This comes up a lot in VR/AR discussions, but IMO it's the least likely application in the near to medium term. There's just not enough pixels in the headset to accurately simulate multiple high-resolution monitors.
For instance, the Hololens is rumored to have 1280x720 resolution per-eye - so a screen that consumes the entire visual field is only 720p, and "simulated displays" that were farther away would be worse.
People keep saying this over and over but I don’t understand. Why does a HMD need the same resolution as a monitor in order to do the same job? Wouldn’t the HMD be equivalent to having like sixteen 1600x1200 displays all around you, and isn’t that at least as good as a single 4K monitor?
You could have one virtual display with close to your face for high resolution information, and then dozens of peripheral displays further back for ambient information. Displays can move forward and back with subtle head movements. Why is the hardware resolution the limit? Isn’t it more of a UI problem?
It’s like people are assuming the VR desktop is limited to being an exact replica of their physical monitor, but why would you do that?
A good chunk of it is that text is unreadable in current headsets unless it's far larger than what most people are used to. So that 720p hololens gives you at best a 720p monitor's worth of text at a time[1]. Sure, you can have any number of virtual displays around you at any desirable resolution - they're just unusable until you get close enough that you only see a tiny piece at a time.
To your specific example of "You could have one virtual display with close to your face for high resolution information, and then dozens of peripheral displays further back for ambient information.", yes, absolutely. That makes sense. But the "close to your face" one would show you less than a paragraph of text, if you could actually see the peripheral ones all the time. Useful at times, to be sure, but not equivalent in all (I'd argue "most") situations.
[1]: plus some fudge-factor, because you can read a bit better than with a comparative screen - the change in how the text lands on pixels as you move gives you a slightly higher "effective" resolution... though text at this size is still plenty difficult to read, so you still don't want to rely on it.
Have you looked at text through a VR headset? It's difficult to fit a lot of legible text on screen at once right now. They need to have incredibly high pixel density in displays that are an inch or so from your eye.
> You could have one virtual display with close to your face for high resolution information, and then dozens of peripheral displays further back for ambient information. Displays can move forward and back with subtle head movements. Why is the hardware resolution the limit? Isn’t it more of a UI problem?
No matter how much you play with bringing some virtual monitors/displays closer or further away depending on focus it's always going to be inherently limited by the internal display resolution. Even then in VR headsets the lens distortion means text isn't really readable outside a small FOV directly ahead of you. Eventually we'll get cheaper better screens in these headsets but that'll require a lot more rendering power and still doesn't get past the fact that you're losing a lot of pixels to anything that isn't the display so the headset screens have a long ways to go before they can look anywhere near as good as the normal displays we use.
Wow. Clay Bavor is one of the most articulate speakers that I've ever heard. He delivered a talk with an extremely high information density so cleanly. I really just want to hear this guy talk about things more.
Could it do a single monitor at a decent resolution? That would be handy enough for me when I'm standing on the train and can't open a laptop, or just to avoid carrying a laptop around everywhere. If I could open a decently sized terminal at any time I'd be happy.
For instance, the Hololens is rumored to have 1280x720 resolution per-eye - so a screen that consumes the entire visual field is only 720p, and "simulated displays" that were farther away would be worse.