I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

> Has anyone actually worked this way?

I tried with the Samsung Odyssey+ a few times. I used the counterbalance and extra support kit (it is a bit heavy), and it's quite nice with those. Still some pressure on my nose bridge, so have a bit of adjustment to do. Touch typing takes a bit of getting used to, but it works well enough. I already am using a trackball 100% of the time (I know, I'm a monster), so I don't have to worry about knocking stuff over with my mouse.

The real problem is that since I have a WMR headset, none of the really good virtual desktop softwares people use are available. The ones that are, aren't that great, for various reasons.

Then there's the issue that my laptop is a surface book 2. Powerful enough to run VR smoothly, but while the system fan is blasting at full volume the whole time. Also it seems to slowly drain the battery. So it's really not an all day affair regardless of usability.

I don't want to use my gaming PC (which is more than up to the task), because then I have to basically let my company own it, in order to meet the security policy requirements. I'm concerned if I do that, that I'll never really get all the bits off again short of a reimage. I haven't ruled out buying a dedicated HDD to swap out (I have a hot swap bay).

Horizon Workrooms offers keyboard passthrough, which works amazingly well. You just see your keyboard in VR along with your real hands, when you look down. No more touch typing!

I'm kind of a perpetual skeptic and I probably would have been one of those that dismissed the internet as a toy in its early days had I been old enough to have an opinion.

That being said, by being a skeptic, I think I'm right more than I'm wrong. For every "internet" that I've called wrong, there's a "3D TV" or "Segway" that's I've correctly predicted would fail to live up to the hype.

These revolutionary technologies that shift our daily life come along far less often than people like to predict. Even if the technology is superior to what most people are using there are still a ton of factors standing in the way of mass adoption (see VHS vs Betamax). You know that Tolstoy quote "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", I kind of feel that way about new technologies. There are a million reasons technologies can fail to catch on, but they have to walk a very narrow path to succeed.

So, as one of those type of people you're asking about, I guess my reaction would be "oh well". I'm right more than I'm wrong and the downsides of a false negative and less than the downsides of a false positive. If thought the internet was a load of crap and I hop on the band wagon a few years late, oh well, it's not like I've missed out on it for ever. On the other hand, if I bought a 3D TV when they first came out, I'd now be stuck with an overpriced TV with a feature that has almost no support.

This starts to sound a lot like The Matrix.

I tried to with a Quest 2. Immersed VR was the only option I found for getting multiple virtual monitors with my non-VR-ready work laptop (it has to encode and stream the virtual monitors to the headset), but performance was not good enough for more than two screens at a reasonable resolution.

I did see the promise of it though. Input was not a problem as I'm able to touch type without looking at the keyboard. Being able to position additional screens all around your main screen was amazing -- with physical monitors I only have space for two.

Using a VR-ready machine to directly run the headset and some headless monitor emulator adapters might result in a better experience right now. With this kind of setup you can use other VR desktop software, e.g. Virtual Desktop.