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Comment by ezjones | Hacker News Reader

When I see these demos or hololens demos I always wonder if the resolution is good enough to code. To read text clearly without blurred effects or jaggies. After all the text is being mapped to a texture in 3d. These demos work but are they usable?

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I just released a VNC client for Hololens, for the express purpose of exposing my Mac to that environment, for development. The resolution is absolutely fantastic. The thing about Hololens is that the resolution all depends on where the window is in reference to you; I don't know how they do what they do, but there's no blurriness, no jaggies in the least. I'm not one for hyperbole when it comes to tech, especially that in development, but I will say this: it's the closest to magic I've ever seen.

Edit: I should probably actually link it, since people might see this! https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/vncaster/9nblggh528q... Don't judge the text by the screenshots; for whatever reason, they threw a 640x480 camera on the front, and downscale everything for that. What looks like magic in real life, looks like shit in screenshots. If they don't fix that with Hololens v2, there's a serious problem with their priorities.

Interesting. We've got a Vive in the office, and the limited resolution is a serious downer. Everything looks like it's 800x600, no matter how far away it is.

Would love to see some real highres screenshots. Even if the real world is lower res, to get an idea of the quality. I am still annoyed that you cant test the HoloLens on Microsoft stores.

I would get one of this instead of buying several monitors.

To code, I would say not yet. We'll get there eventually, but in the meantime I can think of other uses, like modifying the VR server's settings or browsing and importing from a web catalog of 3D models without having to take off the HMD.

Totally. Less text-dependent UIs are a big win to bring into VR. When we reach a more legible resolution for text, that's going to mark a huge increase in VR development productivity because we can be in there the whole time. VR dev offices could get weird during the VR but pre-AR phase, with everyone in their own bubbles developing and chatting away beside each other.

BigScreen VR seems to be going towards that direction.

https://youtu.be/nai88kUruIw?t=435

I'm super excited about the idea of having a VR headset and no monitors for work, but I do worry about long term immersion issues. My first long session in a Vive left me in a weird state where I felt like an observer to my body for a few hours. That's just one of many possible mental issues. The physical issues worry me as well. What will wearing a headset do to our vision? I already have a lot of neck issues, will wearing a headset all day cause even more?

There's https://www.reddit.com/r/HMDprogramming/ which is devoted to the idea of coding in VR. But, it's pretty quiet...

Samsung recently demoed live-coding VR in VR on a GearVR using http://www.gearvrf.org/ Note the use of green-on-black text to get the best clarity out of the pentile screen http://imgur.com/a/ZL32K

It depends on the simulated screen resolution you are looking to achieve. Even disconnecting from the idea of a screen, you have to accept that the resolution is effectively lower than the current generation of monitors. That being said, I was able to use my IDE with my vive as long ad I bumped up the font size. It wasn't really very practical, but was very cool. I think that the next generation of hardware or the one after will get to the point where you can code in VR/AR/MR. I'm very excited about that personally.

The coding tools of the future probably won't be so file/text based. At any given moment you're only really focused on a couple lines of code. That's what I think anyway.

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