look like a shelf you pull down from above or something which renders each directory as nested boxes. Or a collection of retro games could display in mixed reality as if it were real boxed games on a shelf along your real wall. Or it could be integrated with a smart home control system so you could just point at a light to turn it on.
  • RajT88 3y ago
    I could see Microsoft making this. ...And then mothballing it, because they couldn't figure out how to make mountains of money off it.
    • jsmith45 3y ago
      >> Or a collection of retro games could display in mixed reality as if it were real boxed games on a shelf along your real wall. > I could see Microsoft making this. The first quoted part is actually similar to part of the old Microsoft BOB concept. Indeed some Later version of Packard Bell Navigator (which was basically a Bob clone) literally had general programs presented as box software sitting on a shelf.
  • YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
    I'm honestly surprised there isn't already a VR frontend for Steam that works just like your second example. Valve love upselling on virtual items like profile pictures, backgrounds, trading cards, emotes, so a virtual bedroom full of virtual consoles and virtual doodads that you can show off to other users seems like it'd pay for itself. And they already have a VR team.
    • RajT88 3y ago
      A VRChat-like social area like this on Steam would get a lot of my free time.
      • hparadiz 3y ago
        We need either VRC or something like VRC with in-world item management, avatar/world creation, and full support for adult content. Anything less is just wasting time.
• epolanski 3y ago
  I just cannot possibly imagine the user experience of that be any better than flat screens.
• YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
  My experience with trying to play flat games or watch movies in VR is that it shows up the imperfections in the system a lot more than tailored experiences. Until they have some eye-tracking mechanically adaptive optics, there'll always be some imperfections in the system, and a high-contrast perfectly flat rectangle full of text right in front of your face shows off those imperfections far more than a full 3D environment full of naturalistic objects.