How old are you if you don't mind me asking? I'm pushing 50 and the real world is rather lacking in resolution nowadays.

I solve this by leaning forward or back. In VR/AR the same thing works.

I'm your age. I find my oculus totally useless for real world work. I'm used to a 4k monitor as a desktop.

I'm used to a 14" laptop + 21" monitor (resolution doesn't matter), which together occupy maybe 20% of my field of view while using them. If I could take the same quantity of information and arrange it arbitrarily in my environment, eliminating the need for any monitors, it would be a win even if the text had to be larger.

You'd need to move your head a lot to look at stuff. Gets old quickly. Try out the VR desktop on oculus and you'll quickly discover the need for much more dense pixels.

4-16x is an exaggeration. I've tried headsets that are 2x higher resolution than the Rift (i.e. 2k x 2k per eye), and I could view text the same size as my monitor renders.

No doubt 4-16x resolution would be nice, though. True "retina" screens are still at least a decade away.

But would it need to be a true "retina" screen? The Hololens has cameras that track where your eyes are focused, so the laser image could have a "fovea" that moves with your eye movements so as to retain a high focus region just at the spot you're looking at.

That solves the graphics card horsepower issue. You still need a lot of pixels even if you're not driving all of them at high resolution all the time.

Depends on your preference I suppose. For me it needs to be at least 4x the density of the oculus.

Back in the day, all monitors were 4-16x less resolution than yours, and we loved them.

Indeed. I was back in that day too. Have no interest in going back to 1080p let alone VGA for daily work.