Yes, but why? What is the limiting factor here, because from my perspective it's only missing a few small things on each platform that would solve it.
I'd be honestly happy with my Rift as-is if they bumped up the resolution a bit, and had some way to see the real world with the headset on (even camera passthrough is fine!).
I've used virtual desktop apps in the Rift, and they aren't bad to use, and playing games like tabletop simulator is so intuitive and nice that I'm floored tht this hasn't been tried commercially yet.
I assume there are some pretty significant hurtles that I'm missing, or maybe the market is still hilariously small at this point, but it just seems so close!
I'm used to a 14" laptop + 21" monitor (resolution doesn't matter), which together occupy maybe 20% of my field of view while using them. If I could take the same quantity of information and arrange it arbitrarily in my environment, eliminating the need for any monitors, it would be a win even if the text had to be larger.
You'd need to move your head a lot to look at stuff. Gets old quickly. Try out the VR desktop on oculus and you'll quickly discover the need for much more dense pixels.
4-16x is an exaggeration. I've tried headsets that are 2x higher resolution than the Rift (i.e. 2k x 2k per eye), and I could view text the same size as my monitor renders.
No doubt 4-16x resolution would be nice, though. True "retina" screens are still at least a decade away.
But would it need to be a true "retina" screen? The Hololens has cameras that track where your eyes are focused, so the laser image could have a "fovea" that moves with your eye movements so as to retain a high focus region just at the spot you're looking at.
For Oculus to be useful as a traditional display it would probably need a higher resolution(i.e 8k per eye), it needs to be wireless, lightweight and possibly use the camera to blend-in the outside environment so that you don't feel trapped in Matrix while you work. It would probably take 5+ years to get there
But we have the tech to do that right now! Maybe 8k per eye is outside our current capabilities without being ludicrously expensive, but 4k should be doable!
Feature parity. Having one interface that is trying to keep up with and surpass basically all others, is just setting up something that will take a long time to succeed.
Note,I am not claiming it won't succeed. Just that it will take a long time.
I'd be honestly happy with my Rift as-is if they bumped up the resolution a bit, and had some way to see the real world with the headset on (even camera passthrough is fine!).
I've used virtual desktop apps in the Rift, and they aren't bad to use, and playing games like tabletop simulator is so intuitive and nice that I'm floored tht this hasn't been tried commercially yet.
I assume there are some pretty significant hurtles that I'm missing, or maybe the market is still hilariously small at this point, but it just seems so close!