If this concept takes off it could be an interesting leveler (and level-up) for productivity, especially with people working at home.
I'm sure there are loads of people out there working off a single laptop screen, maybe with an extra monitor if their employer has funded one and they have the space and technical ability to set that up correctly [0]. They're spending all day switching their tiny screen betwen Excel and Word and a browser and email and chat, and it's just killing productivity.
If all it takes is a single piece of equipment, with one or two cables, to give any person an enormous virtual workspace - that could be a huge change. Everyone gets a laptop and a VR headset, so everyone is on the same level for that resource. Everyone has space for VR, so it's not lucky me with the full home office against unlucky you who works at their dining room table or on the couch.
[0] Don't underestimate how complex this stuff is for many people - if they're even aware that it's possible!
We agree :) Our goal is for the Simula One to be so good that it's the strictly-more-productive choice over a single-screen laptop (and also over most PC setups too). Here's our pitch for why VR Computers can boost your productivity:
- Provide unlimited screens of any size
- Improve work focus & immersion (like "noise-cancelling headphones for your eyes")
- Fully controllable with just a keyboard (with hand gestures, eye gaze tracking, etc)
- Allow for fully portable, multi-screen computing
- Usable outdoors (no laptop glare) in places like backyards, urban balconies, & parks
- Provide more privacy (no one around you can snoop on your screen)
- Compact design takes up less desk space than PCs/Laptops
- Promote better posture & freedom of movement: with a VR Computer (VRC) you can change positions, sit up, lean back, stand, lie down, or even walk while you compute
> Fully controllable with just a keyboard (with hand gestures, eye gaze tracking, etc)
If it is precise enough, this would be very pleasant to work with, to the extent that you describe, a productivity boost over working with monitors and a mouse.
Glancing at the start button, it being detected with no latency and high precision, and then I press say CTRL + ENTER and I get a left click.
Fresh air, feel the weather, hear the sounds. Some people can probably crack open a window and get that, but some might need to go for a walk to the park or something like that. It would also be a game changer to be able to take a fully fledged setup to co-working spaces, cafes and so on.
I have aesthetic hesitations toward all this which is really shallow I know, you will probably look like a dork sitting with VR on at a cafe. But imagine where this could lead, if the technology keeps getting more compact or even just popular enough that it's the norm.
It's not just plugging in the monitor, it's setting everything up - are you doing screen cloning or expanding your desktop? How do you move windows between screens? How do you configure your OS to know where one display is positioned relative to another (so that windows can be dragged).
I don't want to imply that most people are incapable of figuring this out. But I do think it's potentially hard to find and properly configure your display settings in Windows (which is where corporate is) - if you even have access to such.
This is kind of thing is why people buy iMacs, instead of a laptop and nice external monitor.
The Quest 2 is wireless, and I think VR will have to be wireless to really succeed. At that point it'll be more like "just put on the headset" than "connect the headset to the laptop". The applications will run on-board or stream from the cloud, which is already a thing that works well.
Setting up VR rigs is indeed painful. Just in case this isn't clear though: the Simula One is a portable VR headset, designed to be immediately usable out of the box (with no/minimal setup pain). It features a detacachable compute pack running our Linux VR distro.
With that said, it's admittedly a bleeding edge early adopter product, so won't necessarily be as user friendly as mature products on the market (e.g. office laptops running Windows).
I would hope to use something similar to i3wm or other tiling window managers, so that I could concisely control everything from the keyboard. That might be leaving some user experience on the table though, as I'm not yet sure what's possible with VR and gestures. Could I work like it's minority report but with a keyboard in front of me for input and shortcuts? Because that would actually be rad.
If I'm not mistaken, their included software distro has some opinions on all this, I'm sure they're working just as hard on the UX of the software as they are on the hardware.
I'm sure there are loads of people out there working off a single laptop screen, maybe with an extra monitor if their employer has funded one and they have the space and technical ability to set that up correctly [0]. They're spending all day switching their tiny screen betwen Excel and Word and a browser and email and chat, and it's just killing productivity.
If all it takes is a single piece of equipment, with one or two cables, to give any person an enormous virtual workspace - that could be a huge change. Everyone gets a laptop and a VR headset, so everyone is on the same level for that resource. Everyone has space for VR, so it's not lucky me with the full home office against unlucky you who works at their dining room table or on the couch.
[0] Don't underestimate how complex this stuff is for many people - if they're even aware that it's possible!