Its pretty obvious that virtual TV/Computer screens at arbitrary sizes/distances in arbitrary environments will simply be a better UX than physical monitors.
Not sure if Quest 3 is there yet, but they're iterating towards it.
Is it? I don’t feel like it’s better right now (I know some people do, but I’m not convinced they’re the majority). Fixing the issues with VR is not trivial. There’s some deep flaws in the optics that we simply don’t know how to solve yet, and the weight needs to go down by a lot. I’m not sure I’d ever be comfortable wearing them more than a couple of hours when they’re entirely closed… but that’s a hard requirement for a good experience. There’s a bunch of hard contradictions in making good VR/AR.
Remember that as VR technology improves, so will monitors.
AR guy many years from now can instantly try a new 12-monitor setup while our dumb butts wait for 12 expensive things in the mail and then wire them all up. Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to have 16? More waiting. But nobody buys that many monitors. If it was just a number in a text file, people might try out a 16 monitor setup just for no reason.
The difference in capability could be massive, to the point we’d be truly amazed to jump into the future of AR. Not to mention the freedom of hands free portability, it could be wizard levels of awesomeness!
Ok. Let’s say that’s done. Is it really that much more useful? It has to be good enough to overcome the friction of having to wear a headset and any limitations that come with it like heat, battery life, weight, resolution, etc.
I’m not convinced such a setup would significantly enhance productivity/usability even with hypothetical glasses that do it all, let alone something like a Quest on your head.
I've seen someone here say that they really liked working with a virtual display from wherever, but the resolution of their whole display was 1080p. As someone who regularly uses dual 4k external monitors plus my laptop, I didn't understand how they could be productive. E.g. I may want to keep a browser with docs and a jupyter notebook of a particular investigation on my left, and an IDE of my repo on my right, plus chat with the colleague I'm working with below on my laptop, and all showing a lot of text or perhaps detailed graphs. If 8k monitors cross my affordability threshold before XR headsets with 4k (per eye) cross my affordability threshold, I would likely switch to more physical-screen pixels than to cut down to just 4k pixels strapped to my face.
[0]- Since we're on HN, I need to say -- this is a figure of speech. I am not offering or soliciting any actual wagers here.