I'd advice you to skip another generation. I can give my experience with it.
I have Q3 and try to use it for work from time to time and it is still not enough to replace an actual monitor, at least for me.
FOV of 110 degress is too narrow, maybe 140 degress would solve it, but I'm not sure. The thing is that apparently I glance to content without turning my head a lot and I discovered it when I tried to use Q3 for actual work. Even though the lenses and POV are much better than on Q2 and other wired VR glasses it's not enough for me still. Also sometimes reflections in the lenses are too bright and distracting and I don't know how to fix this.
Resolution is much much better than Q2 and Quest S that I also have, but it's still not enough. And IPS panel is the biggest downside of it. That should've use OLED instead.
But the main problem that stops me from using it is the smoothness of the whole process of starting to work. You can't just sit behind you desk, put on the glasses and start working. The whole process reminds me of preflight preparation: you need to ensure that the software is running and correctly setup on you PC and that's not always the case. You always need to ensure that you have controllers by your side, because hand tracking often fails, and Q3 often struggles to find my hands at all. Basically, software wise it's not there for a 100% smooth ride like with screens where you just sit at your desk and start to work without a single hitch.
In short, it's like a death by thousand cuts. Some people can tolerate some of them and can use Q3 for work, but in my case I wasn't able to tolerate any of them and that kills it for me for now. I hope for Q4 or maybe Quest Pro 2 after seeing a slim prototype that Mark showed some time ago.
>You can't just sit behind you desk, put on the glasses and start working.
I just sit behind my desk, put on the glasses and start working.
Maybe you’re not aware of the feature that both Meta Remote Desktop and Virtual Desktop offer, to auto-connect when the headset is put on. No friction.
OTOH, VD only permits 1 virtual display, and Meta RD offers 3x1080p ones, but both options are plenty sharp to work on.
The free Desktop+ overlay for SteamVR, however provides unlimited virtual displays of any resolution. That’s what I prefer, but it doesn’t have the auto-connect feature like the other 2.
Not sure what you think you need hand tracking for, I use my keyboard and mouse like I do without the headset.
I've tried to use Meta Remote Desktop and it's full of bugs, e.g. it just can't keep being authenticated with my Meta account, so I can't use it at all, even though one of last updates mentioned the fix for this particular bug. I've also tried Virtual Desktop and it can't remember my Meta Quest username between restarts so I must always remember to enter the username.
Regarding hand tracking it's just more comfortable for me to use my hands to control MQ interface without looking for controllers every time I need to do something in VR.
It might work for your specific circumstances or maybe you're more tolerant to it's issues but as a whole it doesn't work for me at the moment. I've seen a few reviews of AVP and it seems to tick more boxes for me than MQ. But the problem right now are the price and Apple-only ecosystem, i.e. there's no way to use virtual desktops with non-Mac computers.
The thing is that the current state of VR regarding work inside it is still mostly for enthusiasts who are willing to tolerate early-adopters' issues and I'm not one of them. I need it to work flawlessly like a regular setup with a monitor.
> it just can't keep being authenticated with my Meta account. Virtual Desktop … can't remember my Meta Quest username … I must always remember to enter the username.
That would be a really rough experience, I’m sorry to hear that’s happening to you. I haven’t had to enter my username since the first time I launched either app, over a month ago.
I also use hand tracking to adjust the screens, but stick to keyboard and mouse for all my work on said virtual displays.
Thankfully the auto-connect feature works smoothly for me, so adjusting the position of displays is the only time I need to use the hand tracking.
Thanks! I really appreciate your insights on this. I do enjoy the Q2 for entertainment and I use it a lot in that context, since I enjoy this as is, I feel like I can at least skip a generation since the work-part isn't there.
Incidentally it seems like the apple set does a much better job of this if you are in the apple ecosystem, but at such a high cost and limit on the entertainment options, at least for now.
$120k is also an underestimate given that the top tax bracket in the UK is only 45%. If you apply that, you get $132k (Still an underestimate). $132k is roughly in the same ballpark as $155k.
It's not like the difference between the same income in the US and UK is 50%, and even if you were on $120k USD net that's the same as the median gross income of a SWE in the US.
I don't understand where "not that much" is coming from.
It's coming from housing prices in London and SF. Also energy prices in the UK the last few years grew considerably. I agree it's a lot of money, but given how much it costs to buy a house or an apartment in London and SF I'd say it's not that much if you want to retire early. I used London and SF in these examples because it's hard to find jobs with that much compensation outside them. And this is all without considering kids. You'll probably want them to have a good education and not struggle all their life from student loan debt so you better save some of your income for them.
It's amusing to watch you bash around numbers and percentages and yet not understand cost of living differences especially with the energy crisis currently in the UK
I don't get what you mean. SF CoL is definitely higher than UK CoL (Even London).
At that kind of income CoL also doesn't mean that much unless your lifestyle matches your income (I.e. lifestyle inflation). The energy crisis should not significantly affect people with top 1% income.
The culture around our current set of movies very very very likely wouldn't exist without for profit markets for that IP. Sorry my blood, sweat, tears in making new items isn't "free" for you to take unless I release it as free (which I certainly have in the past). I mean you can steal it obviously because it's an IT product but that doesn't make it moral at least not in my culture.
The current set of movies wouldn't be possible without thousands of years of myths, legends, stories and other fiction that was in public domain when these movies were made. Are you willing to pay countries royalties for their myths and legends.
And that’s the problem: in my opinion it should be illegal. If I pay the full price I own the device from top to bottom including the ability to change every piece of internal firmwares and software. Otherwise it is renting and must be presented as such from the beginning.
It doesn't matter what I buy or not buy. It's a matter of corporations being able to eat the cake and have it too. There's a distinction of ownership and renting and corporations have successfuly twisted the difference in their favor by bribing as much people as their could.
It absolutely does matter. I don’t buy products when I have other choices that don’t meet my desires and then expect the government to do something about it.
There is nothing “democratic” about the US government. It was never designed that way.
The President is not elected by the people. He is elected by the electoral college giving people in less populous states more power than people in more populous states. We saw that in the last election.
The Senate does not represent the people. It represents the states. Every state has two Senators regardless of the population. Again meaning the flyover states have far more voting power than their population would warrant.
The judiciary is appointed by the President who isn’t elected by the people and decided by the Senate who doesn’t represent the people and have lifetime appointments.
The only part of the US government that is nominally “democratic” is the House and they are the least powerful part of the government and even they don’t represent the will of the people because of gerrymandering.
So put all of that together, the less power the government has the better.
Why not just nationalize both Apple and Google so the government can come up with “Five Year Plans” to design the perfect phone? The same government run by politicians who didn’t realize that Zuckerberg didn’t run Twitter last week.
We see with what’s happening with TikTok what happens when corrupt politicians who are more interested in their own agenda gets involved in the free market. This isn’t partisan. The entire political system is corrupt.
My experience is different: I've seen all three Hobbit movies in HFR with 48fps and it was gorgeous whereas interpolation is not even close to what I've seen in the theaters. Cinema is not in FPS count but in camera movements and frame composition. Cheap TV shows and movies look cheap regardless of FPS count.
If you look closely you'll see that your comment doesn't actually contradict or disprove mine. That we as a civilization decided to move the entirety of our cultural output to the house of cards that is the internet is orthogonal to its nature and purpose.
You don't get to arbitrarily decide that now everything on the internet has to be immutable and that no one should have the right to ever delete anything from their servers because "history," or that all personally identifiable information has to be preserved just in case the mobs want to doxx someone in the future.
I'm not saying that it should be illegal to delete anything you want. What I'm saying is that doing so is tantamount to deleting history.
It doesn't matter what was the initial purpose of the internet. What matters is what it has become. The internet is a worldwide (and potentially interplanetary) interconnected public place. You can restrict information all you want but the reality is such that if something went public it's public forever. Every piece of information will be preserved somewhere in the network for as long as the internet exists. It's the reality we leave in.
> What does this even mean?
All of history before the internet is fuzzy. It was easily rewritten by anyone who controlled narrative and sources of information so the actual events or different view points are lost to the history. And as you dig farther into history the fuzzier it becomes. As I said above as long as the internet exists we can obtain different views on events and decide what is most likely happend, what was the reason it happend the way it did, etc. The internet gave us much more different sources of information to preserve history. That's why I said the real history begun with the mass adoption of the internet.
Wouldn't that seem to violate the idea of freedom of speech? What if someone running for public office requests that I "forget" and not share what I know about some bad things they did in the past?
Perhaps it would, but there are plenty of other restrictions on freedom of speech. And this particular law does not apply to news media etc, as far as I understand - just search engines and similar databases.
Sure, of course there are and should be reasonable restrictions (shouting fire in a crowded theater causing immediate danger, for example). But is this a restriction that society should accept? How could you expect to have a functioning democracy if a politician could make people "forget" to stop them from sharing any inconvenient facts about the politician's past actions?
And perhaps I want to make a list of sources where you can search for information about politicians to hold them accountable. If it's not censorship for them to be able to stop me from linking to true things they don't want people to see about them, then what is?
The way I see it, this European law is already quite dangerous and will become more so as tech merges with our brains. People might wake up one day having 'forgotten,' for example that Trump grabbed someone by the pussy, because some court decided so. Similar to how users saw copies of the book 1984 disappear from their Kindles not long ago because Amazon felt like it.
If these specific circumstances are NDAs, classified government information and such, that is completely okay because they require a knowingly signed contract violation of which leads to fines and charges. The problem with RTBF is that there's no such contract, or rather it's implicit.
I'd add that the ritual around vinyl (i.e. manually adjusting tone arm, touching a vinyl and placing it on the platter, etc) is the part that people like the most, not the actual sound. I don't think anyone would be able to discern a new vinyl from a cd in a blind test.
A major reason is that you can't really get away with the crappy loudness war style mastering on vinyl. Just because of that they sound way better than most digital masters.
Well... you can. You just can't make them as loud on the absolute scale. But there's nothing preventing you from compressing your audio to death, then reducing the overall volume before you press it to vinyl. Once people turn up the volume, they still get the compressed audio that was the input of the process.
There's also the well-known effect where the process of recording and playing a vinyl creates dynamic range (as measured by various tools) where there is none. Some vinyls that are known to be from the same master as the CD still get much better scores on http://dr.loudness-war.info/
I thought vinyls needed to be specially mastered to prevent the needle from basically being pushed to the adjacent grove by an amplitude that's too high on the track.
Yes, but that's no barrier to compression, which reduces the dynamic range. Compressed material is all at about the same level. The reason people speak of the "loudness wars" is that after compression, even the parts of the music that would have been quieter are now almost as loud as the peaks.
It's actually quite ironic, I think, that compression has become such a fad only now that we have digital media with their much lower noise floor. We have more dynamic range available, but we're using less of it.
> Yes, but that's no barrier to compression, which reduces the dynamic range. Compressed material is all at about the same level. The reason people speak of the "loudness wars" is that after compression, even the parts of the music that would have been quieter are now almost as loud as the peaks.
The point is that if you want to make a vinyl sound "as loud as possible", you're best off not compressing it, since you can have higher peak volume in one groove if the adjacent groove is quiet. Whereas when mastering a CD, the way to make it "as loud as possible" is just to crush everything up to 0dB.
This doesn't make sense to me. When I say "the parts of the music that would have been quieter", I'm mostly not speaking of softer passages vs. louder ones. I'm referring to the fact that even within the span of a single measure, the original signal will generally have had significant peaks and valleys. I don't think it's possible, given the number of pairs of adjacent grooves on a vinyl record, for a recording engineer to ensure that no two adjacent grooves have peaks at the same moment.
What makes compressed music sound "loud" is that there's some sound present to the ears at full volume, or nearly so, at all times. It's not that it simply has a higher peak level. Indeed, it's the listener who controls the peak level of the sound that reaches their ears, not the recording engineer — they can always turn the volume up or down as they please. The reason compressed music sounds "loud" is that it has a higher average volume than uncompressed music of the same peak level.
> This doesn't make sense to me. When I say "the parts of the music that would have been quieter", I'm mostly not speaking of softer passages vs. louder ones. I'm referring to the fact that even within the span of a single measure, the original signal will generally have had significant peaks and valleys.
I don't think that can be right - sound is a waveform so even the loudest notes will oscillate around zero. "Loudness" would usually be defined as something like root-mean-square amplitude, but if we zoom in to talk about a single note (sine wave) then the peak amplitude and the RMS amplitude are in a direct relationship with each other. On the scale of a whole piece, yes there's a difference between average and peak, but on the scale of one groove to the next - a couple of seconds - I don't think there's any practical difference.
The complaint I've heard about "loudness wars" e.g. Californication is precisely that there are no soft passages - every bar is pushed up to full volume. I'm not aware of anyone talking about the effects of compression on a smaller scope than the couple-of-seconds scale.
> sound is a waveform so even the loudest notes will oscillate around zero
Sure. When I refer to "peaks and valleys" I'm talking about the envelope of the waveform. I think that's standard usage in audio engineering.
I think you should download Audacity or equivalent and look at some waveforms of both uncompressed and compressed music. I think you'll see that there are loudness variations on a much shorter timescale than you expect, and that compression reduces these considerably.
I'm speaking mostly about compression. It's the worst part of the loudness war: we lost dynamic range even though we have technically superior mediums.
This is basically my position; I buy lots of music on vinyl and I hold no illusions that it's "higher quality" or "better fidelity" or that I could tell the difference between a song played off one of my records and the same song played from a CD with my eyes closed.
But I like the rituals around it: taking the album out of the sleeve and looking at the artwork; placing the album on the table and setting it to spin; lowering the needle. I like how I have to purposefully listen to the music - you can't just set up a playlist and walk away, you have to pay attention to the songs and flip over the record once the side is finished, or put the second disc on.
I have Q3 and try to use it for work from time to time and it is still not enough to replace an actual monitor, at least for me.
FOV of 110 degress is too narrow, maybe 140 degress would solve it, but I'm not sure. The thing is that apparently I glance to content without turning my head a lot and I discovered it when I tried to use Q3 for actual work. Even though the lenses and POV are much better than on Q2 and other wired VR glasses it's not enough for me still. Also sometimes reflections in the lenses are too bright and distracting and I don't know how to fix this.
Resolution is much much better than Q2 and Quest S that I also have, but it's still not enough. And IPS panel is the biggest downside of it. That should've use OLED instead.
But the main problem that stops me from using it is the smoothness of the whole process of starting to work. You can't just sit behind you desk, put on the glasses and start working. The whole process reminds me of preflight preparation: you need to ensure that the software is running and correctly setup on you PC and that's not always the case. You always need to ensure that you have controllers by your side, because hand tracking often fails, and Q3 often struggles to find my hands at all. Basically, software wise it's not there for a 100% smooth ride like with screens where you just sit at your desk and start to work without a single hitch.
In short, it's like a death by thousand cuts. Some people can tolerate some of them and can use Q3 for work, but in my case I wasn't able to tolerate any of them and that kills it for me for now. I hope for Q4 or maybe Quest Pro 2 after seeing a slim prototype that Mark showed some time ago.