Virtual Reality Gets More Productive As 'Space' Brings Multitasking To The VR Age

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Wusch

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How much they pay you? This app seems very sketchy, asking for logon to all my accounts inside of their custom browser? These are not virtual display's by any means. Just views into a custom browser.
 
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This doesn't help productivity. I used to use three screens, but I've found it's less efficient than two screen, then virtual screens that you switch with the keyboard. Less head movement means more productivity. Which is the same concept why touchscreens don't increase productivity, and learning keyboard shortcuts does. Touching a screen < moving a mouse < keyboard. Moving your head around < moving your eyes around.

If you really want to be productive, learn a tiling window manager, like xmonad, ratpoison, i3, dwm, something like that. A second screen is good as a "non-primary" board. A third screen is useless, since you can just define it as a tile you hide on your "non-primary" board.

I've extensively studied this, gimmicks like this app will never improve workflow, and VR will never really be used in productive work, despite all the wonderful hype it's getting now.
 

eldragon0

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I can't wait for these kind of applications to become complete. Granted this won't stand up to virtual desktop due to it being "proprietary " desktops and not native ones. However Andy I couldn't disagree with you more. My workstation's never have less than 3 monitors set up and I never have less than 4 on at my home PC. "productivity" is purely subjective, but I can say there has never been a time I said " Man I wish I had one less monitor, that would make my life easier."
 

Jeff Fx

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VR is not going to make you more productive, at least for this generation, unless the alternative was a single 800x600 display.

VR displays are not yet suitable for displaying small text because the current headsets are low-resolution, and have huge, highly-visible sub-pixels.
 

kcarbotte

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I personally disagree with your conclusion. I've been using three screens for over 5 years, and I find anything less limits my workflow.
I use one screen for writing, another screen for source materials, the third screen has my chat windows (skype, slack) plus my email.
I prefer to have them ready at a glance.
 

kcarbotte

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I get the impression you've never actually put a modern VR HMD on.
Text is generally not great in VR, but that's why this software has its own rendering engine focused on making text clear.

The Vive and Rift have some very MINOR screen door effects in certain settings. They are not "huge, highly-visible sub-pixels," as you proclaim.
In my tests with Space, I didn't notice SDE once.

text is easy to read and the screens are much clearer than you likely expect.
It's by no mean perfect, that will take higher resolution displays, but this software gets around those limitations the best way it can right now.

 

cmi86

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At the end of the day strapping on a headset to play games for a few hours is annoying enough. Slapping on a headset for 8 hours a day to do productivity work ? No thanks. If you can give me some tony stark holo touch type stuff, awesome but i have no desire to be wired to some machine like i am stuck in the matrix.
 

Jeff Fx

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KCARBOTTE, Your wild guess is totally incorrect.

I've put a modern HMD on every day for the past month. I have a Vive, and a Gear VR, though the Gear VR sees little use these days. The sub-pixels are absolutely highly-visible on these devices. Text is only readable in the sweet spot right in the center, so it can't rival even a single monitor, much less a multi-monitor setup.

The graphical limitations become much less of a problem when playing fast-moving games, but these displays are unsuitable even for watching video, and they're terrible for text. This problem is well-known, so I don't know how you're so unaware of the limitation. People making VR games have to be careful to make all text very large so it's readable.

VR is fantastic for games, and the next generation headsets may have lenses and screens good enough to watch movies on and be productive with, but we are not there yet.
 

d_kuhn

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IMO Full VR is MANY years (decades) away from any sort of general 'productive' use outside of niche apps (remote cat/x-ray diagnostics comes to mind). Besides the generations of updates that will be needed before the devices have the image generation capability required, we need new interface technologies and network approaches to effectively leverage the immersion capabilities of VR.

The the devices that you actually SHOULD be discussion as having a near term impact in the productivity space are in the Augmented Reality segment.
 

surphninja

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I'm sure that within 15 years, there will be people that aren't using a monitor at all, and will exclusively use VR/AR. The monitor's gonna be a piece of tech exclusively used for certain scenarios and by old people.
 

targetdrone

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I doubt it.
1)Lots of people get sick from VR
2)Wearing a VR headset for hours on end every day IS going to cause some serious neck and shoulder problems. More so then spending hours staring at a monitor. OSHA and the Insurance companies will place limits
3)Writing TPS reports does not require a $500 VR headset.
 

surphninja

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You're assuming that in the next 15 years there will be no advancements in VR nor miniaturization nor cost reduction of the tech.

So yeah, if everything stays the way it is now, VR/AR will not replace monitors for some people in the next 15 years.
 

bit_user

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It seems to me that the killer app for this would be developers who don't want to switch between their monitors and HMD, every time they want to try something out.

However, I think the better solution for that would be to have deeper OS & Direct3D support for VR, since you'd surely have to exit this app every time you want to run your code, and then start it back up again, afterwards.

I'll bet that's coming in Windows 11.
 

mrpijey

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Before VR is going to be a true replacement for productivty (for other uses than VR development that is) then screens must become much better, and you need to get rid of the screendoor effect. Playing games and interactive videos on my Vive is absolutely stunning, but reading text for a longer period of time is a major pain due to it being blurry and out of focus, and the screendoor effect which is far more visible then when you focus on the tiny text.
 

cbag

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This will unlock me into overwhelm mode.
Being able to have unlimited ways of having data presented to me is many major accidents waiting to happen...

Let er rip... ?
 

Crystalizer

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You know the moment you take your hmd off and look at the mirror :D. How to spot vr user in the streets... Luckily the marks are not permanent. Just need to make sure no light comes in while hanging in the enchanted matrix or that the marks have faded before going out.
 
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