Comment by mattnewport | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattnewport | Hacker News Reader

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I gave it a quick try, some initial observations:

- You don't appear to be using SDK layers for your screens, they would probably help with text readability.

- UI isn't very discoverable and I couldn't find help.

- I couldn't find a way to zoom / scale a web view, this would help with text readability on a site like HN if I could set the zoom to say 150%.

- Related but different, I couldn't find a way to move / scale a panel.

- I couldn't find a way to rotate my view and I spawned at an awkward angle so had to stand at an angle to my cameras to face the large screen. I'd normally expect to find snap turn on the thumbstick in most apps.

- The keyboard works quite well, nice job. I feel like a Swype style keyboard could work even better for VR though.

- Keyboard behavior was a bit unintuitive on sign up, I tried to touch the next input field to select it and my keyboard disappeared, I didn't immediately notice the next / previous buttons on the keyboard itself.

- There's not a lot to do initially as a lone user. Some kind of onboarding / tutorial would be good and it would give a better initial impression if there was a bit more to do. I know the focus is on collaboration but I think you would benefit from a hook for individual users trying it out.

Hey! I'm Doug, one of the founders of Dream.

Thanks for taking the time to leave detailed feedback like this. We need as much of it as we can get.

A few of your points come down to discoverability / help. You are correct. We agree that before the app comes out of early access we have to drastically increase that. Once we understand that the core functionality is serving its intended purpose, we will turn our attention to onboarding, help and discoverability.

It's also fair to point out that pixel density in the headsets aren't really great yet. We are of the opinion that legibility will be a problem that solves itself in the near future. User frustration might force us to reconsider that opinion sooner rather than later.

Lastly, with regard to the position of UI, it is something we have worked on quite a bit and there is still plenty of room for it to get better. We have shied away from infinitely adjustable UI size and positioning and instead tried to make something that positions itself automatically. Right now, the UI positions itself based on where your head and hands are and how long we think your arms are. The implementation is pretty naive and we intend to improve it over time. This might be another area where we have to get more mechanical to decrease frustration.

Yeah, headset resolution is limited but that's why it's important to make the most of what you have. As I understand it the SDK quad and cylinder layers bypass the lens distortion pass and effectively analytically ray trace the optimal sample point for direct display. Carmack is always telling people to use them for anything text heavy. I haven't done a side by side comparison but this is probably why Dash text is a bit more legible than yours. Future headsets will have higher resolution but we're years away from high enough for this stuff not to matter.

As an experienced VR user my expectation at this point is that I can move panels around with my hands and ideally scale them too. Doing that well and in a way that doesn't trip up novice users isn't trivial though, Dash still has some work to do there.

I don't mean to be overly critical, my first VR app (for the DK2!) was written from scratch in C++ so I know how much work goes into developing something like this without an engine. I want this type of app to succeed so I can use it though so the feedback is intended to be constructive!

I don't take this as overly critical. We need and welcome feedback.

Looking at layers for text is something we will definitely do. We are happy with SDF text in our UI, but text inside of Chromium is miles from acceptable and will continue to be a focus.

As far as scalable and user positional UI, we currently hold the opinion that it doesn't offer enough value to compensate for the complication that it introduces, especially for novice users. At the same time, we realize that is a contrarian point of view and user frustration may force us to change it. We have to remain open to changing opinions like these.

Agree with Doug's response, but wanted to quickly say thanks for pointing us at the SDK layers thing - will dig into it!

We spent a fair bit of time building out this pretty unique node-based pipeline architecture, where the HMD is effectively just a sink node. We made an attempt to make text / content more legible by the way of an FXAA implementation, which would have limited performance impact as compared to something like MSAA - but it definitely can get a lot better. Will dig into that stuff, and hopefully we can improve it further!

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