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  • 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_supply class 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 a power_supply device, 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.

  • Much to my surprise, it didn’t take long at all to get used to working while wearing AR glasses.

    Could you see yourself spending a full day working with smart glasses instead of using a monitor?

    For me at least, that "HMD all day" is the limiting factor. I don't want to wear an HMD all day. My experience has been that they're sensitive to being slightly misaligned and going blurry. Traditional displays are nice and crisp.

    I think that to be something that I'd want to use, the thing would need to do something like mechanically move the displays or optics internal to the HMD to keep it at a very precise, calibrated position relative to my eyeball, so that I don't need to futz with not having my movements slightly misalign the HMD.

    In 2025, we don't have an HMD that can do that.

    EDIT: Also, this doesn't matter much if you're watching a movie or something. Not visible then. But it's a visible issue if you're working with text or the like, if you want to full-on replace your display.

  • 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.

    • Really. That's a bummer. if there is an advantage to the glasses it should be that you can have as many displays going as you'd want.

  • While I've also been interested in similar such systems, the author can accomplish one of his goals --- the mechanical keyboard one --- with a fairly-traditional laptop setup: he needs one of those hybrid laptops that has a screen that can swivel to act as a tablet. Then he just converts it to "tablet" mode and uses it as a monitor, without the keyboard sticking out at him, and he can use whatever keyboard he wants without the laptop keyboard being in the way. Does limit the laptop hardware options, though.

    And doesn't buy him the other stuff that he's gunning for, like more customizable hardware or a screen with a larger FOV or such.

  • Imagine being in a cafeteria with his setup, looking straight up to nowhere, people will think of you as crazy!

    • I originally had that when people started using Bluetooth earpieces with cell phones, and you'd see them talking to the air.

      • Yeaaa, exactly. I seeing people talking in the air and I was confused.

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