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  1. #1
    Chram
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    Considering going VR for WFH

    Hi all, I've been looking into VR headsets for the past few days specifically to integrate with my work laptop and allow me to work in VR.

    Office workspace is currently setup in the living room and kids drive me cray cray.

    I decided I'm going to get an Oculus Quest 2, mostly due to the price, and its primary function being work not gaming (though that will be a bonus).

    Would be nice to be able to pick up my laptop and VR headset and go elsewhere and have no productivity loss. Also adds a level of isolation since you can't see whats going on in the room you're in, if I am working at my desk.

    What I wanted opinions on was software. So far I've looked at:

    • Vspatial - no hand gesture support - has more virtual screens -
    • Immersed - hand gesture support - limited to 4 (free) / 5 (subscription) virtual screens - has keyboard tracking in your VR space.
    • Infinite Office - seems like it isn't actually released yet?

    Anyone have any experience with these applications? Looking for any pros or cons to each of them or any other alternatives I haven't looked at. Any cool features that one has that is missing from the other.

    I liked Immersed the most but I felt like Vspatial had more customization options.

  2. #2
    Black Mage
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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2DFhN0K3aQ

    What about OVR Toolkit? I have not tried it yet, but it seems to have some good reviews

  3. #3
    Resident Moogle
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    Have you done work with VR as a monitor replacement before? If not, it's not a thing I'd particularly advise doing with where most of the headset's screen resolution and sweet-spot focus range are these days. You're stuck having to blow the virtual desktops up to around 50-70" equivalents for comfortable reading, and physically moving your head to look around said desktop, since you have limited peripheral vision, and anything not dead ahead in your vision is a blur anyways with how the headset lens are made.

    That's also ignoring the CPU/GPU overhead of simply running VR in the first place (since you said it's a work laptop), if any of your needed applications are heavy on those as it is.

  4. #4
    Chram
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    I haven't tried it before, good to know about the resolution and virtual screen sizes though.

    Most of my work is not at all CPU intensive, no graphic processing or anything like that. The biggest memory eater on my machine chrome. Well that's not true, if I'm running a job in Talend that is probably the most resource intensive. But chrome has the highest consistent memory usage. I work in mostly salesforce, jira, excel/google sheets, and our developer API site. Some internal applications as well but most just load in the web browser.

    I think it would be most useful to have all the screens up at once because I'm comparing so many different data sources. Right now for physical monitors I've a 32" curved monitor and 40" smart TV on my desk. If I could have a screen for each source I'm comparing that would be ideal. I already have to move my head a fair amount to use my 40" monitor.

    I do appreciate the warning though. I don't expect it to completely replace my 8 hour work day, maybe some day as headsets get lighter and battery life gets longer.

    Also, hadn't seen OVR Toolkit before but it definitely looks worthy of trying out, I'm going to try them all before deciding.

  5. #5
    You wouldn't know that though because you've demonstrably never picked up a book nor educated yourself on the matter. Let me guess, overweight housewife?
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    My husband is a tech director who is wfh atm and has an oculus. He can’t figure out how you are going to handle the keyboard stuff.

    Also warning that thing’s battery dies after like 30 min of not being plugged in.

    Another note is the Occulus (I assume any VR) can cause severe motion sickness. So if you have that as an issue be warned.

    I wish you luck and let us know if you get it working as I am very curious as to how that would work.

  6. #6
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    To further clarify what Kaisha was saying, VR itself is the CPU/GPU hog. I don't know how it is now, but a few years back people were making custom desktops to run VR without lag. A work laptop might not be up to the challenge.

    https://www.systemrequirementslab.co...-quest-2/20359

  7. #7
    Resident Moogle
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    What Byrth said. Hell, opening Oculus on its own basically eats half a gig of VRAM, and I lose more if SteamVR has to open on top of it.

    Oh right, one thing I forgot to mention: Ensure whatever headset you end up grabbing doesn't have god-rays out the ass, or you'll be enjoying that washed out white look on anything with contrasting edges. Eg. The new Vive Pro 2 is reportedly the worst of the worst for it. My old CV1 Rift has it a bit but you hardly notice it in games (since VR games tend to tune their colour output to mitigate it), applications on the other hand....


    The other thing with virtual desktop work spaces is I don't know how any of those would handle KBM input. I expect it'd just be a case of having to grab your VR controller, and then click on a given floating application window to bring that to the forefront as far as Windows is concerned.

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