Also, as an aside, I would really like to have six monitors, or 12 even.

But as a practical matter, adding more than 3-4 monitor arms to a physical desk becomes difficult.

So if your startup happens to sell a-grav monitors that can just float in space above my desk, and be re-arranged by waving my hands at them, hit me up in my DMs!

Working in VR often, I’ve realize dI don’t want virtual monitors at all. I want virtual app windows.

Yeah. I think the shape of what that looks like is still TBD, but I think you are right.

I don't yet know personally what I want it to look like (and reserve the right to change my mind many times over the next few years) but there is no reason to stick to the conventional paradigm of "monitors" when in theory you could just let every window or widget float in space, independently or in sets.

Lots of stuff yet to be innovated!

I literally wrote a post above saying this.

Allegedly some of the VR desktop environments support app windows although the one which looked most promising is Quest-only.

I find it baffling that MSFT cannot figure out how to give arbitrary apps their own window in WMR and have to be written specifically to do that. Also: How is their virtual desktop app so bad compared to even the free Desktop+ on Steam?

in your backpack to where? Sit in a coffee shop with that humongous thing on your face? to the backyard veranda enjoying the sun? Well you ain't seeing the sun, nor the backyard

So where to?

Yes, literally to the coffee shop, as one example.

And that's why the (optional) mixed-reality feature is mandatory.

I wouldn't be self-conscious about wearing a headset at a starbucks (just like I wasn't about using an in-ear bluetooth headset for my phone ~20 years ago when people thought that looked weird) — but I don't want to not be able to see the people around me in a public space even if I look at them.

I think within 10-15 years you will see about as many solo customers at a typical starbucks using a mixed-reality headset as you see using wireless earbuds today.

(However, I wouldn't invest the time and money to build out a cloud-powered VR engineering workspace just to be able to take it to the coffee shop. I mainly mean taking it on trips abroad, taking it home when I visit my family, etc.)

I'm with you .... it's fascinating how hard it seems to be for people who aren't bought into this vision to accept there is even a low probability of it happening. But it seems almost completely obvious to me that this is where things will end up. Once an AR headset can render a high fidelity / resolution monitor virtually in front of you it will seem insane to go and buy a giant physical rectangle that is geolocked to your office or where ever you put it.

The timeline is unpredictable but that's the excitement of getting in early to these types of things, because we can start to experience and anticipate what the future will look like before others even have the chance.

Why are you in a coffee shop using VR? Go somewhere else if you want to be somewhere else!

If I owned a coffee shop I'd ban VR headsets. You are in my coffee shop to be in my coffee shop. Go home to use VR or sit in the park or something!

I have heard a dozen variants of this question. But I don't quite get what is hard to understand about it.

In this scenario, I am using a headset (VR, with mixed reality so I can see the real world around me also as needed) for the exact same reason people use a laptop computer in a coffee shop.

The difference would be that I have many big screens instead of one small screen.

Like most people who go to a coffee shop alone in the city, I am not going there to... be in the coffee shop. I am going there to get a seat and get some work done (with the added bonus of a coffee, and possibly a sandwich or pastry).

You don't seem to grok why Google's glasses failed so miserably - they were creepy as f*k to so many people, running around with camera only owner knows if its on or not. Absolutely nothing changed for the better, in fact this would be so much worse - now nobody else would be able to see where you are looking at, an if you are filming them while they want to have some quiet alone time.

Personally I would never ever want to spend money in any food-providing business that would allow such people around us. There is a world of difference between laptops and this. Don't expect mass adoption in cafes soon, I can imagine some SF tech-friendly cafes allowing it as an experiment but overall it would be taking too much risk as an owner at least in this decade.

It also begs the question why you would actually sit in café if you completely shield yourself from whole environment. At home you can usually create much more comfortable place.

Pretty sure that ship has sailed, dude.

The last time I was in a starbucks (in Tokyo) well over 50% of the people were holding highres video cameras in their hands, swiping away in solitude. I couldn't see what they were looking at, nor could I know if they were recording — but who gives a shit? It's a public place. If I cared about that, I'd have to play it safe and assume they all were.

So I think you have it backwards. It's 2022; if you want to make sure you aren't recorded while out in public, then you stay home. (That starbucks also has its own cameras, mounted on the ceiling.)

P.S. Google Glass failed because it didn't provide sufficient utility and value to its users. Not because it freaked out a certain subset of the population, or because John Gruber called them glassholes.

If it had provided real enduring value, then tons of people would wear them and nobody would give a shit about some subgroup's Luddite anxieties — my great grandpa and some of his buddies had similar feelings about the Sony Walkman. But nobody stopped using walkmans because those old guys didn't like them shutting out the outside world with their headphones; they stopped because eventually minidisc players and ipods were invented.

Well, dude, not every nation is like Japan, when it comes to technology I dare to say no country is like Japan, nor it strives to be (maybe South Korea but not even them). So taking the most extreme example (and not really the same example by any stretch of imagination) and stating whole mankind across whole globe is like that is not even stretching it, its a plain lie.

Since you seem completely oblivious about other cultures - there are still whole cultures where taking a picture without asking for permission is highly offensive. We talk about billions of people. And even in other places, like most Europe, you try something like that in cafe and you will be asked to put it down. I also mentioned current decade, things change but not that fast as some kids project it to be.

I think it would benefit tremendously to basically everybody to actually travel a bit like backpackers as far culturally as possible to challenge themselves and their worldviews a bit.

OK, but I'm originally from California and was there just a couple months ago. Same story at starbucks there: cameras on the ceiling, camera phones in tons of peoples' hands.

Sorry if you don't like it, but smartphones are everywhere now, and that's not gonna change. You might feel like sitting alone wearing a headset is somehow fundamentally different than sitting alone using a smartphone, but it really isn't. It is precisely the same in all respects that matter — you just aren't used to it yet.

However, we might be talking about a different kind of "coffee shop". I'm talking about corporate coffee shops like starbucks. They mainly offer industrial coffee and food, wifi, and a place to work, while you are in between things or in transit. I haven't been to Europe since before COVID ,but IIRC it was already pretty much the same there, too, even three years ago. I saw hundreds of people using iPhones, and pretty sure I didn't see anybody get asked to put it down.

Completely different. Your face and ears are covered, so the staff or anyone else can't interrupt your special virtual bubble. Not without tapping you on shoulder.

Perhaps you could place a doorbell on the table. When pressed it gives you a notification in your eye screens. You could rig up automated contextual replies "yes you can borrow the sugar". Saving you the bother of being human.

Sitting there with laptop or phone, you are not faceless like you are with VR headset.

We seem to be talking about different things.

Anybody could walk up and ask me a question, and I'd both see and hear them. In fact, that is one of the main points of today's announcement. The new "mixed reality" feature means exactly that.

(You could always hear people around you in VR (if you wished), but seeing your surroundings didn't work well at all, unless you used developer mode hacks, and even then the cameras were bad.)

With Meta's previous headset, I wouldn't contemplate using it in a starbucks.

Not because I prioritize people walking over and interrupting me, or them being able to see every inch of my face, but because I want to be able to see them.

Sitting in public without being able to hear and see what is going on around me does seem like a very weird thing to me. But that's not what's being talked about here.