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What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

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61–70 of 461 posts

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#61

I've had to do a lot of reading for work and I have to say, the Quest 2 has saved me from a lot of migraines, because I can recline while reading so as not put strain on my neck. I'm not a Zuck fan, but damn the Quest 2 is a game changer for me.

How can you stand reading on something with as low resolution as the Quest 2? That sounds painful.

The in-built browser with large font, and also Adobe Acrobat side-loaded works really well. I'd rather have larger text than usual if it can save me from a sore neck.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#63
post #23

Maybe things have improved a lot since I last tried VR, but the combination of low effective resolution and distortion from the fresnel lens (which also produces a kind of discretization effect similar to visible pixels) meant it was very unsuited to productivity tasks. (Gaming was amazing though...)

Hi! OP here - the discretization effect is also known as the "screen door" effect. That can be even worse when the VR is trying to provide a picture of a picture.

It's improved a little bit, but still takes a lot of tweaking to maximize readability. I'd say it's "maybe passable" for most users without a lot of patience to do that tuning and compromise in favor of density over beauty.

So it might not be there for you yet - but it's moving in the right direction.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#64
post #8

Having a screen blast your eyes 2” away is only ok for so long. Perhaps some can handle this but I cannot possibly imagine this is good for most people at scale. There’s already concern about eye problems due to cell phones in youth, and that’s at least 6-10” away from one’s eyes and with other light coming in. The resolution isn’t there yet compared to my 4-5k monitors for text, but clearly will get there in the fut…

The physical distance from the glass to your eyeball is irrelevant. What is relevant is the distance to the focal plane . For typical screens, the focal distance and the screen distance are obviously identical. For VR systems, they're very different. The last one I tried had a focal plane that was about 4 meters away. This makes it better than typical screens! However, the low resolution is an issue. I've found that…

It's not just the resolution. Lenses get dirty, and you get other optical artifacts (god rays, chromatic aberration, screendoor effect) that mess with the quality of the picture and create eye strain.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if this was a virus you’d be dead now fortunately it’s not

Not sure what you’re implying! End of the day, it’s tech. Tech platforms will have security vulns and thread models. Interested to see what that looks like for VR. Pretending it won’t happen is sticking ones head in the sand.

Reference to the book Snowcrash! It’s a fun book

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#66
post #54

Vario XR has a very good resolution. Did anyone try to code with it?

I think you mean Varjo. It's a pretty ridiculous headset, but the thing also forces you to buy a $2000/month subscription after you purchase it. It's safe to say it's not a really reasonable option.

It also doesn't actually have a particularly high resolution, and sort of cheats by making your periphery have a significantly lower resolution (hardware, not software, is responsible for this, so you can't just turn foveated rendering off), which makes it good for many use cases, but worse for programming.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#67

"...experience less eye strain than I ever did with a bunch of desk-bound LCDs." Is this really true? As someone who has never used VR, I assumed that an issue would be higher eye strain.

Hi! OP here. The screens are physically close, but the lenses give it an effective focal range of about 1.3m / 4'2", further than most monitors are placed. It feels a lot further, though.

As other posters have shared, the bigger issue is that the focal plane is static, at least until the varifocal technology matures. Getting good eye exercise outside of VR is important, just like it is with all-day computer work.

Cheers!

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#68
post #41

As someone who has spent quite some time tuning their VR setup for iRacing, I highly recommend the Pimax headsets (Pimax 8K X has dual native 4K). Best resolution and FOV, decently priced, light software, and surprisingly great support. I 3d printed some supports to mount a vive headstrap to it, and removed the vive headphones in favor of Airpods. 200 degrees of FOV @ 75hz would be incredible for work with a far supe…

What do you mean by light software? Are they not just dumb displays?

There's no real avenue for a "dumb display" to work as a 6DoF headset, and even back in the DK1, 3DoF days you'd still end up needing some software (mainly drivers) for things like the gyroscope.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#69
post #26

This is a great breakdown of the early state of VR productivity. There are still a few key items that are barriers for me personally: 1. Eye and face tracking. The author mentions lip syncing and hand tracking. That goes a long way, but it doesn't recreate the video experience to me. There are a few vtubers out there that are doing some seriously impressive tracking, but it requires tons of special equipment at the m…

Your last paragraph reminded me of Isaac Asimov's novel "The Naked Sun" and his fictional world of Solaria, where people have grown used to living far from each other and only "meet" in VR, and this has happened long enough that people feel repulsed by other people and feel sick if they believe they are in the actual presence of another person.

Re: What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week

#70
post #44

For me, the problem is I wear glasses and I have no interest in switching to contact lenses. I’ve never found a car headset that worked with glasses well

There's actually a mod for this! $10 prescription wireframe glasses, pop the lenses out, 3D-print a facial interface for it. There's a guide for it somewhere.
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