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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Neither VR nor AR will provide effective alternatives to physical monitors for 8+ hours a day of software development or other knowledge work. VR blocks your view so you have to keep removing the headset to talk to a colleague or find your coffee cup. AR just overlays on the real world background making it really unpleasant to read or edit code or documents.

I expect most of us will still be using 2-D physical monitors for most work in 20 years. VR and AR use will increase but they'll be limited to particular use cases.

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AR can also selectively block out the background to give you a virtual monitor. The advantage is that it can go transparent where required so that you can find that coffeecup or talk to your colleague without taking off the headset.

I don't think AR can do full opacity yet, with is the problem. You couldn't block out the background enough

Projectors can't block out the background entirely either, and they're in very wide use. We get around that by projecting onto flat, solid-color areas. As long as you understand that to use your "monitor", you need to be staring at a semi-smooth solid color area, it should work.

If I moved my monitor out of the way, I'd be staring at a white wall. That doesn't need to be completely blacked out before displaying something else unless I was working on photo/video editing or design work where colors actually mattered.

Well sure, you could stare at a blank wall with a bulky headset on, but why not just have a monitor? Also the parent comment didn't seem to be talking about staring at a blank wall. I just don't see how this could be better than an nice wide monitor.

Well sure, you could stare at a tiny monitor, but why not just have a headset that turns all of your available wall space into one massive screen?

Let's take one use case I've seen quite often: someone has three cubicle walls around them, and only uses one 21" wide section of it. Maybe two 21" wide sections, or one 27" wide section if they're lucky. The person has a chair that swivels 360 degrees.

Nothing says "a nice wide monitor" more than a display area that's 20 feet wide by three feet tall.

Think of ergonomics though. Can you comfortably read something 5 or 6 feet away that's in 16pt font? Can you find text on a surface that large easily? I'd be willing to guess people can't do that. Otherwise projectors would be more common displays.

You make a great point, no software in the history of ever has had any ability to change the size of the font or to scale the display size. I completely forgot that humans need to hold their heads perfectly still at a perfectly measured distance from their screen in order to function.

If you need giant font and to move around a lot, then what's the point? Do you really want to more a round a ton while trying to type? I still think this is worse than a monitor in almost every way.

It depends on the distance from the user

To provide a good high resolution in that area though is going to require much better screens in our VR/AR headsets than we currently have with a corresponding bump in rendering power. With VR the best resolution you can conceivably have is to fill the whole FOV with a monitor which gives you the resolution of the internal screens. This ignores problems like screen door and lens distortion that is going to reduce the usable area and worst of all who's monitor takes up the ~100 degrees of FOV a current headset gives, there's loads of stuff around so what you're used to seeing will require probably 4-8k+ per eye.

Most office workers don't have a large, flat, solid, dark colored wall to look at. The reality of most office environments is that we're looking at co-workers, furniture, plants, windows, artwork, small cubicle walls, etc. If you have to rearrange offices to make AR usable then what's the point? Just give everyone a physical monitor. They're cheap.

I doubt that white walls will work well for AR backgrounds because it's additive light. There won't be enough contrast to make reading comfortable.

I'll admit that it wouldn't work for offices with the open floorplan nonsense where across the table is another human face staring back at you, but in my experience as a consultant visiting dozens of different IT offices around the US every year, most office workers I meet are in cubicles where it's trivial to hang a black piece of paper up with some thumbtacks.

Might not work for everyone, but it'd work for some people, which is quite often the case with basically every product that exists anywhere.

Maybe, just maybe it would work for people with ample wall space, in an environment with stable lighting, and good viewing distances. But how is it better than a monitor? How do you show your screen to another person? Do the economics makes sense at all? could the resolution and refresh rate be high enough?

Again, what does it give you that a really large monitor doesn't do better for less money?

Man HN always has a hard-on for "I can come up with one use case where it doesn't work, so therefore it will never work and everyone who wants it is stupid". It's ridiculous. Stop it. You don't want it. Fine. Some people do. That's also fine. Why can people on this site never understand that? And how often do people here say "no one will ever want product X" and then the very next headline is "Product X is top selling gadget of the year"?

Sometimes I want to lean back in my chair and look upward but still continue working. I can't do that with a monitor. I could with a head-mounted display. How the fuck does that hurt you in any way?

I'm not saying that it wouldn't work for anyone. I'm just saying that is a general display tool for office work, it's clearly inferior for most common use cases. I mean shit, if it becomes a thing, I'd try it. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but this sounds like the promise of serious productivity on tablets it was great for a narrow slice of use cases and crap for everything else.

Instead of tacking up a black piece of paper on the wall wouldn't it be better to just hang a monitor there? Flat panel monitors get larger, thinner, sharper, and cheaper every year. It's a lot easier to collaborate with colleagues when you can both look at the same physical monitor.

But have you ever tried drinking from a mug while wearing a VR/AR headset?

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