And then there is the issue with holding 3d pointing devices for prolonged amounts of time. This is taxing upper body strength if you do. The weight of thenheadset itself is also straining the neck muscles.

All of this taken together usually means that I want out of VR after about 2 hours. I barely have sessions that are longer.

I've tried both the DK1 and the vive, and the vive is basically at the point where games are very playable.

Some people complain about the "screen-door" effect, which basically translates to the pixels are so large that it's like you are looking a screen door. But in my experience that's not a problem. If you stop and concentrate you can see the pixels, and they are quite large, but with game-like graphics your brain is more than happy to fill in the gaps between pixels.

This doesn't translate to text. Text needs to be massive before you can read it. There is no way you can have multiple monitors at desktop distances. Best case is a single, low resolution monitor (about 720p resolution) so close to your face (or far away and massive) that it takes up your entire field of view. To see any extra monitors, you would have to rotate your entire head.

I would love a field of view display space, with the option to stack windows behind one another and cycle through them.

As soon as pixel density ~quadruples, I'll make a serious effort at switching to VR for work.

I’ve played with virtual monitors in VR. Everyone loves the idea of having 80 foot virtual monitors. But, all that really does is make it so you can’t move your head in close to examine the low-rez text like you can with smaller virtual monitors up close.

Desktop computing with a VR headset is somewhat possible right now, but I am not quite able to stomach the resolution limitations of the Quest 2. I'm looking forward to devices like SimulaVR [0], which intend to fully replace desktop computing with a self-contained VR headset (plus a mouse and keyboard).

In my mind, there are two and a half problems to solve to make it possible. One is pixel density. It has to at least be equivalent (or very close) to our own eyes. Two is comfort, both physical (ventilation, weight) and health-wise (eye strain). Two and a half is being able to navigate without a mouse and keyboard, and preferably no peripherals, but I think I'm able to wait for that.

[0] https://simulavr.com/

Oculus sucks at displaying text - it's low resolution (half of 1080p), it has crazy chromatic abberations, and you have to transform "spherize" your image to correct for the lens distortion, further reducting the resolution.

Oculus is not light - it's pretty annoying to wear it for longer than 20-30 minutes.

In theory, I should be able to have a laptop and headset and get good multiple monitors wherever I am located.

edit:

I like the separation between VR and irl that a lot of people are complaining about. It makes it hard to multitask between computers and real life, so you have to choose what you are doing instead of pretending to do both.

I also don't see how VR will come close to replicating the productivity I have in my home office, on any foreseeable timeline.

But when I go somewhere and just use my laptop screen, it's almost laughable how inefficient and annoying it is. The screen is tiny, I am constantly switching apps / virtual desktops, and there is no way to even see my debugger, documentation, and my app running at the same time.

To me, that's what I want VR to fix. The portable workspace. For us spoiled rich engineers sitting in our spacious home offices, the constraints that make VR (theoretically) appealing just don't exist.

(I'm skeptical there are enough people who want this badly enough to pay $3500 for it to fund an entire product category, though... I expected them to come out talking about fitness and health.)

There're other interesting areas for productivity improvements too, like better interfaces for human computer interaction

I just don't know if it is really possible to improve on this setup enough. Monitor size is not an issue at this point. Input is not an issue.

If work gave me a VR headset only I would just bring in my own monitor and keyboard.

I see what you mean, but I have to say, I think you can get used to this (as I alluded to earlier). What VR enables, for example, is a custom tiling system since that's how the virtual screens could be used. I'm currently using it that way and especially on the center of your eye, the text is quite readable, so it's less looking with your eyes and more looking with your head/neck.

The problem so far has simply been that none of the existing headsets work for this. Resolution needs to make it past 30 PPD to be usable for text. All the exiting consumer ones are between 10 and 20 PPD.

You also need the right software. SteamVR has basically nothing by default, you get a blurry view of your desktop if you go the menu and that's it. You can enhance it a little with Steam overlay addons, but it's all a crude "make desktop show up in VR", not a "userinterface build for VR". Oculus is a bit better, but still not great. Microsoft tried with WMR Portal to bring the full Windows desktop into VR and it is about the closest thing to what Apple is doing now, but it was still riddled with problems, lots of bugs and limitations that made it impossible to take full advantage of VR (max window size was restricted to 1920x1080, no way to anchor virtual windows to the real world, no real passthrough mode).

What Apple has shown so far look much better than anything else out there. The resolution is good enough that you can actually read text, the passthrough cameras are good enough that you can actually see and interact with the world around you in proper 3D and color and the software seems to be completely focused on making 2D content in a virtual space work well, something none of the other companies spend much effort on.

There is an alternative reality somewhere where VR went the other direction, focus on making it cheap and accessible and focus and producing proper full VR games, basically the original vision behind Oculus. That could have worked, Oculus delivered a couple of great games in the early days of VR and before Facebook joined them, they were even able to produce $300 headsets. But all that got derailed by Facebook, who raised the price to $600, gave up on PC based VR and forced everything on mobile. They also largely gave up on games and focused instead on "Metaverse", which means that the Quest2 games out know, still look a lot worse than what we had 6 seven years ago on CV1 or even DK1. The insane amount of money Meta has spend so far simply doesn't show in the actual product and especially not in the software.

Anyway, since this alternative reality didn't happen, we are now basically stuck waiting for VR headsets to get enough resolution that 2D content becomes enjoyable in them, as that's the only way VR will get content. Native VR content is still just too rare and the quality is often not great. Apple's VisionPro is the first device that crosses that threshold and has the software to go along with it.

No matter how much you play with bringing some virtual monitors/displays closer or further away depending on focus it's always going to be inherently limited by the internal display resolution. Even then in VR headsets the lens distortion means text isn't really readable outside a small FOV directly ahead of you. Eventually we'll get cheaper better screens in these headsets but that'll require a lot more rendering power and still doesn't get past the fact that you're losing a lot of pixels to anything that isn't the display so the headset screens have a long ways to go before they can look anywhere near as good as the normal displays we use.

The other thing to consider in terms of portability is that these have very high resolution displays (they just don't necessarily look high resolution because they take up such a large fraction of your field of view), and also need to be run at 100+ hz to minimize motion sickness. While this is easily doable with gaming graphics cards, many development-focused laptops don't have the GPU horsepower necessary to handle it.

Finally, it looks like this is using SteamVR headset tracking. This is an outside-in tracking system that relies on a pair of external tracking beacons that the headset needs to have line of sight to, to figure out its position and orientation. If these are moved, their position needs to be recalibrated. So it's also less ideal for portability in that you need to set up and run power to two other external devices and have somewhere to mount them while using the headset.

You would have to make your virtual monitors pretty big in order to have a lot of comfortably readable content and that sounds like an ergonomics nightmare to be moving your neck around all day looking all around your virtual screens.