You don't hear me thinking that, though. Let me clarify: the things that make this untenable are not solved by resolution or refresh rate. Twice now you have brought up my "expensive" rig without realizing that it's three of the cheapest models you can buy. You can run touch screens virtually for free - I have three Kindle Fire HDs which I think were like $120 ea? And the software to talk to them costs nothing. And yet, people will pay $1300 for eight channels of "knob, fader, and eight buttons each" to throw in their travel luggage. I helped spec these monsters - never got to mix on them, but we took a system that was almost entirely in the box and spent $4m just to improve the interface. And I was working ten hours a day in a room that was literally a wall of monitors. Your crazy guy - thanks for bringing him to my attention, he's crazy - dismissively makes the assertion that you can't use voice transcription for coding. I knew a guy who did that all day long back in 2003; we had to make his computer work for him, and then I had to listen to him bark at a Pentium II two doors down. it's not like he had a disability, either, he just liked shouting at Windows NT4. Dragon Naturally Speaking was gonna be a revolution from, like, 1998 to 2004; before Ray Kurzweil was the crazy guy who thought vitamins would make you live forever, he was the crazy guy who said speech recognition was going to change the world. So yeah - that guy can dismissively say you can't use voice transcription for coding. he can say that because billions have been spent proving it in the main, while I have personally dealt with the exceptions that prove the rule. Some fundamentals of ergonomics, provided to you by about $8k worth of seminars and training necessary for my firm to apply for a role involving pilot simulation of military aircraft for the DoD/Boeing: - The useful area of visual acuity for command and control applications, as determined by expensive DoD studies, is 5 degrees above your sightline and fifteen degrees below... and roughly 25 degrees side-to-side - The effective spacing for visual information is the equivalent focal distance of double the screen-height to six times the screen height - The human eye, with 20/20 vision, can resolve one arc-minute of resolution Let's run some numbers. I have a display 36" from my face. it is 11" tall. Converting out of freedom units gives us 914mm and 280mm respectively. 914sin(1/60) = 0.266mm; 1080 of those is 287mm is holy shit it's almost like I did that on purpose. 3840 of those is 1021mm is 40" to convert back to my freedom-units tape measure, which puts my visual workspace at 47" but that's okay because 9" of it is the Jellyfish in the middle, because when you're mixing, that shit matters the most. Really? Two HD monitors at arm's length are all you can fucking see but more importantly, they're all that generations of exhaustive DARPA studies have revealed we pay attention to with any regularity. And to be clear - I've got eight monitors, not two. There are three tiny, shitty little Kindle Fires that I use to basically watch levels bob up and down. There's a laptop to the right that mostly exists to show me processes on that computer while I work on other computers. And there's a giant 50" LCD "client monitor" that shows the movie while I'm working on it, in a place I can largely ignore. I throw timecode up there to make sure it always matches the timecode on the burn-in because otherwise catastrophe ensues. That hasn't happened in years... but ultimately you need to make sure the punches match the fists. All of them are out of my sightline, and I only switch my attention to them when I have to. To drive the point home, I own a spare KVM switcher that would allow me to drive two more monitors. I own the monitor arms that would let me do it. I have three (of four) computers all set and ready to drive four monitors at a time, all I lack are the monitors, whose prices are bloody nominal these days. But I don't. I could wrap myself in a 90 degree semicircle of information. I've been doing CAD for 25 years, the multi-monitor frontier has been mine since the Pentium and yet "two HD monitors plus a command line text window" has been my happy place the entire time. A lot of people subconsciously grok this; they don't need $8k worth of DARPA training to get it, just if they really wanted to know why. No one wants this. They might have asked for it at some point but I wouldn't have four fucking monitor arms if eBay wasn't replete with day traders purging their excess Humanscale due to walls of financial data sucking from a UI standpoint. IMAX is a big-ass screen, right? Turns out nobody really wants that. Hundreds were built, people would show up sometimes, Wall Street lost a fuckton of money, they started showing normie movies on the screens, people still didn't really care. OmniMAX is worse - it's a big-ass screen wrapped around the room that was an attempt to use planetariums to show movies and they suck balls for that. OmniMAX was the bright-hot thing of my youth that everyone saw once and went "...yeah." So we can act like we haven't tried this style of information display in the real world but we have, and we hated it, and moving your physical focal distance from "over there" to "an inch in front of your eye" does nothing but up the eyestrain and alienation. Wikipedia tells me we've had planetarium domes for about 2500 years. It's not like we've been incapable of this sort of information display until now, we just haven't had any justification. It's like speakers - you can absolutely put together a set of transducers that will reproduce sound from DC to light. The industry has stuck to 40-ish Hz to 20k-ish Hz because that's where our ears are. Note that my opinion about VR and AR has not changed since I was just a kid with a Society for Information Display membership. I bought a PSVR because my wife said "Beat Saber looks like fun." It exactly met my expectations: there are corner-cases where VR is fun in doses but by and large, it's not worth the fuss. I haven't bought a PSVR2 because none of the games I want to play have been ported to it (and there's only two). Would the extra resolution be nice? For sure. PSVR has 2k resolution across a hundred degree field of view; doesn't take much math to recognize that it's a long, long way from visual acuity. But zero of my productivity comes from my peripheral vision, so why do I care? I can buy another HD monitor right now for $150. $3500 would buy me a 4x6 grid of those fuckers - I would have 4k x 12k resolution. Yeah there would be shenanigans getting data to 24 monitors but take it from a lad with a more-than-passing interest in information display - there are methods. And yet the tech industry is at "$3500 for a nerd helmet is reasonable and 24 monitors is bugshit insane." I've been involved with video walls of various shapes and sizes since the late '90s. They're always a weird-ass corner-case travesty made of money and chewing gum because if you need to do that, you'll pay. I've been involved with control systems of various shapes and sizes since the late '90s. 99% of what used to take $50k of Crestron can now be done by Alexa for free. When I bought my first projector? They were three-eyed monsters requiring unistrut, constant collimation and a $2500 video scope to keep happy. I've seen things... you people wouldn't believe And yet I've seen nothing - nothing - that has changed my mind about VR in thirty fuckin' years. And I say that as a multi-monitor-usin', spacemouse-drivin', 3d designin' mutherfucker going back to haptics-over-RS422. There's no there there.I hear you thinking "so why isn't anyone doing that on a Meta Quest"
Screenshots don’t do it justice. Videos fail to capture the scale and grandeur of the experience. These pictures are a poor illustration of what I see in the headset—low resolution, compressed field-of-view, lacking depth and scale. The low display down front? That’s the size of an executive desk. The code is like an IMAX® theater—I can’t even see all of it at once.
