OP here. The text is comfortable to read. i.e. I made it big enough to be comfortable. I haven't experienced any of the eyestrain that others have mentioned, despite spending up to 2 consecutive hours playing with this app.

However, in addition to the low resolution in the current Oculus dev kits, text rendering is definitely hard to do in VR. How do you do crisp sub-pixel rendering when your face is ever so slightly tilted? Something that will have to be solved in future software or by sheer pixel density.

That said, it's early days for VR and the future is bright!

I tried one yesterday for the first time. It was a DK2, it was very low resolution, and you could clearly see the colored pixels of the display.

Text had to be very large, so only three or four lines fit on the screen at a time. After hearing people praise the DK2, I thought it would be basically seamless, but it was jarringly low-res.

The experience was great, very natural, but the pixel density left a lot to be desired.

I own a DK1 and the low resolution makes text reading incredibly difficult. DK2 is a step up but text reading still strains my eyes. I think the 'sweet spot' for us coders will be when the DK4 hits market late next year (DK3's supposed to be out early/mid 2015).

Huh? Oculus has said there will be no more development kits before the consumer version. And they haven't announced a date for CV1.

cv1="dk3"; cv2="consumer version" BUT... it will all depend on the advances others make in the input space.

I really hope so. I desperately want a VR desktop.

Thanks. So I guess it's just a matter of resolution? I hope it will be improved in several future development iterations.

this is odd, i've got a z800 hmd (800x600) and i could read 16 lines comfortably.

That hmd has only a 40 degree field of view, as opposed to the rift's 100 degrees.

FOV is normally diagonal, so for 800x600 we have 1000 "diagonal" pixels, and for the rift's 960x1080 (per eye) we have 1444 "diagonal" pixels.

So that works out to:

  1000/40  = 25.0 pixels per degree for the z800 
  1444/100 = 14.4 pixels per degree for the rift

So the z800 would have almost 4 pixels for every 1 pixel of the Rift

In fact, it's even less for the rift because the DK2 doesn't have a standard RGB display but pentile pixels, which means you only have the full 1920x1080 for the green subpixels, the red and blue are reduced since humans are less sensitive to those colours

Sorry, I only tried it for half an hour or so and saw that it only displayed three or four lines. 16 lines is probably doable, I just meant it can't display an entire Web page, like a screen can.

It should be pretty simple to add collaboration with node and something like socket.io. We are working on a project using threejs, node, and socket, just no Oculus support (yet.)