Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

I have a vive and a quest 2 and I tried working like that when travelling. The quest won't work in a car as it uses gyros.

I tried for about 18 hours each device to work in VR. Many things are not there yet. My vive is attached to a 5 monitor dual GPU beast that drives a central 144hz 4k HDR 43" and 5 2560x144 monitors. The vive couldn't touch the physical setup for comfort or resolution or just non-fussiness. I constantly had to adjust virtual monitors. In real world I just scootch a quarter inch on my rolly cHair. It's like the first time you setup a physical workspace every time you use it for me. Vive gets warm.

The quest 2 is too low resolution and too laggy. Battery too weak. It was a joy to take it off. Quest is more sweaty.

With the quest I worked from a RV for 3 days. It sucked.

What worked better was just 2 pelican cases with monitors and a discounted ups rate. In the RV I just shoved them in the corner and pulled them out when we parked. When I visit my mom or airbnb I just ship them to where I'm going. Was a massive relief. Maybe in a few years.

It's not just pixel density, it's software, weight, latency, fiddlelyness.

As an addendum one of the things I also remembered in a lower comment is that the Facebook devices definitely seem at random intervals to need some type of internet connection which is not always available when you're working remotely so if you were going to plan on working locally off your laptop with no internet there are definitely cases where all the sudden your display decides it needs to talk to the mothership and therefore your display is now locking you out until you get back into cell or network coverag.

Similar some of the applications and steam sometimes surprisingly want internet connectivity and so some of the desktop applications also will lock themselves out randomly

> The quest won't work in a car as it uses gyros.

Am I reading it correctly you are trying to use VR in a vehicle while someone is driving?

I get car sick very easily when riding. I also get motion sickness when using VR. I cannot imagine being affected by both at the same time.

You get sick because what you watch is moving differently that your eyes/head. VR is nailed to your head.

Hahaha no. I get sick when the motion I see doesn't match the gyros in my ears. I felt horribly sick from vr once with the gyros switched off.

I have definitely tried to use VR in a car while someone's driving I don't get motion sickness very easy so I often try to make myself throw up. When I first tried VR something was bugged with elite dangerous and so I was just sitting there doing as many barrel rolls and backflips as possible trying to make myself throw up and one of my co-workers came in looked at the 2D monitor asked me what I was doing said they got very motion sick easily and then about 10 seconds later I started hearing gagging the 2D was making them nauseous and it wasn't even bothering me.

Yeah we were driving across Texas going to a lake and I was sitting in the passenger seat so I figured I would try out and see how it worked. It did not it freaked out constantly. I think if you had a vibe with a laser tracking system it would actually work but that would be interesting to mount inside of a suburban.

One of my favorite things I ever did was sitting in the bendy middle section of a bus in Seattle which constantly moves while going up and down the hills and playing super stardust HD on Vita that almost got me.

>I don't get motion sickness very easy so I often try to make myself throw up

huh?

You’re braver than me. I feel like the Internet has taught me some people you just don’t ask.

I've almost never been able to do it.

I do it to see where the limits are. I worked in games when the orignal (of this wave) VR stuff was being made. Many of the devs tried all sorts of stuff to see what made them nauseous so they DIDNT ship it. As a game dev you need to think about discomfort of your users. So seeing painful audio, flickers, buzzing, flashes, nausea, that's being player centric. But sometimes you do want to make people uncomfortable for a feeling and you need to know the range to take it to.

Just about everything we eat is because someone tried it and saw if it killed them or made them sick. We got diving tables because divers got the bends and we figured out what caused them and what the limits are. On an on in human history. I'm not putting myself in the same boat as test pilot or navy diver but plenty of people push the envelope to see where it is.

the AI is driving

On a more serious note since this is not Reddit, I have watched movies in VR during bus trips (6h long routes). It works, it's way better than looking at laptop/tablet/phone.

I feel that the bare minimum headset that can handle work is the HP Reverb G2. It’s the only headset with a high enough resolution under $1000 (you can find it under $300 on eBay). There’s also Pimax, but their QA and customer support is terrible and you need to deal with base stations.

Through the lens comparison g2 vs Index vs Quest 2

https://youtu.be/ny_OPsxHQmU

The Quest 2 and the Reverb look closer than I expected. The contrast is the main difference (and that could be an artifact of the way it's shot)

The tracking on the Reverb has a bad reputation and I've avoided it for that reason mainly - as well as the extra complexity resulting from using one more translation layer (Windows MR > SteamVR) and a minority platoform.

The headset tracking for the Reverb is pretty good, it's mostly the controller tracking that has issues.

But the WindowsMR layer is a bit annoying. It's not too common but I've had a Windows update prevent it from working until I did a full uninstall/reinstall of the Windows Mixed Reality software, the Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR software, and SteamVR. Also because it uses different controllers, sometimes (though very rarely) an app will not recognize the controllers or certain buttons on them.

Oculus and SteamVR are pretty far ahead of the pack - the Quest is the biggest market and SteamVR is the most open ecosystem, and the rest of the APIs get comparatively little (or imbalanced) real-world testing and improvement.

Reverb is cool but at the end of the day, despite some good Valve engineering, it's WMR, and HP doesn't seem super committed to VR anyways.

I have a reverb g2 - great for games but definitely not up to it for work - the sweet spot is just too small.

If looking at a page of text, only the middle of 3 or 4 lines of text are in perfect focus. The rest might be readable but blurry. You have to move your head to scan lines comfortably and that is far from acceptable. I tried all the tricks to increase the size of the sweetspot to little avail.

You’re right, but it’s much better than either the Quest 2 or Index.

I guess we’ll all have to wait for simula or Apple reality then

> The quest won't work in a car as it uses gyros.

I did try the quest 2 on a plane and it worked well, apart from when the plane was turning or in turbulence. I suppose the visual tracking makes an assumption that the world is static, which is usually true but breaks down when the plane is bouncing up and down.

Not an assumption: movement is relative. Quite fun to think about it (Einstein's elevator mental experiment)

But here the movement is relative to two things. You're aware of your motion relative to the plane, and the headset is aware of its motion relative to earth's gravitational field. Einstein's elevator experiment only works when you're traveling on a (reversed) path that matches one that would be caused by gravitational force.

The other thing to think about is a lot of these systems use kalman filters and sensor fusion, so stuff like a compass will cause drift. They jsut didn't design the software to think about movement. It could be conmpensated for.

It did work a little bit better in a plane when I tried it however I couldn't get past the unlock screen because I hadn't quite paired it correctly and I didn't have internet and the quest needed to do something with the internet. This actually brings up one of the biggest issues I have with some of these systems is they are too tied to the internet for remote work

If they ever wanted to fix that, it seems like it'd be pretty easy to do by having a wireless IMU and gryo you could attach to the vehicle itself, then subtract that from whatever the headset feels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com