When you compare VR to multiple screens, you also have to consider that with multiple screens you have the ability to see things happening in the peripheral vision, and react to changes or alerts. Switching from one screen to another is just a matter of shifting your eyeballs and focus, which humans can do extremely quickly. With VR, you are shifting your entire head by a rather large amount, and using a significant amount of energy to do so. Also, if you look at the way people usually work at a workstation, you will see people move their head, stretch their neck, etc. Our eyes can naturally compensate for that. For instance you can move your head from side to side to stretch the neck without having to loose focus of the screen. With VR, that's not going to be possible. Plus, with any slight head movement, your entire screen view would be constantly shifting.

Basically, what it comes down to is that we would need an eye tracking VR experience, not just head tracking, to make it useful as a screen replacement. Of course, I see the day when very high resolution small goggles would be something you put on and use in combination with your phone as a laptop replacement. Kind of the Ubuntu idea of a phone that can run desktop software. But that's different from VR. High quality goggles and AR is the future. VR? Not sure, the application is just too narrow, and from my conversations with die hard gamers, many of them just don't really like it for now.

The point is that since the Rift's 2160 x 1200 screen is so close to your face the pixels are further apart in your field of view. You're very far from Retina levels of smoothness. Small details, such as small text, will always look grainy.

I guess the question is how small does the text need to be? When zoomed in so it takes most the view, you essentially have the equivalent of a ~40" screen right in front of you. Would that entire viewspace being a single terminal offer enough fidelity? If I could just turn my head to see a second terminal of similar size for secondary info (such as build error output, viewing a log, etc), then I think that might be sufficient.

It's worth noting that I think trying to approximate current desktops or monitors in a VR environment is entirely the wrong way to go, as it's an abstraction of an abstraction, when we now have the ability to get closer to the source that the initial abstraction ever could.

That is, we have multiple windows, or multiple displays with windows to approximate our ability to have multiple things in front of us. But we don't actually look at both things at the same time very often. That is, we might examine two separate papers, and have one in each hand, but we look at one at a time. Having two documents or terminals open in separate windows/displays but both visible is a way for us to approximate this on a display. We have both visible at the same time so we can physically look back and forth between them easily. With a VR display, we might want a view like that, but when interacting with an item, it will likely be zoomed to fill 90% of the visible space, as that's how we generally interact with things in real life. When we don't, that's because of other limitations that prevent it, or because we need to split focus for a specialized task.

Personally, I would love to have a VR system that presented windows/screens of apps in a 3x3 grid (or more likely a 3x3 cross, a center item with items at the four cardinal directions), where the center item was zoomed to 90% of the display or so, but I could look around at the others, and could rotate vertically or horizontally to center (focus) a new item. This would be the "active" applications/views, and other things could be stashed to the side. It might start as a single item, expand to 2x1, items, then 3x1 (so I can look left or right), then 3x1 with one above, then one below, etc.

Possibly the sheer real estate available could compensate. I wouldn't use it for e.g. graphic design or the visual parts of web work, but grainy terminal text or web content could be made more legible by just using more of the field of view and blowing everything up by 2x or so.

If you make the text big then you'll always be moving your head around, which is slower and more tiring than just moving your eyeballs. It's like sitting too close at a movie theater.

Back to text mode then. Does infinity text consoles do anything better than one retina monitor? We will soon see!