It's a shame we weren't able to program on VGA monitors. :(

My guess would be Commodore 64 with an NTSC TV for display. That's pretty close to the text fidelity you can reproduce on a "virtual monitor" in a current-generation VR environment. (I think a lot of people underestimate the amount of resolution lost due to lens correction -- the rendered screen image is heavily distorted to account for the wide-angle lenses.)

Well, I suppose it would be sort of fun to have a virtual C64, as long as the virtual surroundings are well executed: a complete high school kid's bedroom from 1986.

Even today, most of my (C / Bash) programming is done in an 80x24 xterm, although I'll typically have documentation open in another window. However web and GUI app development requires enough room to see the resulting product.

Anyway, I think I've been going for about a month and a half with 80x27 text displays (full screen with tmux). I'm doing web development and my browser is similarly scaled (thank god we're building something with a scalable UI).

I have not missed the screen real estate at all. Of course, I'm old and I used to always work on 80x25, so the extra 2 lines are luxury ;-)

It's generally fine. Every now and then I feel like I want to see the broader context of the code, but it's rare. In general it forces me to write much cleaner, more readable code, and to structure things better so that concerns are truly isolated and I don't need to look at a lot of code to see how things work. Overall I think it's a positive experience.

The key metric for me is how much information I can access with input under a minimal threshold. From personal experience, a hotkey to swap virtual desktops (e.g. Alt+Up) still isn't the same as having multiple physical monitors to reference.

However, I'd expect VR head orientation changes to look at different monitors to be fairly similar perceptually to what I do now, since it's the same physical action.

The bigger problem for the seat-tray problem is, afaik, both Oculus and the Vive use externally located tracking devices. Would be curious whether a fuzzier, internal-sensor-only, limited "intent" tracking mode (e.g. flick head to switch monitor) would make people hurl or not.

Yes, it would. This has been studied pretty extensively, the head movements need to be very precisely matched by rendering. The absolute worst you can do is any kind of non-linear response -- acceleration + lag can make people who are very tolerant of VR nausea literally throw up.

And use it on any sort of system that can show the outside world (AR, or pass through camera in VR) and it goes away completely.

Gesture interfaces could work.

If you don't experience it, good for you, you are one of the lucky ones.

Oculus has been riding the smartphone screen density wave but I'm not sure that will continue much longer since for phone use going beyond 500ppi doesn't make much difference.

Maybe some kind of projected light field will be the next solution?

GPUs will keep getting faster and smaller. Have you seen NVIDIA X1?

already being done! http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Leap

Nvidia's light-field stuff seems to be more of a VR solution, but requires even higher pixel densities. https://research.nvidia.com/publication/near-eye-light-field...

Not so much on the "raw display hardware" side of things though. I could still see it being a decade+ out on that alone.

Cool stuff, but it needs extremely fast and low latency eye tracking to work effectively. It's not insurmountable, but a significant engineering problem.

Huh. What the fuck have I been doing for the last 6 months, then?

The time will come for textual VR environments though! I can't wait to have "newspaper resolution" for textures (hold up a virtual newspaper in a VR world and you can actually read the text like it were a printed page). But I suspect it's not going to happen before the mid-2020s at least.

There are a lot of people who are doing text wrong in VR. You don't render at 10pt and expect it to look right. You have to pay attention and not just take the default settings.

I've spent much time reading and writing text in VR and it hasn't been a problem. If building a real, live code editing environment were my goal, I could have it done in a week. But I have different goals.

Texture filtering on the Galaxy Note 4's embedded GPU is probably not a priority. On a 2560*1440 phone screen, who can even see those artifacts? So it could be that the hardware and drivers are taking quite a few shortcuts there, and those come to haunt on the Oculus.

The Gear VR has a fairly decent GPU. The move to mobile was more about discarding legacy fixed-function pipeline techniques and more directly optimizing for shaders. The main factor limiting texture-fill is GPU RAM. But most devices have more than enough RAM to be able to render text well.

VR is a realism multiplier. Traditional 3D graphics techniques are realism fakers. You shouldn't apply many traditional graphics techniques, because they have perspective-dependent artifacts that are subtle to impossible to notice in mono still images but glaring in stereo motion. So I think it's folly to apply too much effort on things like displacement shaders or stereo textures. These sort of things both A) cost a lot of time, and B) look terrible in an unrestricted stereo view. There's even new research to suggest one's general hormonal balance can have a huge impact in whether or not these miscues are going to cause simulator sickness in a user. You could literally be alienating half of your potential users along gender lines.

In the face of that, I think it makes more sense to stick to simpler techniques that respect the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. We've been able to write some 3D games that run at 150fps for over a decade now. But there is no 150hz display to pair it with. V-sync is probably the most important issue, followed closely by running at native resolution (so for a given GPU, a lower resolution screen might actually be better, because it will be easier to hit the full refresh rate at the native resolution) and clean, consistent antialiasing. It wouldn't be a problem if both eyes were rendered identically, but having the dual eyes highlights any visual artifacts that appear. Match those three issues and the realism of the content doesn't matter, it could be flat-color, Phong-shaded cubes and you'll have a great VR experience. Miss any of them and even high-end games like Elite: Dangerous that are gorgeous on 2D will look like complete garbage.

VR has completely inverted the priorities of graphics programmers. Because of this, I think the primary VR innovation is going to come from indie developers, because most established companies can't switch their focus away from their 2D-display oriented consumer base. The Call of Duty series has sold over 175 million units. Assume nearly $40 a pop, that makes over $7 billion. You're not going to see VR getting anywhere near that for a few years still, and companies like Activision and EA aren't going to chase after such small potatoes in anyway other than just PR.