VGA had 480 scanlines. When was the last time anyone seriously programmed on a display worse than that?

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.

So long as it has that sweet sweet lamborghini countach poster on the wall, i'm sold.

I recall being my most productive on an old IBM 3151 terminal (probably because of the keyboard, but also fewer distractions). It was only 80x24 characters. And 80x24 is easily represented in a 640x480 screen. Now add in head tracking, and you can have the screen move up and down and scroll the text in the opposite direction, making it appear as if you are moving a virtual picture frame over a bigger sheet of paper.

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.

Although I have much higher resolution, lately some occular migranes have forced me to up the font size on my monitor. Having really big type seems to stave off the migranes for some reason.

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 ;-)

For one of my projects, I am writing code Thet is meant to be read by the 99%, i.e. formatted to be readable on a phone. 40 chars wide, and I rarely look at more than 10 lines at a time.

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.

programming wasn't really possible until HD came around

other than "can't fall off a seat tray" there isn't much point in having 4 virtual monitors if it gives you less readable real-estate than a real monitor.

Really? Even if the visible, readable real-estate is limited, I think there's be a huge usability boost from using... "virtual monitors" is a terribly ambiguous phrase... virtually co-located monitors?

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.

> 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.

Oh, it's not that bad. Jesus, people make more out of this stuff than is at all necessary. How did people ever adopt cars or boats, talking like that?

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.

Its that bad. Its a well-studied phenomenon called 'simulator sickness'. A kind of aphasia, for some it can persist for days beyond the initial experience.

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

No, you don't know what you're talking about. Simulator sickness is not a black or white issue. It's even possible to avoid it by making the display worse.

Makes sense - worse means less involvement with your sensory expectations. Its when you're brain is convinced it should sense vestibular changes and it doesn't, that you throw up, get nauseous and dizzy etc. The difference between 'looking at' and 'believe you're inside of' a simulation hinges on the quality of the experience.

I used to program on a BBC Micro and that was low resolution.