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I ditched my laptop for a pocketable mini PC and a pair of AR glasses — here’s what happened (www.tomsguide.com)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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:

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.
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.
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.