Sounds like something awesome, but kinda impractical for now - at least not until the Oculus-grade headsets become the size of eyeglasses.
I guess that should work great with AR headsets, since these won't constrain your situational awareness.
I've tried both the DK1 and the vive, and the vive is basically at the point where games are very playable.
Some people complain about the "screen-door" effect, which basically translates to the pixels are so large that it's like you are looking a screen door. But in my experience that's not a problem. If you stop and concentrate you can see the pixels, and they are quite large, but with game-like graphics your brain is more than happy to fill in the gaps between pixels.
This doesn't translate to text. Text needs to be massive before you can read it. There is no way you can have multiple monitors at desktop distances. Best case is a single, low resolution monitor (about 720p resolution) so close to your face (or far away and massive) that it takes up your entire field of view. To see any extra monitors, you would have to rotate your entire head.
When the 'in-world' resolution can match 1920x1200 at 2ft then it will replace my 3 monitors otherwise it's a headache inducing experience.
If the technology takes off and follows the usual S-curve I think we'll have that inside 5 years.
Sitting about 2 ft from my 24" monitor at work, I'd estimate that it would take 9 such monitors to get to around the same field of view in my HTC Vive. So you're talking about 5760x3600 pixels there.
Maybe we're going to need iris tracking as an optimization? That's a lot of pixels to push at 90 Hz.
It is but considering the current pace of GPU development it's what 5-6 years away on the really high end and maybe 7-8 on the midrange $200 cards.
VR has already re-invigorated the competition between AMD/nVidia as they both want to get a foothold in the potential new market, interesting times.
I'm not really sure how big the text should be - in the games it looks natural, but there is no sense of scale.
This monitor is responsible for filling your entire field of view, therefore the pixel density of any 'virtual monitor' must be quite low, therefore it'll not work 'like you're sitting at a desk of monitors'.
Imagine the inverse. Imagine you've got a single curved monitor at your desk that fills your entire field of view. Sounds great right? Now imagine that monitor is 2160 x 1200. Not so great.
Of course, the issue now is GPU horsepower. Rendering two viewports at 1200x1080 at 90fps is no easy task. Supersampling at 2x means rendering 2400x2160 per eye at 90fps. Anything short of a 1080 is going to have performance issues at this level of supersampling, and even then it depends on how complex the game environment is and its settings. I messed around a bit with BigScreen and I can certainly see the potential for VR as monitor replacement for $some_tasks. I have yet to see supersampling settings for it or if these global settings affect 2D screen projections in 3D space.
So yes, current densities might be enough to get by without fuzziness and hard to read text if you have enough GPU muscle. I don't think we've figured out all the tricks with first gen VR yet. There are going to be a lot of little surprises like these I suspect. At the very least we know AMD and Nvidia are supporting performance enhancing features that no one has really implemented yet.[1] I suspect the Vive of June 2016 is going to be a very different experience compared to the Vive of December 2016. The same way console launch games don't look as good as games released towards the end of the console's life.
[1] Yesterday one of the PoolNationVR devs said he got a 20% performance increase using Nvidia's Multi-Res Shading. This change goes live in July. A 20% performance increase at no cost? Crazy.
I can't imagine doing work with that. Only some specialized tasks could work, I can see how Tilt Brush could work in CAD work. But projecting your usual 2d app windows to VR sounds awful with the current consumer products in mind.
Maybe it could replace a wall of monitors displaying surveillance footage in a security room. You could even do impossible things enlarge the screens with lots of movements, and shrink or fade out ones without any motion detected. Show each video feed overlaid on a map of the premises.
I have no idea exactly what daytraders are looking at, but I know it's a stereotype for them to have tons of monitors. You could spawn a few dozen virtual screens displaying charts, have indicators when a chart behind you changes within some rules you've defined (something similar to the "you're being shot from behind" indicator in shooter video games), maybe with different colors, shapes and scales depending on the rules you set.
There's probably a ton of potential being passed up just because these don't do text very well yet.
They are both pretty light-weight.
Finally we could look like the keyboard cowboys from Neuromancer ;)
0: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/8/10738792/harman-touchless-u...