Yes, but why? What is the limiting factor here, because from my perspective it's only missing a few small things on each platform that would solve it.

I'd be honestly happy with my Rift as-is if they bumped up the resolution a bit, and had some way to see the real world with the headset on (even camera passthrough is fine!).

I've used virtual desktop apps in the Rift, and they aren't bad to use, and playing games like tabletop simulator is so intuitive and nice that I'm floored tht this hasn't been tried commercially yet.

I assume there are some pretty significant hurtles that I'm missing, or maybe the market is still hilariously small at this point, but it just seems so close!

The resolution is way too low. Needs to be 4-16x greater for desktop replacement.

Also the headsets are too hot and bulky to comfortably wear for a full workday.

How old are you if you don't mind me asking? I'm pushing 50 and the real world is rather lacking in resolution nowadays.

I solve this by leaning forward or back. In VR/AR the same thing works.

I'm your age. I find my oculus totally useless for real world work. I'm used to a 4k monitor as a desktop.

I'm used to a 14" laptop + 21" monitor (resolution doesn't matter), which together occupy maybe 20% of my field of view while using them. If I could take the same quantity of information and arrange it arbitrarily in my environment, eliminating the need for any monitors, it would be a win even if the text had to be larger.

You'd need to move your head a lot to look at stuff. Gets old quickly. Try out the VR desktop on oculus and you'll quickly discover the need for much more dense pixels.

4-16x is an exaggeration. I've tried headsets that are 2x higher resolution than the Rift (i.e. 2k x 2k per eye), and I could view text the same size as my monitor renders.

No doubt 4-16x resolution would be nice, though. True "retina" screens are still at least a decade away.

But would it need to be a true "retina" screen? The Hololens has cameras that track where your eyes are focused, so the laser image could have a "fovea" that moves with your eye movements so as to retain a high focus region just at the spot you're looking at.

That solves the graphics card horsepower issue. You still need a lot of pixels even if you're not driving all of them at high resolution all the time.

Depends on your preference I suppose. For me it needs to be at least 4x the density of the oculus.

Back in the day, all monitors were 4-16x less resolution than yours, and we loved them.

Indeed. I was back in that day too. Have no interest in going back to 1080p let alone VGA for daily work.

For Oculus to be useful as a traditional display it would probably need a higher resolution(i.e 8k per eye), it needs to be wireless, lightweight and possibly use the camera to blend-in the outside environment so that you don't feel trapped in Matrix while you work. It would probably take 5+ years to get there

But we have the tech to do that right now! Maybe 8k per eye is outside our current capabilities without being ludicrously expensive, but 4k should be doable!

And the rest already exists in other products!

4k is not good enough. What you need is 8k or even 16k(whenever it becomes available) per eye. Otherwise you better stick to a traditional display.

Feature parity. Having one interface that is trying to keep up with and surpass basically all others, is just setting up something that will take a long time to succeed.

Note,I am not claiming it won't succeed. Just that it will take a long time.

eye strain.

But imagine a Smalltalk-like environment on steroids with that sort of 3D environment. Still need a virtual keyboard or voice-input for the actual code, but the ability to place Smalltalk GUI elements anywhere in your visual field would be interesting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project is basically what you described. Dynamicland also has similarities. Neither are mixed reality like Hololens but long-term I think it will be the application model that wins for MR.

I always thought croquet/cobalt would be a nice fit for vr:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

http://www.opencobalt.net/

I actually can't imagine this. As someone described by aphantasia, this level of graphical immersion sounds off, to me.

More, this will have less rigor than standard 2d graphical builders. And those don't exactly have a great track record. :(

I used the HL1 as my full-time computer for a while. The display itself was actually fine -- the text rendering was great, so it worked out well. The issues were 1) software (I built an app called VNCaster that was a decent implementation of VNC, but you were restricted to working within that window, which kind of killed a lot of the benefits), 2) FOV (way too small), and 3) comfort (it got uncomfortable quick -- 2-3 hours was about my cap).

I think that with the HL2, many of these are going to go away. I can't speak to the comfort, but I know that the first two are now non-issues for me.

Be wary of HL1 and HL2 as abbreviations. I'm already on a hair trigger hoping for HL3 (Half Life that is...)

It's only a few characters and you saving typing breaks my Ctrl+F and web search. :-)

Fair point, thanks!

FOV was the main problem in my opinion as well. If that's taken care of, it will be significantly more impressive than the first HoloLens.