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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

The desk space recommendation almost certainly no longer applies. In the '70s, it was not uncommon to work with printed listings of code and printed memory dumps for debugging. These were printed on large fanfold sheets.

If you were working with a code listing, a memory dump, and the program output, that could easily take up almost half of 30 square feet. Toss in a giant reference manual or two, and a desk calculator, and it is easy to believe that desks under 30 square feet could interfere with productivity.

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I gotta say it - those 160 column printouts of code were awesome for debugging over a cup of coffee...

And they still are. When you can look at 500+ lines of code at once spread over a table, you can immediately see all sorts of things that aren't evident even on a 30" screen.

Those printouts remain one of my secret weapons for isolating really heinous bugs.

I'd say another point for using oculus rifts for development.

If only their resolution were better...

Isn't the same true of most of the Oculuses out there? :)

In time. I do worry about putting 2 screens 3" from my eyes for hours on end though.

Apparently, the main issue with eye strain from close monitors and such is the fact that your eyes have to focus closer. But the oculus has two screens and optics, which they use to let your eyes focus at infinite distance. Hence, eye strain is not an issue.

You'll get sick in the stomach long before any effect on your eyes in any case - having it on for hours on end is extremely unrealistic right now.

> Hence, eye strain is not an issue.

There are other subtle effects like fish-eye that are lead to a disoriented feeling when I take off the Oculus.

Think of it this way: your cortex is always learning. Always. So if you present visual input that is subtly different (eye-spacing, fish-eye / pin-cushion, lag) for long periods your brain will learn that. Take it away and you've effectively got mild (hopefully reversible) brain damage wrt the physical world.

Isn't that mostly a matter of adjusting IPD and other calibration?

There are software issues caused by the game / simulation camera FOV mismatch.

E.g. if you walk up to a wall in the Tuscany demo, it'll look like the wall at the center of your view is slightly closer to you than the wall off-center. It's not such a bad artifact in-game, but when I take the goggles off, flat walls IRL look slightly bowed away from my center of view for a while, and things feel ... different.

It's similar to when you stare at a scrolling screen, and then look at a fixed object. The object seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

Or a 50" TV screen.

  Or a 50" TV screen.

For that to be of any practical benefit, it'd have to be 4K resolution, right?

If you're just feeding that 50" TV a standard 1080p signal, you're not going to be able to display significantly more code than you'd be able to display on a 23" screen that's also running at 1080p.

Heck, cover the side of a building with a 1080p projector image, and a 27" monitor running at 2560x1400 will still show more code. :)

have you tried this yet? i'm curious

I tried one. The screen isn't there yet for long term productivity, or even long term gaming. They'll get it there though, the motion tracking and field of view are wonderful, it mostly would just need to be much higher res for non gaming activities.

It's all fun and games until your programmer starts vomiting...

A Rift, a Leap Motion, and a wooden crate. Office is done.

I recall debugging a monstrous web system (it woudl require more that one entry in the daily WTF to do it justice) by borrowing a large conference room and laying out the code over about 20 feet linear length of table

The modern equivalent, of course, is big monitors and maybe more than one.

It would also be nice to have some height on them - whoever decided that the computer industry must conform to Hollywood entertainment standards has a lot to answer for.

Hey, at least you get a reasonably complete keyboard out of it.

Note to those who want to tilt their monitors into portrait mode to get more height (I have two tilted 1080p monitors jammed together to make one squarish screen), take note of vertical viewing angles (which now become horizontal). Your average TN panel is simply not going to cut it. Get an IPS display or equivalent.

4 screens, some testing hardware, printouts, lunch at desk while reading... 30 square feet is reasonable. Not everyone works on Macbook Air.

It also depends greatly on what you work on. It's not unusual for me to have several towers in various states of disassembly, a few embedded boards, numerous JTAG probes, and a laptop fighting for space around my 2 monitors. In this case, I could definitely use 30 square feet of desk space.

You bring up a great point--my desk is none too large (20 sq. ft. tops), and still it's pretty sparse: phone, keyboard, mouse, laptop (stand), monitor, picture of the kids. Nothing that requires 30 sq. ft.

However, I think the closest contemporary analog to the desk space of the 70s would be screen space. This association totally bolsters the 2+ monitor argument.

I wouldn't even know what to do with more than ~20sqft of desk space. Even 15 (5'x3')is pretty roomy.

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