I enjoy VR. For me, the appeal is immersion wherever you want: rather than having to feel like I’m in a boring or unstimulating environment, VR offers the most comprehensive way to trick yourself into thinking you’re in a dreamy, perfect environment. Why even be sat at a desk? I’m only there for the screens really, and in VR, they’re strapped to my face.
However, I’ve spent a lot of time at my computer, optimising my desktop experience for nerding around. Redesigning and shifting all my patterns and workflows into VR is a tough, but fun and rewarding challenge.
I think the best way to do it currently is using the VR headset and - where necessary - another device as a thin client. Most of my life, my desktop has been my preferred place to do my computing, so initially, I just want to try get that environment in VR.
Key components in my current setup:
- Oculus Quest Pro: great resolution, and pancake lenses give a huge sweetspot for clarity. Earlier lenses need a lot more head movement.
- Immersed VR, for remote desktop, consists of app on Oculus Quest and then clients for Windows/Mac/Linux. Supports multimonitor and passthrough portals to see surroundings.
- raspberry pi running usbip to share USB devices, primarily full keyboard functionality, but also microphones, security keys etc.
Some areas that present the most interesting challenges:
- keyboard/input
- displays/resolution
- physical comfort
- collaboration
2024-01-10 quick notes from google meets call in VR: headset battery issues, died quicker than ideal, and alarmingly small time between low battery warning and poweroff. hand, face and eye tracking okay, but wierd when lost, or when switching to controllers no microphone passthrough on quest and couldn’t get microphone over usbip originally:
This was confusing, as the webcam has a microphone in it, and the webcam worked fine, but camera microphone was showing up, but there was no audio coming through to it.
I managed to fix the issue by switching the device configuration profile to “mono input”, as it was set to “Pro”. Not confirmed if this is the mode I’d normally use when plugged direct into desktop, so I need to test and understand if it’s different, why and what caused it to change.