Thanks for this post! Interesting to learn about the current state of things.
It does seem true (and funny) to me that the #1 thing in physical reality I and millions of others would like to experience in Virtual Reality is our computer screens.
I expect it humorlessly. In a lot of ways, computer screens can’t be improved upon that much:
The third dimension is unlikely to turn out to be useful when most of the work we do is already neglecting to use the color dimensions. Hopefully it’ll be useful to people who work with 3d objects (3d modellers) though.
I’d predict operating systems that at least start presenting larger computer screens, but even that has practical limits. Once it’s wide enough, it would require you to physically turn your head to be able to see things. Right now you can just hit a switch workspace or show overview keybinding for that kind of thing, which is faster. Working while looking to the side is not ergonomic, and it would be hard to get the OS to consistently put stuff at the sides that’s occasionally worth looking at but not ever worth looking at for long enough to get uncomfortable. Caveat: Turning your body to look around at different stuff would probably be healthy, and intuitive, so we might hope for some hip new VR-optimized standing desks with keyboards that can be yawed around to different angles. Optimally, keyboards would be mounted on a fairly long robot arm that lets you just move and position it in 3d space anywhere in a room. Still seems kinda gimicky on net but who knows, might be nice.
One thing I noticed is that HTML could really be optimized for 3d viewing. Right now computer screens are totally flat, but with VR, you could take advantage of the extra dimension. In general I’d be quite curious about 3D web pages, it seems like there’s a lot of innovation to be done. My quick hunch is that it won’t radically change UX (things would have to be accessible to people with one eye, for instance, and it’s very user-convenient to not need to adjust the third dimension, like having a 3-d mouse), but I imagine it could still lead to a bunch of UI changes.
Big Screen allows you to watch 3D movies, which is pretty cool (though they charge a fair bit for them).
Thanks for this post! Interesting to learn about the current state of things.
It does seem true (and funny) to me that the #1 thing in physical reality I and millions of others would like to experience in Virtual Reality is our computer screens.
I expect it humorlessly. In a lot of ways, computer screens can’t be improved upon that much:
The third dimension is unlikely to turn out to be useful when most of the work we do is already neglecting to use the color dimensions. Hopefully it’ll be useful to people who work with 3d objects (3d modellers) though.
I’d predict operating systems that at least start presenting larger computer screens, but even that has practical limits. Once it’s wide enough, it would require you to physically turn your head to be able to see things. Right now you can just hit a switch workspace or show overview keybinding for that kind of thing, which is faster. Working while looking to the side is not ergonomic, and it would be hard to get the OS to consistently put stuff at the sides that’s occasionally worth looking at but not ever worth looking at for long enough to get uncomfortable.
Caveat: Turning your body to look around at different stuff would probably be healthy, and intuitive, so we might hope for some hip new VR-optimized standing desks with keyboards that can be yawed around to different angles. Optimally, keyboards would be mounted on a fairly long robot arm that lets you just move and position it in 3d space anywhere in a room.
Still seems kinda gimicky on net but who knows, might be nice.
Good point.
One thing I noticed is that HTML could really be optimized for 3d viewing. Right now computer screens are totally flat, but with VR, you could take advantage of the extra dimension. In general I’d be quite curious about 3D web pages, it seems like there’s a lot of innovation to be done. My quick hunch is that it won’t radically change UX (things would have to be accessible to people with one eye, for instance, and it’s very user-convenient to not need to adjust the third dimension, like having a 3-d mouse), but I imagine it could still lead to a bunch of UI changes.
Big Screen allows you to watch 3D movies, which is pretty cool (though they charge a fair bit for them).
https://www.reddit.com/r/bigscreen/comments/ck4xrc/where_can_i_get_3d_movies_and_play_them_in/