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Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

Productivity is correlated with display size, and VR should be the next step in productivity, because it allows your whole space to become a display and an interface. When paired with powerful hardware and innovative software it should be the next step in computing.

Therefore, VR should be a replacement for large displays in productive work, not a device that everyone is wearing outside or casually watching videos with. The use cases are professional; such as programming, CAD, design etc. I believe that properly implemented VR would allow utilizing full visual-spatial capabilities of our brains, totally eliminating the process of hunting for files and switching windows.

It would be possible to dive into code and see it all at once like an intricate factory. Our brains are capable of navigating very complex environments, but this capability is lost when its viewed through a small window.

I wish they'd explore this area, rather than go for a mass market appeal. What kind of software is possible, and how much productivity can be increased with maxed out hardware with high resolution VR? I'm not sure if 4K resolution with a M2 chip is powerful enough for a truly innovative product. Maybe it is, but there's still room for a "pro" product.

I don't think there's a use case for glasses-type product, with a watch-like functionality and environmental AR which would show information pop-ups everywhere. We already have information overload, and we don't need any more of that.

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> Productivity is correlated with display size

Where do you get this from?

It seems to me if there was even a correlation, which I'm not sure, it would have more to do with resolution, since same resolution but bigger display doesn't actually show more information.

Its like how health is correlated with height.

Its true, up to a point.

you just have to ignore that at the extremes it's probably negatively correlated, and there's a significant non-zero possibility that at least in the short term, that possibility of negative correlation applies to the area VR is interested in as well.

>Its like how health is correlated with height.

It’s a popular myth propagated by American public. Funnily enough, in many European and Asian countries the opposite is deemed to be true. The truth is that there has never been any conclusive evidence one way or the other.

“The first evaluation of the impact of human size on longevity or life span in 1978, which was based on data for decreased groups of athletes and famous people in the USA, suggested that shorter, lighter men live longer than their taller, heavier counterparts. In 1990, a study of 1679 decreased men and women from the general American population supported these findings. In the present study data on the height, weight, and age at death of 373 men were obtained from records at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Diego, CA, USA. Men of height 175.3 cm or less lived an average of 4.95 years longer than those of height over 175.3 cm, while men of height 170.2 cm or less lived 7.46 years longer than those of at least 182.9 cm. An analysis by weight difference revealed a 7.72-year greater longevity for men of weight 63.6 kg or less compared with those of 90.9 kg or more. This corroborates earlier evidence and contradicts the popular notion that taller people are healthier.” [0]

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1600586/

> Funnily enough, in many European and Asian countries the opposite is deemed to be true.

I find a hard time believing this. Do you have a source?

Seems like an intuitive correlation, but some of the most productive people I know use just a laptop with a small screen.

I'm most productive when I don't even have a screen up: pen and paper, drawing out ideas.

High resolutions on small screen are very hard to read.

In the extreme, yes, and low resolution on large screens are also difficult to read. Viewing distance is also a factor. You always need to find a balance.

> Productivity is correlated with display size

That's a dubious statement. Filling the binocular field of view is fine; it's about 120° horizontally, give or take. But past that it starts to be a problem. Generally, if you look at the screen and any edge is blocked by your nose without turning your head, it's likely too large to work comfortably on. (but still fine for immersive content like games or movies)

You can turn also turn your head and move around in your room, i.e. your whole room could be full of separate displays, or just pieces of code floating in space. It's not just how much you see at a time, but how easily you can switch context.

Haha now I can try and figure out where I put that function I’m looking for as if it were the hex wrench included in IKEA furniture.

Counterpoint: It’s faster to Alt+Tab (or using other keyboard shortcuts) than to move around the room.

Move around a room? I'd compare it to eye motion of 30-60deg, that's a saccade of about 30-40ms. I don't think most fingers can move that fast from the home row, probably more comparable to head motion

It's not about switching time, it's about cognitive load. If any dense information creeps into your far peripheral vision, it might as well not exist because you have to locate it. During any concentrated work, only something you can fit in the center of your binocular field of vision (roughly speaking) doesn't cause severe mental context switching.

I tried to work on three 16:9 displays for some time, and found it exhausting. The cognitive overload isn't worth it, workspace switching with a hotkey turned out to be far easier for me. That's not even mentioning constant neck movement.

Maybe it's just me though, I can't speak for different people; but I strongly suspect it's the same for many.

> During any concentrated work, only something you can fit in the center of your binocular field of vision (roughly speaking) doesn't cause severe mental context switching.

I mean this doesn't seem to be true for anyone working in the trades. "Mise-en-place" allowed me to tend a 24-foot-long bar by myself with 60+ customers. At the time, I was essentially a highly trained, top performing athlete. Just because I can't see the cash register / margarita machine / well drinks / etc... it doesn't mean it's not an extension of my body.

It is possible for your entire workshop to become a second-nature extension of self, not just the desk in front of your face.

I think part of this discussion is: "What can be part of a singular focused task vs. what requires some amount of 'context switching'?" And its not always super obvious. Practicing a workflow can integrate context-switches so that it becomes one singular focused task.

But VR/AR can also assist with neurological training by allowing you to switch environments when you switch contexts. For someone who is WFH in a studio apartment it can separate their "gaming desk" from their "work desk" from their "hobby desk" ... or even their "React desk" from their "Concurrency-wrangling desk" from their "Email/Communications battlestation". This could enable much faster context switching -- meeting in 30 seconds? pop over to your "Virtual Conferencing Room". Then come back to your sanctum of concurrency troubleshooting.

Allow me to summarize this perspective as the future of "cognitive ergonomics" of sorts and second entirely the idea that it's the biggest promise of VR from an experience standpoint. Literally immersion in a wider context, not deliberate focus that by very definition a narrow viewport already covers quite well. Conversely to physical displays, contextual ergonomics is where VR must shine.

The way you expressed it actually reminds me of Iain McGilchrist's "left brain" versus "right brain" thinking model, wherein the narrow-ish "task-focused" approach is typical left-brain concern (essentialist, to a fault), whereas the wider "contextual" approach is typical right-brain associative concerns ("everything is complex/connected"). I'd never noticed this ergonomics question (should I say dichotomy) could be neurologically framed that way, thanks for the insight.

I'd imagine it changing the way I work to be closer to what I do when working on a physical project. Like when building a book case I have various pieces laid out in different stages of completion. My context switching involves moving physically from one to the other which provides a physical reinforcement to the mental change I have to make. Just like I have all the shelves on one bench ready to be sanded and the trim on another being cut to length I could have my server side code on one wall and the client code on another. It'd probably be a lot better for my posture and fitness to physically move from one to the other rather than be glued to a chair for 8 hours.

The parent was talking about moving around in a room filled with virtual displays. Regarding eye motion, I already use a screen filling my non-peripheral field-of-view (~120°), so any additional screen would require significant head movement.

You sit with your eyes closer than half the width of your screen? That is either a HUGE screen and/or you sit with eyes less than 14" away, which is at least novel?

Of course you need two of those screens to fill your field of view, unless you have a square screen that goes below your desk, but I'm sure that's available somewhere.

I’m near-sighted, and checking now it’s really more like 90-100° horizontally, but moving my eyes outside of that range without moving my head is actually not comfortable.

My subjective impression is that the nonperipheral visual field isn’t square. I would find 3:2 displays optimal, or maybe rather 16:11. While a 16:9 or 16:10 display could be extended vertically to fill more of the visual field, that extended portion is not large enough to usefully fit a second monitor there (without head movement).

Eyes (lenses/retina) are spherical with roughly (slightly more than) 100deg field of view each and a little more than 20deg left/right overlap at the nose. That gives a total range of almost 180deg horizontal-yaw and 100deg vertical-pitch. You don't even notice most eye motion... if you did then every time you moved 2.5deg you'ld think about it. Apparent field of view is made up of many saccades that allow your much higher high resolution fovea to cover the interesting parts as it moves/scans/jumps around. By the time you're +/- 10deg from center, you've lost 5x in resolution.

If you're like most people and the horizontal field is close to max, you'll do better stacking monitors than putting them side/side. Inter pupillary distance is a bit over 2in (~65mm), but that's usually small compared to screen distance, which is why I say roughly square (~16:14).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis

It really isn't because you can't see everything at once. And I'm sure VR/AR will provide equally fast shortcuts for moving between anchor spaces.

I have three monitors, and it's still not enough. I would be thrilled if each of my monitors had four times the apparent area in a 3D space that layered applications and documents behind each other in some approximately intuitive way.

You also can’t see everything at once with VR or with multiple monitors. You have to shift your focus and move your eyes/your head. It is though probably a matter of preference whether you want to have your windows etc. layed out in 2D or 3D space that you have to move around in, or whether you want buttons you can blindly press to have the desired window pop up immediately right in front of you where you’re currently looking at.

Typical large (32") monitor with normal spacing is about 30-35deg vertical and 60-70deg horizontal and 27" is usually less. If your eyes are 20" from the screen, it's probably not healthy. Binocular field of view (without head motion) of VR systems is usually 100deg in both dimensions (20deg overlap in the middle). I'd expect Apple VR to be "retina".

I'm bullish on VR but I think the "many floating monitors around a desk" is a bad use case. I mean, you can just alt-tab through windows or desktops as it is.

In my mind the real power comes from spatial hand tracking as a new UX paradigm(seeing an interacting with objects in 3d space) and possibly the addition of large displays anywhere a monitor couldn't have feasibly been, (eg, floating in the server room in a cramped space when needed).

I don't think working on code will be all that different. There isn't any physical spatial interaction with text on paper that the current editors are missing.

We will rush so quickly to make UML in 3D that we will never stop to think... Should we?

Thought experiment: imagine fixing your car engine by tabbing around a little viewport.

I think I’d be fine with that; I’d find the right reference and start working.

When I work on a laptop I also keep one app or one tab in focus most of the time.

Counter example, imagine fixing your car engine and having 100 tabs open everywhere.

People do it now, if we're talking about CAD software of an engine model. I'm not sure they're clamoring for more 2d monitors. I think being able to reach into the model in 3d space is probably more natural than mouse clicks and manually moving viewports around.

As someone who has been getting into CAD lately and has several years of experience working on 3D models in Blender, I would very much prefer to be able to walk around the model and make adjustments here and there rather than using keyboard shortcuts and the mouse. More display space in VR should have an emphasis on "space" rather than "display".

If we're talking about programming instead, an intuitive way to switch between modules when working on a large project would be to have their windows laid out before you on a virtual desk and you could switch between the active one displayed on a central virtual monitor by making a gesture (probably something like the Oculus pinch) towards the window you want to switch to. This would allow you to use your spatial reasoning to remember which windows you have open and would also allow you to group related windows. Additional displays could show console output from your development server, the GUI part of the app you're working on, a test runner, etc. positioned where you can glance at them easily.

That being said, I think the real killer app for the new "facetop" computing devices that are around the corner will be physical fitness and social interaction. If you think a standing desk was a big improvement for your health then you'll love being able to freely walk around your office and work from any position whether it's standing, sitting at a desk, perched by the window, lounging on the sofa, or even crouching while giving those legs a stretch. You can also kiss zoom meetings goodbye with the unnatural wall of faces almost but not quite making eye contact with you. You'll talk to an avatar, realistic or not, that has full eye, face and body tracking allowing you to tell if your interlocutor is paying attention or thinking about how long it is until lunch while checking the wait time at the nearest restaurants. It actually does feel like you're in the presence of another person and spending a few hours talking to people virtually will no longer leave you with a headache and eye-strain.

I'd also invest in learning how to use a one handed, portable chording keyboard, it'll probably be useful.

>I'd also invest in learning how to use a one handed, portable chording keyboard, it'll probably be useful.

We might end up with a phone as the go-to XR keyboard. Would be pretty funny if that evolves into everyone wearing AR glasses with a 90s Nokia sized blackberry keyboard in their pocket.

Hey dude, nobody's cracked the code on VR UX so far as I know

If you have a good idea, you should prototype it and get it out there (and maybe get a nice buyout in the process..)

> and spending a few hours talking to people virtually will no longer leave you with a headache and eye-strain

I'd love to know if this is true. I've heard that in a VR headset, your eyes are always focused at the exact same distance, even if it appears like something is far off in the distance. And that this can lead to eyestrain. Can anybody here speak to that?

I did a little bit of 3d modeling.

Your shortcuts are your bread and butter and you are super fast.

Perhaps for sculpting.

Being able to zoom in and out and pan around using a medium-sized viewport though.

Takes time, distracts, and encourages a context shift.

> spatial hand tracking as a new UX paradigm

I only see this as a supplemental feature for certain use cases (coarse-grained 3D operations). In general nothing beats the efficiency of working with a keyboard for navigating application functions, or (at least with current technology) the mouse for precision 2D navigation/selection. Their advantage being precise and definite/discrete input.

For actual work, even with a VR headset I see myself still mostly using keyboard and mouse.

Agree that keyboard shortcuts can't be topped for speed but a keyboard doesn't need to be a flat thing you keep on a desk. Mice on the other hand stand a good chance of being replaced by virtual laser pointers combined with a shift in how we do GUI layouts.

I agree that "floating virtual monitors" isn't much of an improvement over real monitors - but it's an transitional step that you take to experiment with building a UI that's not possible with traditional physical interfaces.

That sounds absolutely exhausting to me.

Perhaps, in a lab setting, doing straightforward, focused tasks like the ones they use in these productivity studies, I could sustain a productivity boost long enough for the researcher to get a two-tailed p<0.05.

Make me do it in real life, though, 40 hours a week, week after week after week, and I expect I would burn out very quickly. I like my work well enough, but I don't think I want to actually stick my whole head inside of it.

Maybe not all the time, but it would be great for me to be able to travel and not have to worry about taking a huge productivity hit without my desk and monitors.

I'd counter that with, why are you worried about computer-time productivity when traveling?

If it's for vacation, just unplug. Mixing work and vacation makes both worse.

If it's for business, your attention should be on whatever it is that prompted you to travel. Presumably that's face time with people, not grinding away in front of a computer.

Because I'm not talking about vacation, I'm talking about the ability to travel and see family or go somewhere new at any point during the year without needing to take time off to do so. My work is programming, and travel has never been a part of the work equation for me. If workspace arrangements weren't an issue, I could go visit my friends from college this very weekend.

Meh, this is mainly a bad excuse. Even when I'm doing CAD or manipulating large 3D datasets, I can get my work done with just a 14" laptop and a good trackball. There is some reduction in efficiency, but mainly due to scp'ing large files or waiting for the slower CPU. For coding it's not an issue at all, as long as you have your toolchain set up properly.

I find that the high DPI trend has a tendency to limit us unneccesarily more than actually fix anything. It is still common to say max 80 characters per line. In the olden days where that comes from, it would require 640 pixels horizontally. So at 100% scaling you can fit 3 standard terminals side-by-side and fit 60+ lines vertically, what more do you need when you also have multiple workspaces to tab across?

:thumbs_up: good for you. Doesn't work for me.

It definitely does not scale linearly. A second monitor is a big advantage. A third less so. Infinite visual space would be barely more valuable than that. And really just having all that screen real estate isn't useful unless it's matched by extremely high resolution, frame rate and field of vision. I can flick my eyes between two monitors but any headset on the market is going to make me turn my head while squeezing my temples.

I can get behind this. I always though VR was a gimmick but I got an oculus ~2016 and was honestly blown away. However, the #1 thing that turns me off to VR is that it's uncomfortable. That's ok though as long as the experience is worth it.

I truly believe that VR is perfect for training/sim type games. Actual games.. Could really only count on one hand the games I feel are worth diving into VR for.

Apple's headsets would be much more comfortable:

- OLED panels could provide much darker screens and cause less eye strain.

- Eye tracking with higher resolution where they only have to render properly where you are looking at

- I think the headset would be much lighter and comfortable.

> Productivity is correlated with display size

Do you have a source?

Anecdotal, I work without external displays and keep one window in focus, this helps my productivity.

Andrews, C., Endert, A. and North, C., 2010, April. Space to think: large high-resolution displays for sensemaking. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 55-64):

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1753326.1753336?casa_toke...

There’s much more. Search “sensemaking” or “immersive analytics” on Scholar. Depth and width of field, achieved via stereoscopy and tracking, is well documented as a performance enhancer when it comes to generalizeable task completion in VR.

That seems to be describing a single type of task which is not what 95% of time is spent on by professionals in a work environment. This seems akin to a whiteboard session which traditionally is solved by just grabbing a whiteboard for an hour. But then you're not comparing VR to a monitor but VR to a physical whiteboard.

Context switching is terrible for productivity.

And displaying more things mean you need to context switch less.

Same. I tried the “dual monitor” setup for a couple years and just went back to one. The second was just causing distractions and context switching. It’s easier to focus on what’s right in front of you than look around for stuff.

And my work involves working with 2-4 ‘documents’ at once, analyzing, comparing, and summarizing them. My focus space is a little larger than one window.

Both Meta and Microsoft are exploring AR/VR in the workplace (Microsoft pretty much entirely). I’m not sure why you’re suggesting they’re not exploring this area.

Their software and hardware are generally crappy, and I don't believe they can deliver anything innovate in a thousand years.

Can you explain what you mean? The Quest2 is easily the best stand alone headset and the hololens has the best world sensing. How can you say it's generally crappy? I consider it industry leading unless you get some niche devices that push up the spec sheet but are generally uninteresting.

I have a quest 2 and on one hand I'm impressed, on the other hand "crappy" is still a reasonable assessment.

It's way better than I would have expected. It's still not good enough to make me want to use it daily (even for just an hour or so)

You understand how big Ms is right?

Their hardware like the Xbox or surface are not crappy.

Is this just trolling?

Don't forget even the home use case where you're much less likely to have a pair of 30" monitors or even the space to put them... nor the IP concerns of the company, if you did have them in your living room. I agree, for apple this is most likely to be a creative/productivity play at high dollar. The challenge will be pricing and multi-hour usability (weight/watts/weariness).

You get retina resolution, high refresh rate, HDR, and 2Factor authentication (Biometric+Goggles)/information security in one package. Of course you'll still likely want to have a laptop to drive it (untethered) except for the simplest mobile games.

I agree that VR/AR is the future of productivity computing, but I think we are a bit far off still, half a decade at least. I have played around with remote desktop apps on the Meta Quest 2 and these are the main challenges I see:

- 4k is not nearly enough. I think we will likely need 8k screens.

- The headsets are not light enough. You need something with all day comfort for work.

- There is still too much eye-strain from the quality of the lenses and the fixed focus.

- Input is still not natural and precise enough. We would need to be able to see our own hands and type with zero latency. Hand-tracked pointing needs to be able to pick up on small subtle finger motion like a mouse or trackpad can

Your first sentence is already problematic. Do you have any data or research to back this up ? It doesn't seem very true to me.

Just common sense. Watch -> Phone -> Tablet -> Laptop -> Desktop. You'd be least productive on a watch and most productive on a desktop, and adding extra displays would make you even more productive. Each of them has an interface that's designed to max out productivity on that particular display size. We don't yet have an interface that maxes out productivity on a VR device.

Careful with those analogies. The distance you can throw something away wit your hands increases with size… up to a point.

You can throw a grain of sand only so fra, a pebnle somewhat more, a baseball probably very far… And you stop there, more or less.

But there's also clearly an upper limit. And it's not clear what is this limit.

The upper limit would be immersed in a sphere, I suppose. I also think the maxima is a lot less than that.

Space isn't a constraint in VR, you could have an infinite number of displays that you could teleport between as quickly as your interface allows. The limiter on productivity increase probably has more to do with your ability to remember what each display is for and the ease of locating and switching to them.

People can learn 3D environments by viewing them in a 2D screen very happily, and millions of gamers do exactly that every day. I can still remember my way around the map in GTA 3 about 20 years after I first played it...

Gaming environments are more like 2.5D. There aren't many games which are fully open in 3D, because the world isn't, and humans can't fly.

The "flight" in GTA is more like a moving viewpoint than a space full of 3D objects and affordances.

Full immersive 3D navigation through code and file systems would be an interesting experiment. I suspect we'd get used to it very quickly, and we'd then wonder why we spent so long tied down by virtual paper metaphors. (I could be wrong, of course.)

> Full immersive 3D navigation through code and file systems would be an interesting experiment. I suspect we'd get used to it very quickly

inb4 "It's a Unix system, I know this!"

> It would be possible to dive into code and see it all at once like an intricate factory. Our brains are capable of navigating very complex environments, but this capability is lost when its viewed through a small window.

This is such an Engelbart-esque statement. Bravo! I'd love for AR to go there too :)

I know plenty of software engineer who not even click away the GitHub information banner for weeks.

I don't think VR headsets will not take off as display alternatives.

People don't even care about highdpi.

In case VR you are right, but AR, with current state of software might be good for navigation only. Later on, every physical thing can have its own augmentation, GUI, either by something like QR code or Bluetooth. In a bus stop you could buy a ticket not by using dedicated point of sale device but by using augmentation software in glasses. Posters could change into trailers etc.

> Therefore, VR should be a replacement for large displays in productive work, not a device that everyone is wearing outside or casually watching videos with. The use cases are professional

I hope you’re wrong about this.

I hope there will be a great personal (non-work) use case for the next generation of VR/AR. Something like gaming, watching sports (always have awesome “seats”), movies with friends, maybe map/gps/etc. for when I’m running.

I know there are options for this already. But honestly, I haven’t seen anyone who’s not a dork using VR/AR. I want the version the average person is excited about. I’m ready to plunk down any amount of money Apple wants from me.

If it’s VR/AR for work, count me out. I don’t have any interest in increasing my work productivity lol.

Social experiences are the use case you're looking for. Multiplayer gaming is a lot more fun in VR, watching video together with people is great, even just hanging out and socializing is great and it beats video or voice hands down. You're right that it's currently in the dork stage of development, the internet went through that period as well. I'd enjoy it while it lasts though, I dread the day when it's fully monetized and mainstream.

The internet is much improved since the end of the dork stage of development. Don’t know why HN romanticizes slow connections and a few text websites made by obsessives. Tik Tok, YouTube, etc. are leaps and bounds better than anything I saw online pre-1999.

I can’t wait for VR/AR to be fully monetized and mainstream. I’m sick of speculative VC-funded crap that I can’t pay for because they’re in “growth mode.” When something’s monetized at least then I have some faith that it’ll be around for awhile.

We're hordes waiting for a usable product, but that iconic/pop moment isn't about to come, the tech just isn't there yet.

Think late 2020s at best, and probably well into the 30s for the kind of refined VR we all know possible. It's like we had nice and functional pocket computers since the 1990s (PDAs etc), but it would take a solid decade for the iPhone to be made under the vision of a statistically rare product genius (means we can wait ±5~10 yrs for things to emerge as commercially successful tech). Or how video games took about 20 years to move from whatever came before the current "modern" era/paradigm (say late 1990s) that lives on to this day in terms of UI/UX. Same with the "desktop" metaphor for PCs, etc.

We have yet to nail the hardware for VR, let alone the OS code (core libs etc) whose precision and intuitiveness will feel tremendously "corporeal" in the case of VR, visceral, much more than any TV/monitor + vibrating thing could ever do (let alone keyboard/mouse). If you've ever did the timing for an action-paced fast video game, you know the kind of intricate subtleties I'm talking about, where one frame can make or break some experiences.

Then will come the time to nail killer metaphors, high-level GUI/GUX, killer apps.

We're not quite there yet.

I had a Quest 2 and honestly thought it was at it best when I was lying down and watching videos in bed on a huge screen. All the other use cases I just didn’t have a good space for

Problem is most companies prefer higher headcount than more productive employees.

This is because middle managers need employees to manage.

Literally "proof of stake" as measured by headcount.

Is it a bad relapse of LOC metrics? ツ

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