Oculus Rift

[Guest]

I was in John Lewis yesterday shopping for a new telly and managed to get a demonstration of an Oculus Rift.

Now... I don't know about you but I develop with two large 20"+ 1080 monitors and that's still not enough: if you want to view the timeline, properties and content of a Captivate slide, and have, say, the script/storyboard visible at the same time and probably Photoshop too, then there just isn't enough space. More and bigger monitors would be very expensive.

Oculus Rift allows a "virtual desktop", and my understanding is that the size and resolution of this is dependent upon the output of your graphics card; and some of the top-of-the-range gaming cards I found online have resolutions in excess of 4000px high. That would mean that you basically have a huge desktop in front of you, with space for everything.

Oculus Rift price in UK is around £550. Top graphics cards seem to be about £200-£300.

Discuss?

[StevePixel]

Hi Neil,

Interesting suggestions but it is years away from being practical for everyday use. What you see on VR like Oculous is two stereoscopic images, basically two images offset slightly to give it that 3D feel. You can't just plug your computer into the OR headset and see your desktop live, ( it would be super cool if you could though). The images you see are recorded using two cameras then aligned and rendered in a stereoscopic workflow. that is why gaming will be the first beneficiary of VR technology. Oculous just gives you a way to view the VR images. 

Someday, VR,along with augmented visuals will replace the screen but not for a decade or so in my opinion.  

Cheers

Steve

[Guest]

It seems you can

Virtual Desktop on Steam

[StevePixel]

Interesting.. I was unaware of this program. Thanks for sharing it. 

Not really VR though and a pretty limited software options. In my mind, practical VR is much more like the screens in "Minority Report: this  just mirrors your screen in Z Space and allows you to shift left or right of it and I don't see any support for business applications.  I still think VR is pretty impractical currently,  given that you have to wear a bulky headset and can't really manipulate objects any differently than you can on-screen currently. I can see an interest for this in the game space though,  which they are targeting.

Virtual Desktop is an application developed for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that lets you use your computer in VR. You can browse the web, watch movies, Netflix or even play games on a giant virtual screen.

Cheers

Steve

[BDuckWorks]

It might not hurt to put in a feature request, apparently Adobe is already working on a VR interface to Premiere:

#CloverVR. Adobe MAX 2016 (Sneak Peeks) | Adobe Creative Cloud - YouTube

I've been waiting decades for these type of 3D desktop interfaces to materialize, after QTVR, Project X/Hotsauce, Project Xanadu, Xanadu.com, etc. it's made me a bit skeptical, but the technology may actually catch up for us.

I just wouldn't expect Minority Report, yet.

The Virtual Desktop is a next step, but it hasn't evolved the design of a 2-D desktop, but if we could get a video card that had that as a built-in mode, I'm in!

[Guest]

The guy in the clip appears to be editing vr video. I guess what I want to do is edit 2D stuff using VR. Slightly different. My idea is simply to allow the use of a HUGE (virtual) 2D monitor to allow me to do the same stuff I'm doing now, only more easily.