Productivity in VR
So awhile back, Zuck said that he sees the upcoming Cambria headset to compete against chromebooks. As a designer, I've never considered a chromebook to be a true productivity tool, as traditional design suites have never been web-based.
Recently though, my team has been transitioning to a design suite called Figma, which is a really remarkable piece of software, and it runs straight out of a browser. So I realized this week, that I could theoretically switch to a chromebook now... or potentially a VR headset.
So I'm experimenting with getting an actual work setup up and running in my Quest 2 headset. Of course this isn't going to be an ideal work solution, but I want to see how close I can get it, and how large the delta is until we get something really great for productivity.
The Quest 2 has a web browser built in. And it's a reasonably decent browser. And you can multi-task 3 browser windows side-by-side, like a 3-monitor workstation. You can change the sizes or aspect ratios of the each of the browsers, and you can make them very large if you want. It won't let you position them wherever you want though.
First I booted up Figma in the browser in my Quest 2, just to see if it would even load. Sure enough, it seems to load fine. So I'm simulating my typical workspace. I've got my design software in the middle browser, youtube playing music in a small window on the left side, and requirements documentation in the right-side browser. I've set the background to "pass-through", so I can see my real environment around me (although it's black-and-white and fuzzy)... so I can see my desk, and my hands, and 3 big monitors floating in the air. It's a pretty amazing vision of the future of computing really... that your computer could be a slim set of goggles you wear, and a mouse & keyboard. WAAAY better than a laptop, because you're not constrained to a tiny screen.
Ok, so let's talk about the delta between my current Quest2 setup and where it needs to get to actually be worth working on.
- Headset needs to be slimmer, lighter, more comfortable. Duh. Cambria is supposed to be a big improvement in those areas.
- HD color passthrough will be a MASSIVE improvement. To be able to see your environment clearly.
- Quest2 screen resolution is... nearly fine, but not good enough. Honestly it's closer than I expected though. I think another 50% resolution will be plenty. Until then, you kindof have to make your screens EXTRA big, to compensate for the low resolution. (I think Cambria screens are ~10% higher res... so we'll see how close that gets)
- Mouse support on Quest is... kindof bad. Seems to work intermittently, and cut out other times. Also the mousewheel doesn't work well for scrolling. Very intermittent. They really need to improve mouse support. I know it seems funny for me to say that mouse support is an important feature for a VR headset, but for productivity it really is.
- My design software (Figma) still runs a bit choppy, although it's close to good-enough. I expect a bit more cpu/gpu power would fix that.
- Need to have better options for positioning screens, running more screens, make it easy to arrange my work setup however I want.
Anyways, you can see that we're not quite there yet, but actually the gaps are not that big. Actually I think there's a reasonable chance that Cambria might actually be really great for productivity, for people who's work tools already work in a browser-based (chromebook) environment. Especially if they include support for Android apps too.
Honestly, I think if Cambria nails the 2D laptop/chromebook productivity use case, it's going to be WAAAAY more successful than people expect. It'll be the biggest tech product of recent history. And that's not even including any of it's potential for 3d stuffs.