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Comment by bmacauley | Hacker News Reader

Would it be possible to use Google Pixel as a personal high resolution monitor? 2560 x 1440 is the equivalent of a 27 inch monitor...if you wore it as a headset, how big would the monitor equivalent be? 50"?

If I could attach this to my Mac and use the headset instead of hunching over a 15" laptop, I'd be very happy!

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The actual resolution you get in an HMD is much, much lower than the screen resolution. For example, a movie theatre screen in an Oculus Rift CV1 with a resolution of 2160 x 1200 (1080 x 1200 per eye) would have an effective resolution of about 720x480.

Of course, you can create as many of these screens as you want in a virtual space, but the resolution combined with the distortion will hinder any text-heavy work.

One of the issues here is the content isn't tied directly to the pixels in the display. You have competing rasters: the raster of the input video (or desktop rendering), and the raster of the display device. They don't necessarily interact in a nice way.

That's actually the reason VR experiences seem so low-rez (well, among many others) despite having high resolution displays.

Like this?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/382110/

No...forget the VR

How about it's just a 2560 x 1440 screen in a headset?

Would be great for coding without the neck pain

You'd have eye strain from focusing on such a nearby object. In the headset itself each eye would only see half the screen.

You loose half the resolution since each eye needs to be looking at the same thing. Second since you're looking at it in stereo you need to have the desktop a decent enough distance away from you to be able to focus on it or you'd go cross eyed.

I think this is what causes the effective resolution to drop to that much lower level.

Starting with a 2560x1440 mobile device, you'd need to get a very different head mount -- with a larger distance from the eyes to the screen for the same device -- to make that a useful 2560x1440 screen for coding or other non-stereo "flat" work vs. a pair of 1280x1440 screens for stereo 3D work. The latter is what you get from a phone-in-a-box VR displays with a 2560x1440 phone display.

Now, there might be a use for stereo 3D displays in programming, but I don't think anyone's developed and proven the tools that demonstrate this use.

Or this http://store.steampowered.com/app/457550/

A.f.a.i.k. few people tried some rudimentary experiments and there were two main problems:

a) you can work in VR for more than an hour because of nausea b) smaller text is not legible

But if you feel wealthy and adventurous enough, there is "Virtual Desktop" [1] for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/382110

You would also have a 360° view, much better then double/triple/x-le screens.

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