This challenge is one of the reasons we're so excited about pcwalton's work on Pathfinder (https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder )

I'm ashamed to realize that despite being well aware of Pathfinder, and of Mozilla's somewhat surprising pivot toward "mixed reality", this connection had never occurred to me.

There's also Slug which handles variable-resolution shading of text (http://sluglibrary.com/), though it's unclear how its performance would stack up vs pathfinder's in these scenarios. IIRC when it was last discussed in this context it was unclear whether Pathfinder would work well for variable-resolution text that isn't screen aligned boxes?

You can do that by rendering text yourself, particularly in a full-immersion app. Rendering distance field text is cheap and really easy to do properly in that situation, but I don't know if anyone has actually done it in practice.

SDF is great and all but ClearType is a necessity if we want text as ubiquitous and cheap as 2D computing. If SDF is the way to go, Microsoft should standardize it themselves so we don't need to pack texture sheets of every language of Ariel into every app.

If anyone else is wondering what SDF is, a bit of googling found me this blog post: https://aras-p.info/blog/2017/02/15/Font-Rendering-is-Gettin...

It gives a pretty good summary and a lot of other vocab words you can google, and touches on the Pathfinder project

> full-immersion app

IMHO, that's another dead end (or rather intermittent tech), like full-screen apps, or single task environments (hello, DOS).

Gosh. I run all my apps full screen. The only thing I need to switch to is a web browser to look stuff up. I never have more than one window visible at once.

I don't think I run anything full-screen. I am irked by not being able to see the other things I need while working (files, time tracking, notes, email, FTP, etc). But maybe it depends on whether you have a single screen or more than one? I have four displays (MacBook Pro plus externals: 34" curved, 26" landscape, 26" portrait) and 14 different app windows currently visible in one way or another. I feel very cramped if I use the laptop on its own.

how big is your monitor ? When I am on my laptop I run everything full screen. When I am on my desktop I have two 20" monitors and I regularly have multiple windows open on each. I have found that splitting vertically on one monitor with the code I am actively working on and firefox for looking up things works really well for me.

I have a 27" monitor, and 90% of the time, it shows a single maximized app, with the browser second in the Alt+Tab stack (so you can switch back and forth just pressing it once).

Does that not make for either a lot of wasted space, or ridiculously wide text?

For the browser, it does (wasted horizontal space), but you can also rephrase it as "less distraction".

Most productivity apps, however, have their own way to subdivide space within the app efficiently. E.g. in the IDE, there are various panes and tool windows. Put a file browser on one side, a documentation browser on the other, and a terminal pane on the bottom, and it actually starts feeling kinda crowded.

This guy is either trolling or he's the UX designer behind Windows 8

Either way he should be ashamed of himself!

Doing exactly this with a tiling windows manager was a game-changer for me, and I can't imagine going back to an "Alt-Tab" environment.

Agreed. Like windowing systems allowed sharing the 2D screen, AR/VR systems will need to be able to share 3D space. I need my mapping app showing the way at the same time as my social networking app is popping up info about the friends in my view at the same time my pokemon-go-ar is showing the latest pokemon hiding in the bushes, at the same time as restaurant app is showing which restaurants have seats right now. (or whatever)

Sure, some people will want to tune out / turn off all other apps from time to time but the ability to run them together is really key it seems.

I wish browser VR supported popping 3D things out of the screen. Currently browser VR is click a button, browser display's that page's VR presentation in your VR. But run one of the many VR virtual desktops that show your computer's desktop as a virtual monitor in VR and suddenly I want a standard so that a webpage can make a 3D object and it pops out of the virtual monitor. Ideally like a browser tab I could pop out lots of different VR-VR apps/pages/etc all running at the same time, all integrating in the same 3D space.

I heard two and a half talks at last year's BUILD with the folks working on _Windowing_ in Windows and directions things are headed, and the really interesting stuff was all the hints of "we can't talk about it in detail yet, but" stuff and almost all of that was hints of what it even means to be a Window in 3D and how things interact in that sort of space. (Not just for today's version of Windows Mixed Reality, but also potentially how that shakes up all of Windows' base windowing capabilities whether 3D or 2D, how it may drive even 2D windowing moving forward, depending on how things shake out.)

(Something I don't think a lot of people notice, too, is how important 3D is to the Fluent Design System, and not just for Material Design reasons of faking paper stacks for visual interest in 2D, but probably because a lot more of Microsoft is taking 3D very seriously than it currently seems obvious that they are given the current intentional "no hype" approach.)

It certainly sounds like the Windows team has been thinking about all of this sort of stuff for years now, and I'm very curious to see a lot more of it come to light rather than just "we're thinking about it". This article also hints at some more of it getting released as real services SOON™.

I'm presuming we'll hear a lot more about Azure Spatial Anchors at this year's BUILD, and that could be quite interesting based on the hints in this article.

Personally, I like the idea of doing everything of mine through a full-immersion app. But my ideal use-case for these is also to just have windows from my desktop anywhere in space, which isn't exactly the norm.

Subpixel AA for VR/AA helps, but it's nowhere near enough. You also need better panels and better optics.

The reason why ClearType works so well on low-rez LCDs is that pixels are made of 3 RGB subpixels with guaranteed shape, size and layout.

Based on the parts of the video where they mention display technology, clear type is probably out, they're projecting lasers, I don't think there're subpixels.

Yet many of us turn off ClearType because the subpixel artifacts are worse (subjectively) than the increase in resolution.

Ironically I feel that subpixel rendering works better (and becomes worthwhile) in high-dpi displays where the artifacts aren't as noticeable.

On Windows, subjectively, it works OK for a range of resolutions: 15.6", 13.3", 4.5" FullHD, 22" 1200p, and 27" 4k.

I also have 8" 1280x800 windows tablet which doesn't look good regardless on the setting but it was very cheap, something like $120.

fonts being defined as a set of bezier curves you'd have thought it would quite easy to write a shader where each fragment computes its distance from the curve & assigns smoothsteped color as a function of that distance

This is kind of expensive actually. Its usually done with a precalculated texture sheet of glyphs which trades memory for shader perf. See: Signed Distance Field

ok but a precomputed texture isn't scalable

When its an SDF texture it is scalable because the distance function produces continuous data. The aliasing is greatly reduces because data is easily calculable from neighboring pixel samples.

Edit: Here's Valve's Siggraph paper on the technique https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...

Perhaps Pathfinder mentioned above is implementing exactly that, but I am not familiar.

DWRITE is very extensible so you can always implement an IDWriteTextRenderer and do all the magic staff in it.

Link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/directwrite...

I read the Hololens 2 has a better pixel density of 47 pixels/degree of visual field. Not sure if I recall if the units I stated are completely correct, but I have no idea if that's enough to render good font quality at all levels of presentation.

Handy calculator:

http://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDensityCalculator.html#find:dist...

Looks like it's probably similar to using a 27" monitor on your desk, depending on the resolution/size of the display

47 pixels per degree (PPD) would certainly be good enough to emulate a desktop monitor. In reality, 35 PPD is sufficient, albeit only capable of emulating low end monitors. 62 PPD is roughly the limit of human eye resolution for a general static image.

I would be surprized if this Hololens is up to 47PPD, but to my pleasant surprise MS did make a big leap (no pun intended) in optics his go-round. So, I suppose it's possible. In my opinion, they are definitely (finally) on the right track in terms of pursuing a virtual retinal display (I.e. laser projection on the retina).

I thought the pixel density is the same as Hololens 1, but the display is bigger.

I think we also need way higher res HMDs than today, like at least 2K per eye