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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the idea of having a better virtual office really isn't as great as it seems when you try it out. Basically extra latency to not see all of the stuff on your desk and have the entire world skip frames when you do something that maxes out your CPU or GPU. Not to mention the aformentioned image-in-an-image quality problems.

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I think this can be solved. This may surprise many, but I use virtual reality for all of my heavy reading, without any issue whatsoever. It basically feels like I am reading on a movie screen.

While my use case is different than most, I personally have a print related disability (severe convergence insufficiency), which requires the use of assistive technology. Anyways, the app I use is called Retinopsy Look VR, which is available in Viveport. It is intended for people with visual impairments and is super adjustable. I think the adjustability is key. To augment my reading experience, I use a screen reader called Kurzweil 3000, which reads the text aloud to me, with the sentence being read in yellow and the word being read aloud in green, simultaneously.

I use a Valve Index headset with prescription lenses that are adapted to the headset (I got them from VR Optician). I also use a laptop with an i9 10th gen processor, a 2080 Super video card, 32 GB RAM, and SSDs as hard drives. The only thing I do not like about my setup is the fact that it is not wireless and also the fact that base stations (“lighthouses”) are required.

I think specialized use cases are an absolute hit on VR devices. Where else can you get consumer priced hardware that you can create a completely custom tuned to the user version without needing custom hardware? That being said I never did manage to find a customized version that was more efficient for the common use case, after all monitors/books/phone screens are already the customized optimized consumer hardware for most people.

Agreed. I am actually working on making an app that effectively does all of this natively, that is extremely customizable, for both Oculus and SteamVR systems.

You may want to check out SeeingVRToolkit, which was made by Microsoft to make VR accessible to the visually impaired. Retinopsy Look VR utilizes this.

See: https://github.com/microsoft/SeeingVRtoolkit

With Retinopsy VR, reading dense and long material in VR is extremely easy and immersive. I find it far more enjoyable than reading physical books, even without using a screenreader.

I also have ADHD, and reading in VR is far more immersive (and especially with a screen reader utilizing multimodal highlighting). I can learn a lot better because the text is right in my face, being read aloud to me, with changing colors highlighted to the audio, which I cannot escape and drift off from in VR.

Anyways, I do all my coding in VR using Retinopsy VR. It allows me to really buckle down and focus. I sit on the couch reclined and I have my keyboard and mouse on a very stable lap desk, the Couchmaster Cycon 2. I also have headset strap stabilizers/modifiers from Studioform Creative so I can use my headset for several hours.

This was amazing to read thank you for taking the time to discuss all of these VR tools and how they are used. I have a friend in a similar situation who is getting an Oculus Quest 2 soon and this information will be very useful to them.

Best of luck with the app development it sounds fantastic m

You are so welcome!

You have to read this article, which was written by somebody who is visually impaired. He explains why the experience of VR is so much better for people with visual impairments, in so many ways, compared to any other assistive technologies. He states why it is so much more helpful: https://www.alphr.com/virtual-reality/1008932/vr-vision-loss...

There is a visually impaired user who uses the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift. It is the first person on this thread. You may want to investigate their posts: https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/86303/low-v...

Here are all of the big accessibility groups that I know of, for VR: https://udl.berkeley.edu/accessibility/xr-accessibility

There is also a very large (500+ person) VR accessibility group: https://www.meetup.com/a11yvr/

This is an accessibility design podcast for VR: https://xrforlearning.io/podcast/designing-accessibility-int...

This is the Microsoft SeeingVR website, with the open source code and YouTube video: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/seeingvr/

I hope this helps. I have been looking into this recently, and I will need all of these resources for my project.

Those are terrific resources, thank you!

See mirage[0] - this solves the "can't see your desk" problem.

A more recent seems to be ThinkReality (by Lenovo) which prominently features a 'extra screens' application on the home page[1].

0: https://www.mirage-app.com/

1: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkrealitya3

I think the softwre side answers are there, just pump more high quality information in faster and it's easily solved. The problem is i just punts it to hardware. Both the lenovo product and hololens have absymal fovs and resolution but you can at least look to the real world great. Otoh normal headsets can display the virtual world in great detail and double the fov but not only is it taxing on the hardware to do so you need to bring in the real world insted. In either scenario you get pretty bad tradeoffs at this point, and I've tried both approaches for quite a while.

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