Lastly! You only need 1 device. So spending $5k+ on a device that could provide a better experience than your TV, iPad, laptop, desktop, monitors, headphones, and everything else would be reasonable.

The way we interact with tech today is a semi-distracted state. There is always some sort of "real world" going on, and we're not immersed. It would take more energy to be fully immersed, but we would be more productive from it. It could make using "old" tech very boring and not worth the time when you could do a much better job, or have a better experience through VR.

And people say "well people watch TV or movies together". Sure, maybe. You're in the same room, but you could both throw on headsets, enter the same virtual room, and "watch" together, whether you are in the same room or not. And it might highlight that there are higher quality forms of recreation than sitting and watching TV together.

In the case of watching TV with another person, the being in the same room together is often the point. Sharing a virtual space makes less sense when you have this option. The form factor of an iPad makes it portable in a way today’s headsets are not, and I can access a desktop computer remotely if I am away on travel. I agree with you about immersion but it’s hard for me to see headsets as anything but another device.

Fair. I’m hoping for a “portable” headset even if it goes into a backpack and may have layers (like an astronaut helmet) where you have transparent for AR and then blackout for full immersion.

At least for something like this, I can't help but think a laptop is better, haha.

Now if we were talking 3d modeling or art, something that would use the spatial input of AR instead of a keyboard, that would be exciting. In fact you could almost do this today if the Hololens had some better productivity apps.

I think the techie fixation with "better desk" as the goal may turn out to be the "faster horses" of VR.

Also, while sitting at a desk with a computer describes a disproportionate amount of our work and personal lives, I'm not sure how well that translates for mass adoption.

The reason is that if you’re working in any realistic room people have in their house you’ll be standing or sitting or laying down. I doubt there Will be a better text only device than the keyboard so you have to be able to reach that. You can go minority report but your arms would get tired pretty quick

Not to mention the separation it would give you working from home / or wherever. You could disengage from your whole work environment by taking off your headset, and have a very minimal tech setup outside that space. It would be a clean transition from work and home. You couldn't text with your phone, have TV in the background, and be in a room with someone at the same time. It would be fully engaged in tech, or not. (I admit there will likely be more opportunity for distraction in the virtual environment, because the friction to add an additional data feed or notification will be low).

And watching sports on the weekend? Throw up all the games on multiple big screens.

After seeing some of the programming environments people have posted here in the last few months I’m becoming more convinced. I’d love to test out a VR work environment where I can sit on a fairly realistic mountain top or in a quiet forest. Still waiting for the cheap and economic version but I’m sure that’s coming eventually.

> have emails look like a stack of papers that you could actually process - pick up, hold, throw in a trashcan

For some reason this is a hilarious image in many ways. Perfect example of imagining the future being a better horse. But it also does sound cool

I enjoyed it too (I’d love to just light my files on fire when I’m not happy with a draft).

But I don’t see “email” going anywhere for a long time. At its core, it is text information and serves as a record of a transaction, usually related to the real world. If we think VR will take us past email, it means setting up a new standard for communication that is somehow better and will have enough network effects to take over from email (e.g. - everyone will need to migrate to VR before abandoning email).

So processing email more effectively is an open problem of VR. VR isn’t going to hook into our brains more than video or audio or text, so I view it as about how someone interacts with that in a VR environment.

So I think the way we process things will matter and could be massively improved. For example, you could have a “workbench” for insurance related items. Where you go and all of the things you were working on and relevant communications are neatly organized and sandboxed. You effectively wouldn’t have to put anything “away”. It would just be sitting there on a desk until you returned to it.

Training for work environments would be amazing - you could copy the environment for your employees and it would be intuitive. Right now companies often give people just a vanilla machine with basic office apps and expect them to find their optimal setup.

I would also join a startup to work on this stuff if someone is interested in B2B VR productivity software.

Or more aptly, a car with reins.

I hear you. But it is also about effectively processing information in that environment.