Oh look, another Tom’s guide advertorial masking as original content…
im a pretty big fan of AR/VR for productivity, reading books, watching films. the resolution and lenses need to be pretty good for the first 2. but it’s promising. laying in bed and looking up at a book or movie is really something else. standing up once in a while is great also. i think there is a future here.
All this trouble just to be able to use a nosy keyboard and covertly watch porn in public.
I’ve thought about doing this too, with a very similar setup.
Larger FOV for your screen than anything else portable. Potentially more power efficient too, as you don’t blast light everywhere to get a tiny bit into an eye. Can be used in very bright conditions, like outdoors on a bright summer day, without issues. More comfortable to use in some other orientations — I use a split ergo keyboard with my laptop when lying back in a recliner or on a couch, lets my hands not be jammed in front of me and obstructing my views of the screen, but an HMD is even more flexible.
Laptops have limited hardware customizability, so it’s really the only route other than carrying a portable display if you want more control over the PC hardware. Want a 100Wh battery or larger? Non-soldered memory and more of it? More expansion ports or storage slots? Moving the hot-and-noisy stuff beneath the table instead of beneath your hands? For the form factor: have airflow vents that aren’t on the bottom and covered up when on a lap (ironically, “laptop”), chest, couch, or bed? If you’re a woman and want to use the thing on your belly while lying down, not having your breasts in between your eyes and the screen? For anyone, not having their hands in the way?
Laptops have a lot of limitations as to input devices. Do you want a Trackpoint? You’re limited to a very few models of laptop. Trackball? Few laptops and it has to be very small. A trackpad with three physical buttons? Very few laptops on offer make that an option. Particular about your keyboard layout? If you’re getting external hardware, there’s a cornucopia of options, and you can mix and match as you’d like. Yeah, you can also do this with laptops and a stand and a docking station and external hardware, if you’re aiming for use at a particular desk, but that’s not really suitable for a couch, say.
The privacy is nice – and I don’t think that that reasonably can be reduced to looking at porn, which I assume most people aren’t going to want to do in public anyway, for obvious reasons. I can throw a password list up onscreen, don’t need to deal with those inane “hide your password as you type it” things that try to mitigate privacy issues with people using computers in public places.
Problem is that at least today, wearing HMDs is not as comfortable and sharp as looking at a display. Easy to get something slightly blurry if it’s not perfectly aligned. My HMD tends to fog up, though the Xreal thing in the article has more airflow and it’s probably less of an issue. Also, VR goggles and headphones tend to compete for the same spot around the ears — circumaural headphones need to seal there, so you may need to accept whatever sound, if any, the HMD can provide. You have less awareness of your surroundings, which matters in some situations.
A lot of work has gone into making laptops particularly low power, and if you build your own system, some of that is on you, to pay attention to component power consumption.
Also, I couldn’t find a way to get some kind of external battery to be treated by Linux as a
power_supplyclass device, which lets Linux do things like automatically hibernate when power gets critical and use nice in-UI reporting of low battery. On the power source side, USB PD power banks, which it would seem would be a good solution, technically have the ability to report a battery level but AFAICT do not actually do this, or even present themselves as visible devices on the USB tree. You could probably work something up yourself with a modular battery bank — at the very least, even if Linux can’t use it as apower_supplydevice, NUT can be rigged up to treat some hardware that you can put on a modular battery bank as a UPS, which accomplishes some of the same stuff, like auto-shutdown. And a modular battery bank is pretty user-configurable. But…that’s not necessarily all that portable.I would definitely do this instead of a laptop if they managed to get HMDs to the point where I’d be willing to dump my displays and go all HMDs. We aren’t there yet, though.
I use rokid air max and it is wonderful, but fatigue sets in despite the light weight due to the heat. Hope they make them with a heat vent
He has reached douchevana
He needs an actual typewriter instead of a keyboard to go where no douche has gone before.
My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere
My laptop easily fits in a backpack. Hell I can fit TWO laptops in my backpack.
Laptop is hardly a whole desk setup though. AR is potentially going to be much better than using clunky laptops.
“My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere”
Man, I guess I’ve been fooled using laptops this entire time. IM SO STUPID
He addresses this by saying a laptop doesn’t allow you to replace components, doesn’t have mechanical keyboard and there’s no ultra wide support.
The funny thing is, this device he’s using doesn’t allow you to replace components either. And there are 21:9 laptops and mechanical keyboards available.
Seemed like he’s trying to reverse-engineer his way into justifying a use case for it, but just failed.
I mean if it did multiple virtual monitors the way vr headsets can I could see this being worth it…
Yeah they make laptop monitors but no ones gonna carry two 24" panels and a 30" ultrawide in their pocket.
It might be able to do that.
From memory, those Xreal glasses have this optional doohickey called a Beam that you can plug them into. If you have that, it can “project” a monitor into reality, not have it move with your head. So they can do the projection bit. Like, they aren’t just dumb HMDs that throw an image in front of your eyes. They’re AR, so like VR goggles, they do headtracking and such, but they’re intended to have you view a mix of the real world and the virtual projected elements.
The problem is that if you’re rendering a virtual image of a screen on a screen, you need to have the physical screen be significantly-higher-resolution to look right — you have to throw away some of your resolution on this. True of VR or AR googles. I’d think that the first practical monitor replacement HMD is gonna avoid doing any 3D projection of virtual monitors.
EDIT: Yeah, those goggles can do it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Xreal/comments/182wwxb/can_i_use_3_virtual_monitors_and_2_physical/
I do this with 4. I have 3 floating ones above and then look at the regular monitor thru the lenses. I also do this when watching TV and working in bed. I rest my head against the headboard looking up at the floating windows and straightforward when looking at the tv.
Oh no I’m aware of the resolution limitations as a first gen vive owner. That being said from what I’ve heard some of the newer high DPI devices handle this a lot better.
It’ll be a while but I think it will eventually have a practical use case as a portable workstation monitor.
That being said from what I’ve heard some of the newer high DPI devices handle this a lot better.
I mean, you can get higher-resolution ones, but they aren’t as high resolution as even the monitors that you’d virtualize. Like:
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First, the guy is using glasses that are really designed for augmented reality, not as a monitor replacement. They’re not optimizing for this use case.
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We aren’t yet at the point where traditional displays are really even maxed out in terms of usable resolution, and as things stand, HMDs have lower resolution.
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If someone wants that “virtual projection” thing, HMDs have to be even higher-resolution than that.
One good thing about these AR goggles compared to trying to use VR goggles for this is that the AR goggles are spending the physical pixels they do display in the center of your visual field, as opposed to way off in the periphery. VR goggles need to have a really high field of view to provide immersiveness and let you see things in the corner of your eye, but for working with text and such, monitor replacement hardware only really needs to put something in the visual arc that you’d actually be viewing a regular monitor in, in the center of your field of vision, a smaller arc. So repurposing these for a desktop replacement is at least using the pixels that are physically-displayed more-efficiently than VR goggles would. That is, the XReal goggles here are at least closer to being optimized to be a “monitor replacement” HMD than VR goggles would be.
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I read that as well, and it addresses none of that. Also, you can replace components on a lot of laptops, and ALL components on a Framework. This is why they are so sought after.
Whoever wrote this is making a bad faith argument and throwing an ignorant assertion out to serve a specific purpose, which…is not stated 🤣
Yeah, you can swap more on a framework laptop than the mini PC he’s using.
However glasses, a mini PC, keyboard and battery is smaller than a laptop. Using whatever keyboard you want instead of what came with the laptop for forever is also nice.
However glasses, a mini PC, keyboard and battery is smaller than a laptop.
It relaxes the X and Y dimensions — no screen. But it might take up more volume, depending upon the configuration. Like, laptops use flat keycaps and scissor switch keys to save space. He’s using a keyboard with traditional, full-height keys and regular keyswitches. That alone is a not insignificant amount of volume.
EDIT: I have a split-ergo keyboard with standard full-size keyswitches that fits into a folding case, one half on each side. If I were going to carry an external mechanical key keyboard with a portable PC, that’s probably what I’d use. Split ergo keyboards are expensive, though, so not as cost-effective as a standard one-piece mechanical key keyboard. [email protected]
Here, follow this affiliate link to this overpriced portable machine.
Wait I saw this on the game Heavy Rain.
Or – hear me out – what if he used his already owned laptop with the VR goggles, instead of advertising the proprietary-connector Khadas mind?
I imagine it would be really annoying to set up after taking it out of a backpack. I think it would be much more practical to just use a laptop with the xreal glasses
It’s longer than a laptop, but honestly, I have my laptop set up to hibernate if I have it closed for more than ten minutes or so, and it takes several seconds to get that dehibernated, even off NVMe, and some of that is happening in parallel. My last laptop was a lot slower, took something north of ten seconds to get dehibernated. He’s gotta drop a keyboard on his desk, unzip his HMD case, and plug each in (if he’s not using a wireless keyboard or the wireless accessory for that HMD, neither of which I would personally use). Some of that at least can be parallelized. And that HMD has integrated headphones, IIRC — I carry headphones with me for my laptop, so he doesn’t need to do that bit.
EDIT: Oh, and his trackball/trackpad/mouse or whatever. I carry a trackball with my laptop, but don’t usually use it.
Or, and hear me out, I could just carry a single device with a charging cable that weighs less than 5lbs that does all of that without all of the cables and BS associated with trying to be a tech edgelord for clicks. Hell, if that device is a Framework is will probably be way more repairable than that mini PC and probably super fragile AR glasses as well.
The only thing that really attracts me about these glasses is that you could hold your head up instead of looking down all the time at a laptop or a portable monitor. But most of the time I need more than one display, while the glasses only offer a single, expensive, fairly low resolution screen. I also wonder what it does to your eyes to use this for long periods of time.
I tried a previous incarnation of these and was not impressed. The screen was too dark in bright rooms and the resolution and image sharpness was lacking. Also the response time was rather slow, which made them basically unusable for playing games or watching (which was primarily what I bought them for). Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use. I ended up returning them after a week.
It appears as if these are at least the second, if not third generation (mine were simply called Air), and the spatial processing chip might help alleviate some of these issues, but I’m disappointed to see that the vertical resolution has not been increased. But at 32:9, it seems that these have twice the horizontal resolution, which would equal two 16:9 screens next to each other.
I wonder if these might be worth giving another try, but I’m loathe to risk it as my Amazon account has been flagged for returning too many purchases before.
Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use.
The current version of these glasses have this optional device that they sell that provides this fixed-in-real-space projected screen called a Beam – I assume that it’s got enough 3D hardware and such to do the projection.
The problem, as I mention in another comment, is that if you do any kind of 3D projection of a virtual monitor, you have to “spend” resolution from the physical monitor on it to get the virtual monitor enough lower-resolution that it still looks good, and I don’t want to give up the resolution.
Like, there are physically 1080p, 1920x1080 OLED displays in front of each eye on these.
My laptop monitor, right now, is 2560x1600. So even from the start, I spend resolution just to get down to the resolution of the displays in the physical HMD.
Then I’m projecting a virtual monitor on that. You could argue what a reasonable virtual-to-physical ratio is, but it’s gotta be less than 1.
The virtual display might be big in terms of visual arc, use a lot of my optical receptors. But end of the day, I want to shovel a lot of data into those optical receptors.
Maybe if someone has really blurry vision or something like that, can’t see at anything like the kind of laptop screen resolution that I’m describing, it’d be less of an issue. But I’m not there (yet!).
EDIT:
The screen was too dark in bright rooms
At least one of the current models that XReal has out has three levels of cycleable opacity on the display – IIRC it’s a “premium” feature on the high-end model, with a lower-end model that can’t do variable opacity. IIRC there’s a button on the body of the glasses or something. I don’t know if the specific ones that that guy tested was the this model, but if not, they do make a model that can.
Right, I have a 1600p laptop screen as well and the resolution downgrade was noticeable. What you say about the projection makes sense, unfortunately I haven’t seen any specs for the micro OLED displays they use, they only claim that the virtual screen has 1080p, which might be achievable if the displays DO in fact have a higher vertical resolution. It DOES appear that they’ve increased the size of the displays from 0.55" to 0.68" but there’s no information on the native resolution that I can find.
If I saw these glasses in a store somewhere I’d probably try them out but they’d have to be VASTLY better than the ones I tried to convince me to buy them.
I think that some of the issue here is that the theoretical use case that these are designed around is not what the author is trying to use them for.
The author is looking for a monitor replacement.
These are augmented reality goggles. Like, the hardware is optimized to look at the world around yourself and then display useful information annotated over it, for which resolution is not critical. If we had data sources and software for that, that might be useful too, but right now, we don’t really have that software library and data sources.
I think that Snow Crash did a good job of highlighting some of the neat potential of and yet also issues with AR:
Putting a rubber-band on brightness:
A black car, alive with nasty lights, whines past her the other way, closing in on the hapless Hiro Protagonist. Her RadiKS Knight Vision goggles darken strategically to cut the noxious glaring of same, her pupils feel safe to remain wide open, scanning the road for signs of movement.
Highlighting hazards in low-light conditions using sensor fusion can be useful (current high-end US military NVGs do some of this):
He turns off his view of the Metaverse entirely, making the goggles totally transparent. Then he switches his system into full gargoyle mode: enhanced visible light with false-color infrared, plus millimeter-wave radar. His view of the world goes into grainy black and white, much brighter than it was before. Here and there, certain objects glow fuzzily in pink or red. This comes from the infrared, and it means that these things are warm or hot; people are pink, engines and fires are red.
The millimeter-wave radar stuff is superimposed much more cleanly and crisply in neon green. Anything made of metal shows up. Hiro is now navigating down a grainy, charcoal-gray avenue of water lined with grainy, light gray pontoon bridges tied up to crisp neon-green barges and ships that glow reddishly from place to place, wherever they are generating heat, It’s not pretty. In fact, it’s so ugly that it probably explains why gargoyles are, in general, so socially retarded. But it’s a lot more useful than the charcoal-on-ebony view he had before.
And it saves his life. As he’s buzzing down a curving, narrow canal, a narrow green parabola appears hanging across the water in front of him, suddenly rising out of the water and snapping into a perfectly straight line at neck level. It’s a piece of piano wire. Hiro ducks under it, waves to the young Chinese men who set the booby trap, and keeps going.
The radar picks out three fuzzy pink individuals holding Chinese AK47s standing by the side of the channel. Hiro cuts into a side channel and avoids them.
Overlaying blueprint data can permit “seeing through walls”:
YOU ARE HERE," he says. His view of the Enterprise’s hull – a gently curved expanse of gray steel – turns into a three-dimensional wire frame drawing, showing him all the guts of the ship on the other side. Down here along the waterline, the Enterprise has a belt of thick antitorpedo armor. It’s not too promising. Farther up, the armor is thinner, and there’s good stuff on the other side of it, actual rooms instead of fuel tanks or ammunition holds.
Hiro chooses a room marked WARDROOM and opens fire. The hull of the Enterprise is surprisingly tough. Reason doesn’t just blow a crater straight through; it takes a few moments for the burst to penetrate. And then all it does is make a hole about six inches across.
A lot of the obvious stuff that one might display in AR goggles doesn’t compete well with just showing reality in terms of usefuless:
He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the same time, a yellow sputtering light overrides the loglo. A screaming red display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?
Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire. All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts. The Enforcer has given up on bullets and whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro’s goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN).
He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.
