If anyone is succeeding here I hope they have a stronger neck and head structure than I do.
I was present when Randy Pausch made the empirical lecture on screen real estate at CMU almost two decades ago. I believed strongly in that argument and was lucky to hear it before the last lecture.
However, as my work and tools evolved, I found myself abandoning the triple monitor Windows, Mac, Linux setups I used for the kind of portability work I did then.
And so while I did the apple vision pro demo when I interviewed at Apple this summer I experienced probably the most legitimate and extreme dichotomy between the value proposition of infinitely extensible screen real estate and diminishing returns on that real estate.
Put simply, that dichotomy is standing on the shoulders of poorly designed HCI for decades. Apple gets a free pass on design here but they should be held to a much higher standard.
If they were, we'd have something approaching Bret Victor's dynamic land or at least a desktop metaphor not siloed in a Cartesian model hundreds of years old when what we need is n-dimensional.
The data out-dimensioned displays decades ago. What the world needs now is a better tiling window manager, not another attempt to solve the problem by extending human vision while causing head and neck trauma we may never understand.
Raymond Loewy said, "most advanced yet acceptable, not most advanced yet bone crushing.
When I used apple vision pro, I found the experience so compelling I pinged all my friends working in AR singing its praises and potential applications in things we'd worked on together: radiation oncology treatment devices, visualization, robotics, and autonomy. But the thing that stopped me in my tracks was the ungodly physical trauma that accompanied the experience. That's saying something given I am an adult with nearly perfect health and no orthopedic issues whatsoever.
The thing that shifted my perspective on screen real estate was realizing that monstrous monitors are big tech's mcmansion hell. I did my day job on an 11 inch Chromebook running Linux a decade ago. I still ask why I need the morbidly obese MacBook pro m I have now with a 16 inch display and 32 GB ram.
Soon we'll see that big tech is just reading big pharma's playbook from decades ago. The reason it's hard to see now is that big tech did not finish reading the playbook, particularly as it applies to side effects foisted on an unsuspecting public. Give it a few years. I hope I'm wrong.