| ▲ | xeonmc 13 hours ago |
| > Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. But the price is hopefully low. Question, what is the criteria for deciding this to be the case? Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details? |
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| ▲ | potatolicious 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| There's no precise criteria but the usual measure is ppd (pixels per degree) and it needs to be high enough such that detailed content (such as text) displayed at a reasonable size is clearly legible without eye strain. > "Could you not just move your face closer to the virtual screen to see finer details?" Sure, but then you have the problem of, say, using an IMAX screen as your computer monitor. The level of head motion required to consume screen content (i.e., a ton of large head movements) would make the device very uncomfortable quite quickly. The Vision Pro has about ~35ppd and generally people seems to think it hits the bar for monitor replacement. Meta Quest 3 has ~25ppd and generally people seem to think it does not. The Steam Frame is specs-wise much closer to Quest 3 than Vision Pro. There are some software things you can do to increase legibility of details like text, but ultimately you do need physical pixels. |
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| ▲ | giobox 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Even the vision pro at 35ppd simply isn't close to the PPD you can get from a good desktop monitor (we can calculate PPD for desktop monitors too, using size and viewing distance). Apple's "retina" HiDPI monitors typically have PPD well beyond 35 at ordinary viewing distances, even a 1080p 24 inch monitor on your desk can exceed this. For me personally, 35ppd feels about the minimum I would accept for emulating a monitor for text work in a VR headset, but it's still not good enough for me to even begin thinking about using it to replace any of my monitors. > https://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDensityCalculator.html | | |
| ▲ | numpad0 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think there is a missing number here: angular resolution of human eyeballs is believed to be ~60 ppd(some believes it's more like 90). | |
| ▲ | potatolicious 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Oh yeah for sure. Most people seem to accept that 35ppd is "good enough" but not actually at-par with a high quality high-dpi monitor. I agree with you - I would personally consider 35ppd to be the floor for usability for this purpose. It's good in a pinch (need a nice workstation setup in a hotel room?) but I would not currently consider any extant hardware as full-time replacements for a good monitor. | | |
| ▲ | andybak 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Most people in what age group? I'm 53 and the Quest 3 is perfectly good as a monitor replacement. | | |
| ▲ | gruturo 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm in the same boat. Due to my vision not being perfect even after correction, a Quest 3 is entirely sufficient. | | |
| ▲ | pdpi 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I keep hearing this argument, and it baffles me. I find that, as I age and my vision gets worse, I need progressively finer text rendering. Using same-size displays (27") at the same distance, with text the same physical size on screen, 1440p gives me a much worse reading experience than 4k with 2x scaling. |
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| ▲ | froggit 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are you saying ppd requirements for comfortable usage vary with age? |
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| ▲ | whycome 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We get by with lower resolution monitors with lower pixel density all the time. | | |
| ▲ | big_toast 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think part of getting by with a lower PPD is the IRL pixels are fixed and have hard boundaries that OS affordances have co-evolved with. (pixel alignment via lots of rectangular things - windows, buttons; text rendering w/ that in mind; "pixel perfect" historical design philosophy) The VR PPD is in arbitrary orientations which will lead to more aliasing. MacOS kinda killed their low-dpi experience via bad aliasing as they moved to the hi-dpi regime. Now we have svg-like rendering instead of screen-pixel-aligned baked rasterized UIs. | |
| ▲ | giobox 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm not sure most of us do anymore - see my 1080p/24 inch example. No one who has bought almost any MacBook in the last 10 years or so has had PPD this low either. One can get by with almost anything in a pinch, it doesn't mean its desirable. Pixel density != PPD either, although increasing it can certainly help PPD. Lower density desktop displays routinely have higher PPD than most VR headsets - viewing distance matters! |
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| ▲ | modeless 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not only would it be a chore to constantly lean in closer to different parts of your monitor to see full detail, but looking at close-up objects in VR exacerbates the vergence-accommodation mismatch issue, which causes eye strain. You would need varifocal lenses to fix this, which have only been demonstrated in prototypes so far. |
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| ▲ | Fernicia 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Couldn't you get around that by having a "zoom" feature on a very large but distant monitor? | | |
| ▲ | wongarsu 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes. You can make a low-resolution monitor (like 800x600px, once upon a time a usable resolution) and/or provide zoom and panning controls I've tried that combination in an earlier iteration of Lenovo's smart glasses, and it technically works. But the experience you get is not fun or productive. If you need to do it (say to work on confidential documents in public) you can do it, but it's not something you'd do in a normal setup | |
| ▲ | potatolicious 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes but that can create major motion sickness issues - motion that does not correspond top the user's actual physical movements create a dissonance that is expressed as motion sickness for a large portion of the population. This is the main reason many VR games don't let you just walk around and opt for teleportation-based movement systems - your avatar moving while your body doesn't can be quite physically uncomfortable. There are ways of minimizing this - for example some VR games give you "tunnel vision" by blacking out peripheral vision while the movement is happening. But overall there's a lot of ergo considerations here and no perfect solution. The equivalent for a virtual desktop might be to limit the size of the window while the user is zooming/panning. | |
| ▲ | rtkwe 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | For a small taste of what using that might be like turn on screen magnification on your existing computers. It's technically usable but not particularly productive or pleasant to use if you don't /have/ to use it. |
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| ▲ | whycome 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This all sounds a bit like the “better horse” framing. Maybe richer content shouldn’t be consumed as primarily a virtualized page. Maybe mixing font sizes and over sized text can be a standard in itself. |
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| ▲ | jayd16 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's just about what pixel per degree will get you close to the modern irl setup. Obviously it's enough for 80 char consoles but you'd need to dip into large fonts for a desktop. |
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