Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

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> For the past week I've been trying to explain to people how certain I am that doing work in headsets will become mainstream

This gets at my main question about this: does it feel to you like it will be great for "doing work", which generally happens at discrete places, or something which will apply to life generally, which is the kind of (some would say dystopian) ideal of "augmented reality"?

Or put another way, I felt a huge increase in immersion and interest going from the original Oculus's three degrees of freedom to the "room scale" six degrees of freedom in Quest.

I know this is "spatial computing" and you can put monitors in fixed positions in the environment, but is "desk scale" where you can kind of look around and pivot your head, or "room scale" where you can get up and move around the room, or "life scale" where you can leave the room entirely to check on the screens you left in the kitchen before coming back to sit down in front of the ones in your office?

I think it'll be great for "doing work", but I'm not entirely sure if it'll immediately outclass my in-office setup that my employer has already spent thousands on. However, I don't have a wfh setup in my small apartment because I didn't want to dedicate space for that purpose, so when I occasionally need to wfh I just use a laptop on my couch or dining table and I would love it to replace that. I think if an employer were speccing out a new office it would definitely be a viable option to have a small laptop + Vision Pro instead of desktop (or bigger laptop) + multiple external monitors.

I also don't expect it to be super dystopian or replace real life in general, but it could definitely replace the parts where you're already looking at a screen regardless.

It is technically capable of being "life scale" in the way that you describe: it tries to keep a consistent coordinate system across multiple reboots and from room to room and real life objects can occlude virtual objects, but to be honest I have no clue what the average use case will be or how the OS will enforce it.

Its interesting to hear it will replace the parts where you are already looking at a screen. My consumer oriented view is that it will first replace the moments where we absolutely cannot be looking at a screen but need to see the real world in front of us, perhaps even for safety reasons.

To me its a bit like tap to pay vs magnetic credit cards. Eventually tap to pay replaces all other ways of paying much like AR might replace all other screen interactions. But FIRST it should replace something critical. In the payment space this was subway entrances where people needed to pay quick and get through.

The reason it takes so long for full adoption is because its very challenging to replace something like magnetic credit card that “works pretty well”. From my point of view, the iPhone “works pretty well” and its going to towards the END of the innovation cycle when other screen usage gets folded into these spatial platforms

> when I occasionally need to wfh I just use a laptop on my couch or dining table and I would love it to replace that

The most important part of a WFH setup is desk + chair. That's where the comfort is, much more so than a big screen - which is certainly nice.

Desk + chair is what takes up space though. Once that space is taken, a big monitor is just something you put on it.

As excited I am about this new tech, which looks fantastic from the ad, I don't think it will replace a comfortable desk + chair setup.

> or "life scale" where you can leave the room entirely to check on the screens you left in the kitchen before coming back to sit down in front of the ones in your office?

according to the videos they show, people move around a lot in a room with these things on, grab things (e.g. their phone, cup of coffee). and makes sense, if you see basically what you have in front of you, then there's no "boundaries" you should stay in not to bump into things.

I'm wondering the same thing too. I have tried multiple monitor setups dozens of times now, but always end up coming back to a single display. I can't imagine having a tonne of widgets floating around my work space in 3D is going to do anything positive for my productivity.

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