Where do you get this from?

It seems to me if there was even a correlation, which I'm not sure, it would have more to do with resolution, since same resolution but bigger display doesn't actually show more information.

Its true, up to a point.

you just have to ignore that at the extremes it's probably negatively correlated, and there's a significant non-zero possibility that at least in the short term, that possibility of negative correlation applies to the area VR is interested in as well.

It’s a popular myth propagated by American public. Funnily enough, in many European and Asian countries the opposite is deemed to be true. The truth is that there has never been any conclusive evidence one way or the other.

“The first evaluation of the impact of human size on longevity or life span in 1978, which was based on data for decreased groups of athletes and famous people in the USA, suggested that shorter, lighter men live longer than their taller, heavier counterparts. In 1990, a study of 1679 decreased men and women from the general American population supported these findings. In the present study data on the height, weight, and age at death of 373 men were obtained from records at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Diego, CA, USA. Men of height 175.3 cm or less lived an average of 4.95 years longer than those of height over 175.3 cm, while men of height 170.2 cm or less lived 7.46 years longer than those of at least 182.9 cm. An analysis by weight difference revealed a 7.72-year greater longevity for men of weight 63.6 kg or less compared with those of 90.9 kg or more. This corroborates earlier evidence and contradicts the popular notion that taller people are healthier.” [0]

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1600586/

I find a hard time believing this. Do you have a source?

That's a dubious statement. Filling the binocular field of view is fine; it's about 120° horizontally, give or take. But past that it starts to be a problem. Generally, if you look at the screen and any edge is blocked by your nose without turning your head, it's likely too large to work comfortably on. (but still fine for immersive content like games or movies)

I tried to work on three 16:9 displays for some time, and found it exhausting. The cognitive overload isn't worth it, workspace switching with a hotkey turned out to be far easier for me. That's not even mentioning constant neck movement.

Maybe it's just me though, I can't speak for different people; but I strongly suspect it's the same for many.

I mean this doesn't seem to be true for anyone working in the trades. "Mise-en-place" allowed me to tend a 24-foot-long bar by myself with 60+ customers. At the time, I was essentially a highly trained, top performing athlete. Just because I can't see the cash register / margarita machine / well drinks / etc... it doesn't mean it's not an extension of my body.

It is possible for your entire workshop to become a second-nature extension of self, not just the desk in front of your face.

I think part of this discussion is: "What can be part of a singular focused task vs. what requires some amount of 'context switching'?" And its not always super obvious. Practicing a workflow can integrate context-switches so that it becomes one singular focused task.

But VR/AR can also assist with neurological training by allowing you to switch environments when you switch contexts. For someone who is WFH in a studio apartment it can separate their "gaming desk" from their "work desk" from their "hobby desk" ... or even their "React desk" from their "Concurrency-wrangling desk" from their "Email/Communications battlestation". This could enable much faster context switching -- meeting in 30 seconds? pop over to your "Virtual Conferencing Room". Then come back to your sanctum of concurrency troubleshooting.

The way you expressed it actually reminds me of Iain McGilchrist's "left brain" versus "right brain" thinking model, wherein the narrow-ish "task-focused" approach is typical left-brain concern (essentialist, to a fault), whereas the wider "contextual" approach is typical right-brain associative concerns ("everything is complex/connected"). I'd never noticed this ergonomics question (should I say dichotomy) could be neurologically framed that way, thanks for the insight.

Of course you need two of those screens to fill your field of view, unless you have a square screen that goes below your desk, but I'm sure that's available somewhere.

My subjective impression is that the nonperipheral visual field isn’t square. I would find 3:2 displays optimal, or maybe rather 16:11. While a 16:9 or 16:10 display could be extended vertically to fill more of the visual field, that extended portion is not large enough to usefully fit a second monitor there (without head movement).

If you're like most people and the horizontal field is close to max, you'll do better stacking monitors than putting them side/side. Inter pupillary distance is a bit over 2in (~65mm), but that's usually small compared to screen distance, which is why I say roughly square (~16:14).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis

I have three monitors, and it's still not enough. I would be thrilled if each of my monitors had four times the apparent area in a 3D space that layered applications and documents behind each other in some approximately intuitive way.

In my mind the real power comes from spatial hand tracking as a new UX paradigm(seeing an interacting with objects in 3d space) and possibly the addition of large displays anywhere a monitor couldn't have feasibly been, (eg, floating in the server room in a cramped space when needed).

I don't think working on code will be all that different. There isn't any physical spatial interaction with text on paper that the current editors are missing.

When I work on a laptop I also keep one app or one tab in focus most of the time.

Counter example, imagine fixing your car engine and having 100 tabs open everywhere.

If we're talking about programming instead, an intuitive way to switch between modules when working on a large project would be to have their windows laid out before you on a virtual desk and you could switch between the active one displayed on a central virtual monitor by making a gesture (probably something like the Oculus pinch) towards the window you want to switch to. This would allow you to use your spatial reasoning to remember which windows you have open and would also allow you to group related windows. Additional displays could show console output from your development server, the GUI part of the app you're working on, a test runner, etc. positioned where you can glance at them easily.

That being said, I think the real killer app for the new "facetop" computing devices that are around the corner will be physical fitness and social interaction. If you think a standing desk was a big improvement for your health then you'll love being able to freely walk around your office and work from any position whether it's standing, sitting at a desk, perched by the window, lounging on the sofa, or even crouching while giving those legs a stretch. You can also kiss zoom meetings goodbye with the unnatural wall of faces almost but not quite making eye contact with you. You'll talk to an avatar, realistic or not, that has full eye, face and body tracking allowing you to tell if your interlocutor is paying attention or thinking about how long it is until lunch while checking the wait time at the nearest restaurants. It actually does feel like you're in the presence of another person and spending a few hours talking to people virtually will no longer leave you with a headache and eye-strain.

I'd also invest in learning how to use a one handed, portable chording keyboard, it'll probably be useful.

We might end up with a phone as the go-to XR keyboard. Would be pretty funny if that evolves into everyone wearing AR glasses with a 90s Nokia sized blackberry keyboard in their pocket.

If you have a good idea, you should prototype it and get it out there (and maybe get a nice buyout in the process..)

I'd love to know if this is true. I've heard that in a VR headset, your eyes are always focused at the exact same distance, even if it appears like something is far off in the distance. And that this can lead to eyestrain. Can anybody here speak to that?

Your shortcuts are your bread and butter and you are super fast.

Perhaps for sculpting.

I only see this as a supplemental feature for certain use cases (coarse-grained 3D operations). In general nothing beats the efficiency of working with a keyboard for navigating application functions, or (at least with current technology) the mouse for precision 2D navigation/selection. Their advantage being precise and definite/discrete input.

For actual work, even with a VR headset I see myself still mostly using keyboard and mouse.

Perhaps, in a lab setting, doing straightforward, focused tasks like the ones they use in these productivity studies, I could sustain a productivity boost long enough for the researcher to get a two-tailed p<0.05.

Make me do it in real life, though, 40 hours a week, week after week after week, and I expect I would burn out very quickly. I like my work well enough, but I don't think I want to actually stick my whole head inside of it.

If it's for vacation, just unplug. Mixing work and vacation makes both worse.

If it's for business, your attention should be on whatever it is that prompted you to travel. Presumably that's face time with people, not grinding away in front of a computer.

I find that the high DPI trend has a tendency to limit us unneccesarily more than actually fix anything. It is still common to say max 80 characters per line. In the olden days where that comes from, it would require 640 pixels horizontally. So at 100% scaling you can fit 3 standard terminals side-by-side and fit 60+ lines vertically, what more do you need when you also have multiple workspaces to tab across?

I truly believe that VR is perfect for training/sim type games. Actual games.. Could really only count on one hand the games I feel are worth diving into VR for.

- OLED panels could provide much darker screens and cause less eye strain.

- Eye tracking with higher resolution where they only have to render properly where you are looking at

- I think the headset would be much lighter and comfortable.

Do you have a source?

Anecdotal, I work without external displays and keep one window in focus, this helps my productivity.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1753326.1753336?casa_toke...

There’s much more. Search “sensemaking” or “immersive analytics” on Scholar. Depth and width of field, achieved via stereoscopy and tracking, is well documented as a performance enhancer when it comes to generalizeable task completion in VR.

And displaying more things mean you need to context switch less.

It's way better than I would have expected. It's still not good enough to make me want to use it daily (even for just an hour or so)

Their hardware like the Xbox or surface are not crappy.

Is this just trolling?

You get retina resolution, high refresh rate, HDR, and 2Factor authentication (Biometric+Goggles)/information security in one package. Of course you'll still likely want to have a laptop to drive it (untethered) except for the simplest mobile games.

- 4k is not nearly enough. I think we will likely need 8k screens.

- The headsets are not light enough. You need something with all day comfort for work.

- There is still too much eye-strain from the quality of the lenses and the fixed focus.

- Input is still not natural and precise enough. We would need to be able to see our own hands and type with zero latency. Hand-tracked pointing needs to be able to pick up on small subtle finger motion like a mouse or trackpad can

You can throw a grain of sand only so fra, a pebnle somewhat more, a baseball probably very far… And you stop there, more or less.

People can learn 3D environments by viewing them in a 2D screen very happily, and millions of gamers do exactly that every day. I can still remember my way around the map in GTA 3 about 20 years after I first played it...

The "flight" in GTA is more like a moving viewpoint than a space full of 3D objects and affordances.

Full immersive 3D navigation through code and file systems would be an interesting experiment. I suspect we'd get used to it very quickly, and we'd then wonder why we spent so long tied down by virtual paper metaphors. (I could be wrong, of course.)

inb4 "It's a Unix system, I know this!"

This is such an Engelbart-esque statement. Bravo! I'd love for AR to go there too :)

I don't think VR headsets will not take off as display alternatives.

People don't even care about highdpi.

I hope you’re wrong about this.

I hope there will be a great personal (non-work) use case for the next generation of VR/AR. Something like gaming, watching sports (always have awesome “seats”), movies with friends, maybe map/gps/etc. for when I’m running.

I know there are options for this already. But honestly, I haven’t seen anyone who’s not a dork using VR/AR. I want the version the average person is excited about. I’m ready to plunk down any amount of money Apple wants from me.

If it’s VR/AR for work, count me out. I don’t have any interest in increasing my work productivity lol.

I can’t wait for VR/AR to be fully monetized and mainstream. I’m sick of speculative VC-funded crap that I can’t pay for because they’re in “growth mode.” When something’s monetized at least then I have some faith that it’ll be around for awhile.

Think late 2020s at best, and probably well into the 30s for the kind of refined VR we all know possible. It's like we had nice and functional pocket computers since the 1990s (PDAs etc), but it would take a solid decade for the iPhone to be made under the vision of a statistically rare product genius (means we can wait ±5~10 yrs for things to emerge as commercially successful tech). Or how video games took about 20 years to move from whatever came before the current "modern" era/paradigm (say late 1990s) that lives on to this day in terms of UI/UX. Same with the "desktop" metaphor for PCs, etc.

We have yet to nail the hardware for VR, let alone the OS code (core libs etc) whose precision and intuitiveness will feel tremendously "corporeal" in the case of VR, visceral, much more than any TV/monitor + vibrating thing could ever do (let alone keyboard/mouse). If you've ever did the timing for an action-paced fast video game, you know the kind of intricate subtleties I'm talking about, where one frame can make or break some experiences.

Then will come the time to nail killer metaphors, high-level GUI/GUX, killer apps.

We're not quite there yet.

Is it a bad relapse of LOC metrics? ツ