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Comment by spiderPig | Hacker News Reader

The virtual desktop thing looks cool. Has anyone been able to use it as an external monitor for coding ? I have neck problems and this seems like a great replacement

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Have you tried VR headsets for extended periods of time? My experience with both the Rift and Vive have been that they aren't easy on the neck and upper back muscles because the headsets are front-heavy. You could try to use it lying down though.

The other poster is also right about resolution issues. To get any decent amount of text on the screen, you'll cause a lot of eye strain.

Haven't tried them but an idea that just popped in my mind would be to add some counterweight at the back of the head. Increased weight but decreases the torque you have to fight. It is what the military uses when wearing NVGs IIRC

I've been wondering why more companies don't do this. Simply re-locating the battery to the back would go a long ways towards this.

I remember this came up in an Oculus keynote that John Carmack gave. I believe the reason given was because a significant portion of users use the headset while lying down and so nothing can really be on the back of the head?

Modern smartphones almost weigh nothing, so I'm wondering why is a VR headset so heavy?

Glass for the lenses, for one thing.

Another is that the force exerted on you head is roughly weight times the distance that weight is from the centerline of your neck. This multiplier makes stuff hanging out in front of your face much heavier than it would be if were just sitting on top of your head.

I had silly idea of gaming using DJI headset while lying down. Not sure how good would it be and how would it compare to monitor hanged above the bed.

I do it sometimes with my samsung odyssey. I usually use VR Toolgox: 360 Desktop although I also have Virtual Desktop and Multiscreens. You have to blow the screens way up to keep things readable but if you're having a bit of writers block it can be a nice change of pace to get your creativity flowing on a whatever problems you're hacking away at.

Waiting for my Piimax 8K-X to see what the greater and field of view and nominally better pixel density does for it.

If you're having strength issues you should consider exercising more. They aren't heavy and are well balanced.

I was trying to think about why your comment irritated me. It's because it sounds like you commented about balance without actually trying to find the center of gravity on either headset. (It's near where your nose would be.)

I researched it for a VR application primarily for older people, so the ergonomics mattered, and the ergonomics were a real issue.

You raise a great point that I overlooked. There are many reasons why someone would have impaired neck movement or strength, making it hard to use. I apologize.

The Oculus Go is not heavy at all.

Tasks that require reading text from screen can't be done using VR yet, because of the resolution and chromatic aberration. You'll end up with eye related problems. It's good for pictures, videos.

That (and watching video) requires significantly higher resolutions than the Rift provides, even 4k isn't enough.

Resolution needs to be quadrupled at least to make this feasible :(

Having tested Visual Studio and IntelliJ IDEA in 1080p (HD), 1440p (QHD) and 2160p (4K) desktops with a Vive Pro, I would it say it really depends on your monitor and HMD resolution. With the new Vive Pro, 1080p is totally acceptable, albeit strenuous (for my eyes/brain), then again I am easily fatigued by anything in VR lasting more than 30 minutes. It also assumes you don't mind coding in HD, which I do, so I have only tried a couple times before giving up.

Is the 4K resolution less strenuous for you than HD? I tried looking at text in VR a while ago on an older Vive and the text was too blurry for me to easily read.

Yes and no. I just tested again... 4K is considerably crisper than HD, even when resizing down ~25% and up to ~60% of original size. The main problem is actually the size... 4K is just too large of a screen area to be viewed without having to pick up the controllers to move the virtual screen around. Anything past the bottom or right half is more or less off-limits, meaning you have to move those windows (e.g. builds)... or just resize the editor to the upper-left corner.

The best setup I could manage was to put the bottom of the virtual screen a bit in the floor, then you are looking straight on so that you can see the upper-left corner and still get to the menus and see at least the first ~25 lines of code (Consolas size 10).

I should note I'm using the built-in Desktop which you can insert via Steam VR Home. I just dropped it into the default home and moved it around/resized until I found it workable. There may be better tools for running virtual desktops in VR, I haven't explored this space at all since reading anything in any VR app for more than a few minutes makes me dizzy... speaking of which, no more VR for today! ;)

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