“My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere”
Man, I guess I’ve been fooled using laptops this entire time. IM SO STUPID
He addresses this by saying a laptop doesn’t allow you to replace components, doesn’t have mechanical keyboard and there’s no ultra wide support.
The funny thing is, this device he’s using doesn’t allow you to replace components either. And there are 21:9 laptops and mechanical keyboards available.
Seemed like he’s trying to reverse-engineer his way into justifying a use case for it, but just failed.
I read that as well, and it addresses none of that. Also, you can replace components on a lot of laptops, and ALL components on a Framework. This is why they are so sought after.
Whoever wrote this is making a bad faith argument and throwing an ignorant assertion out to serve a specific purpose, which…is not stated 🤣
Yeah, you can swap more on a framework laptop than the mini PC he’s using.
However glasses, a mini PC, keyboard and battery is smaller than a laptop. Using whatever keyboard you want instead of what came with the laptop for forever is also nice.
However glasses, a mini PC, keyboard and battery is smaller than a laptop.
It relaxes the X and Y dimensions — no screen. But it might take up more volume, depending upon the configuration. Like, laptops use flat keycaps and scissor switch keys to save space. He’s using a keyboard with traditional, full-height keys and regular keyswitches. That alone is a not insignificant amount of volume.
EDIT: I have a split-ergo keyboard with standard full-size keyswitches that fits into a folding case, one half on each side. If I were going to carry an external mechanical key keyboard with a portable PC, that’s probably what I’d use. Split ergo keyboards are expensive, though, so not as cost-effective as a standard one-piece mechanical key keyboard. !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world
Ha! I have mechanical keyboards subbed and split keyboards subbed. Didn’t know of ergomechkeyboards. Thanks!
I mean if it did multiple virtual monitors the way vr headsets can I could see this being worth it…
Yeah they make laptop monitors but no ones gonna carry two 24" panels and a 30" ultrawide in their pocket.
It might be able to do that.
From memory, those Xreal glasses have this optional doohickey called a Beam that you can plug them into. If you have that, it can “project” a monitor into reality, not have it move with your head. So they can do the projection bit. Like, they aren’t just dumb HMDs that throw an image in front of your eyes. They’re AR, so like VR goggles, they do headtracking and such, but they’re intended to have you view a mix of the real world and the virtual projected elements.
The problem is that if you’re rendering a virtual image of a screen on a screen, you need to have the physical screen be significantly-higher-resolution to look right — you have to throw away some of your resolution on this. True of VR or AR googles. I’d think that the first practical monitor replacement HMD is gonna avoid doing any 3D projection of virtual monitors.
EDIT: Yeah, those goggles can do it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Xreal/comments/182wwxb/can_i_use_3_virtual_monitors_and_2_physical/
I do this with 4. I have 3 floating ones above and then look at the regular monitor thru the lenses. I also do this when watching TV and working in bed. I rest my head against the headboard looking up at the floating windows and straightforward when looking at the tv.
Oh no I’m aware of the resolution limitations as a first gen vive owner. That being said from what I’ve heard some of the newer high DPI devices handle this a lot better.
It’ll be a while but I think it will eventually have a practical use case as a portable workstation monitor.
That being said from what I’ve heard some of the newer high DPI devices handle this a lot better.
I mean, you can get higher-resolution ones, but they aren’t as high resolution as even the monitors that you’d virtualize. Like:
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First, the guy is using glasses that are really designed for augmented reality, not as a monitor replacement. They’re not optimizing for this use case.
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We aren’t yet at the point where traditional displays are really even maxed out in terms of usable resolution, and as things stand, HMDs have lower resolution.
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If someone wants that “virtual projection” thing, HMDs have to be even higher-resolution than that.
One good thing about these AR goggles compared to trying to use VR goggles for this is that the AR goggles are spending the physical pixels they do display in the center of your visual field, as opposed to way off in the periphery. VR goggles need to have a really high field of view to provide immersiveness and let you see things in the corner of your eye, but for working with text and such, monitor replacement hardware only really needs to put something in the visual arc that you’d actually be viewing a regular monitor in, in the center of your field of vision, a smaller arc. So repurposing these for a desktop replacement is at least using the pixels that are physically-displayed more-efficiently than VR goggles would. That is, the XReal goggles here are at least closer to being optimized to be a “monitor replacement” HMD than VR goggles would be.
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Here, follow this affiliate link to this overpriced portable machine.
You’re not wrong but this is a distinctly different experience. Some these AR glasses allow you to have multiple giant virtual displays instead of the tiny ~14 inch one. Hence the reference to a “desk setup”.
Although I would argue that it would make more sense just to plug the glasses into a laptop.
But also you can use your preferred keyboard and mouse (with more space for the mouse).
The point is that this is a fake assertion to push a product.
Whats a fake assertion? This thing doesn’t need to completely revolutionize the industry or replace existing products completely to be viable and useful for some. I personally think it’s a neat idea even though I have zero use for a portable device outside of my phone. I seriously can’t comprehend why people seem to be getting outraged in the comments here over something that has zero effect on them or their life whether it exists or not.
Lemmy lately has been on an outrage fest it’s getting kind of exhausting. Topics in just about everything I follow are almost all outrage with out critical thinking.
Yeah, I don’t get that either. I assume that they’re thinking that the author must be trying to sell the glasses or something.
I’ve written numerous comments before talking about the challenges and pitfalls of building almost identical portable mini PC systems on here, and people didn’t downvote those. And most of the outraged comments in this thread seem to be asserting that it must be some kind of paid promotion.
Hell, I’ve talked about these same Xreal glasses, among other HMDs.
I can work at my desk using only my laptop. Do I want to, and is it my actual setup? No, and no. My laptop is plugged into my ultra wide screen, my mechanical keyboard and my mouse. That’s what he meant, and that’s what I found interesting.
How is it fake?
Oh look, another Tom’s guide advertorial masking as original content…
I also suspect ArsTechnica of running sponsored AI stories these days.
They’re all doing it. Most tech these days just isn’t exciting enough to attract attention without them hyping it.
I would quite honestly be surprised, they have been vocal in the past about having no such thing.
Anyone who makes a living off of reviews is going to be suspect whether it’s tech journals, youtubers, reddit shills, Amazon reviewers, review sites, etc. This is why I launched my own proprietary review methodology which I’m willing to share with others in my 16-week online course. Sign up with the code BUTTSTUFF for 10% off now!
Have they ever not been?
Before the sale when Igor still wrote for them, Tom’s was pretty well respected as was Anand.
My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere
My laptop easily fits in a backpack. Hell I can fit TWO laptops in my backpack.
And a whole bunch of other shit.
I carry two laptops in my work bag regularly, a 15" and 14"
This article reads like satire… it’s sentence after sentence of “and I did it using one of the [best office chairs]” which is a link to some review by themselves. Every bit mentioned had an affiliate link and there wasn’t an actual review of what the experience (software, setup, visual fidelity) is like??
Welcome to Future plc publications. Almost entirely clickbait advertorial garbage anymore. It’s sad, really.
Makes me wonder what the onboarding/indoctrination process is.
Is anyone there actually happy, or proud of their writing? Are they actually all just marketing people cosplaying as writers, so they are proud?
Darn. I recall reading good articles from some of these publications in the past. Shame…
He has reached douchevana
He needs an actual typewriter instead of a keyboard to go where do douche has gone before.
A guy at work asked if he could use some similar pair of AR glasses at work and was rejected because the companion app for it required to always be running as elevated in windows. Was a solid no there.
Depends the type. Some are essentially just a monitor.
It’s a novel idea. But despite the article’s claims this is not a practical alternative to a laptop in planes, coffee shops, etc. Nor is a minipc inherently more serviceable than a laptop as others have pointed out.
For traveling, if it’s a longer trip, it almost makes sense to me as you’d have it set up for a while. Though I’d do a mini ITX system. The ones with external power supplies and no drive bays or expansion slots are pretty small. But even then, I don’t feel like this would be significantly better than a laptop. And that’s a lot to buy for a niche use case.
Edit: spelling and grammar
At this point, something like a steam deck would go better with the glasses, at least it has its own battery
I’ve looked at this before and I agree that mini-ITX is probably the most realistic. You want to look hard for a small mini-ITX case. Though even that isn’t that small. I think that you could maybe save some space — the mini-ITX power supply pushes the case size out in one dimension, so there’s probably some unused internal volume – if you could stick components, like the HMD, into part of what would normally be airspace interior to the case.
You wouldn’t use a typical SFX power supply for something where size matters; you’d likely use a Flex PSU, which are often long and thin. If you got a lower-power CPU with integrated graphics, you could manage a case that’s not much bigger than the motherboard or much thicker than the IO shroud.
Lemmy doesn’t have a lot of SFF or Ultra SFF content yet, but getting the most out of limited space is definitely a thing people are into, and they can get quite creative.
The final product is often portable but still rarely as tiny as a mini PC or NUC-like. Depending on your needs, someone might be better off making a Steam Brick.
I can fit my PC in a backpack. It’s got a mini-ITX motherboard, SFX power supply, 240mm AIO water cooler, and an RX 9070 XT in a Lian Li A4-H2O case.
I went to the trouble of building it small mainly because of the possibility that I decide to flee the US. Thanks, Trump. 😡
I think you have my pc build, except a 9070 XT for a 6800 XT. But the case is huge, I don’t see how it fits in anyone’s backpack.
Maybe you’re thinking of some other case? Mine is a little under 13"x10"x6", about the size of a (large) shoebox:
Granted, not a whole lot else would fit in a backpack along with it, but I’m quite confident it would fit. A stack of three or four textbooks would be bigger.
I was looking at mini-ITX cases for exactly this purpose a while back — wanted sturdy and small for portable use, something that could go in a backpack or suitcase or the like.
I remember seeing the Velka and one other whose name escapes me right now.
https://velkase.com/products/velka-3
184 x 99 x 219 mm
7.2 x 3.9 x 8.6 in
Wait I saw this on the game Heavy Rain.
All this trouble just to be able to use a nosy keyboard and covertly watch porn in public.
I’ve thought about doing this too, with a very similar setup.
Larger FOV for your screen than anything else portable. Potentially more power efficient too, as you don’t blast light everywhere to get a tiny bit into an eye. Can be used in very bright conditions, like outdoors on a bright summer day, without issues. More comfortable to use in some other orientations — I use a split ergo keyboard with my laptop when lying back in a recliner or on a couch, lets my hands not be jammed in front of me and obstructing my views of the screen, but an HMD is even more flexible.
Laptops have limited hardware customizability, so it’s really the only route other than carrying a portable display if you want more control over the PC hardware. Want a 100Wh battery or larger? Non-soldered memory and more of it? More expansion ports or storage slots? Moving the hot-and-noisy stuff beneath the table instead of beneath your hands? For the form factor: have airflow vents that aren’t on the bottom and covered up when on a lap (ironically, “laptop”), chest, couch, or bed? If you’re a woman and want to use the thing on your belly while lying down, not having your breasts in between your eyes and the screen? For anyone, not having their hands in the way?
Laptops have a lot of limitations as to input devices. Do you want a Trackpoint? You’re limited to a very few models of laptop. Trackball? Few laptops and it has to be very small. A trackpad with three physical buttons? Very few laptops on offer make that an option. Particular about your keyboard layout? If you’re getting external hardware, there’s a cornucopia of options, and you can mix and match as you’d like. Yeah, you can also do this with laptops and a stand and a docking station and external hardware, if you’re aiming for use at a particular desk, but that’s not really suitable for a couch, say.
The privacy is nice – and I don’t think that that reasonably can be reduced to looking at porn, which I assume most people aren’t going to want to do in public anyway, for obvious reasons. I can throw a password list up onscreen, don’t need to deal with those inane “hide your password as you type it” things that try to mitigate privacy issues with people using computers in public places.
Problem is that at least today, wearing HMDs is not as comfortable and sharp as looking at a display. Easy to get something slightly blurry if it’s not perfectly aligned. My HMD tends to fog up, though the Xreal thing in the article has more airflow and it’s probably less of an issue. Also, VR goggles and headphones tend to compete for the same spot around the ears — circumaural headphones need to seal there, so you may need to accept whatever sound, if any, the HMD can provide. You have less awareness of your surroundings, which matters in some situations.
A lot of work has gone into making laptops particularly low power, and if you build your own system, some of that is on you, to pay attention to component power consumption.
Also, I couldn’t find a way to get some kind of external battery to be treated by Linux as a
power_supplyclass device, which lets Linux do things like automatically hibernate when power gets critical and use nice in-UI reporting of low battery. On the power source side, USB PD power banks, which it would seem would be a good solution, technically have the ability to report a battery level but AFAICT do not actually do this, or even present themselves as visible devices on the USB tree. You could probably work something up yourself with a modular battery bank — at the very least, even if Linux can’t use it as apower_supplydevice, NUT can be rigged up to treat some hardware that you can put on a modular battery bank as a UPS, which accomplishes some of the same stuff, like auto-shutdown. And a modular battery bank is pretty user-configurable. But…that’s not necessarily all that portable.I would definitely do this instead of a laptop if they managed to get HMDs to the point where I’d be willing to dump my displays and go all HMDs. We aren’t there yet, though.
The only thing that really attracts me about these glasses is that you could hold your head up instead of looking down all the time at a laptop or a portable monitor. But most of the time I need more than one display, while the glasses only offer a single, expensive, fairly low resolution screen. I also wonder what it does to your eyes to use this for long periods of time.
I tried a previous incarnation of these and was not impressed. The screen was too dark in bright rooms and the resolution and image sharpness was lacking. Also the response time was rather slow, which made them basically unusable for playing games or watching (which was primarily what I bought them for). Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use. I ended up returning them after a week.
It appears as if these are at least the second, if not third generation (mine were simply called Air), and the spatial processing chip might help alleviate some of these issues, but I’m disappointed to see that the vertical resolution has not been increased. But at 32:9, it seems that these have twice the horizontal resolution, which would equal two 16:9 screens next to each other.
I wonder if these might be worth giving another try, but I’m loathe to risk it as my Amazon account has been flagged for returning too many purchases before.
Additionally, the virtual screen was not fixed in space but moved around when you moved your head, which gave me vertigo after prolonged use.
The current version of these glasses have this optional device that they sell that provides this fixed-in-real-space projected screen called a Beam – I assume that it’s got enough 3D hardware and such to do the projection.
The problem, as I mention in another comment, is that if you do any kind of 3D projection of a virtual monitor, you have to “spend” resolution from the physical monitor on it to get the virtual monitor enough lower-resolution that it still looks good, and I don’t want to give up the resolution.
Like, there are physically 1080p, 1920x1080 OLED displays in front of each eye on these.
My laptop monitor, right now, is 2560x1600. So even from the start, I spend resolution just to get down to the resolution of the displays in the physical HMD.
Then I’m projecting a virtual monitor on that. You could argue what a reasonable virtual-to-physical ratio is, but it’s gotta be less than 1.
The virtual display might be big in terms of visual arc, use a lot of my optical receptors. But end of the day, I want to shovel a lot of data into those optical receptors.
Maybe if someone has really blurry vision or something like that, can’t see at anything like the kind of laptop screen resolution that I’m describing, it’d be less of an issue. But I’m not there (yet!).
EDIT:
The screen was too dark in bright rooms
At least one of the current models that XReal has out has three levels of cycleable opacity on the display – IIRC it’s a “premium” feature on the high-end model, with a lower-end model that can’t do variable opacity. IIRC there’s a button on the body of the glasses or something. I don’t know if the specific ones that that guy tested was the this model, but if not, they do make a model that can.
Right, I have a 1600p laptop screen as well and the resolution downgrade was noticeable. What you say about the projection makes sense, unfortunately I haven’t seen any specs for the micro OLED displays they use, they only claim that the virtual screen has 1080p, which might be achievable if the displays DO in fact have a higher vertical resolution. It DOES appear that they’ve increased the size of the displays from 0.55" to 0.68" but there’s no information on the native resolution that I can find.
If I saw these glasses in a store somewhere I’d probably try them out but they’d have to be VASTLY better than the ones I tried to convince me to buy them.
I think that some of the issue here is that the theoretical use case that these are designed around is not what the author is trying to use them for.
The author is looking for a monitor replacement.
These are augmented reality goggles. Like, the hardware is optimized to look at the world around yourself and then display useful information annotated over it, for which resolution is not critical. If we had data sources and software for that, that might be useful too, but right now, we don’t really have that software library and data sources.
I think that Snow Crash did a good job of highlighting some of the neat potential of and yet also issues with AR:
Putting a rubber-band on brightness:
A black car, alive with nasty lights, whines past her the other way, closing in on the hapless Hiro Protagonist. Her RadiKS Knight Vision goggles darken strategically to cut the noxious glaring of same, her pupils feel safe to remain wide open, scanning the road for signs of movement.
Highlighting hazards in low-light conditions using sensor fusion can be useful (current high-end US military NVGs do some of this):
He turns off his view of the Metaverse entirely, making the goggles totally transparent. Then he switches his system into full gargoyle mode: enhanced visible light with false-color infrared, plus millimeter-wave radar. His view of the world goes into grainy black and white, much brighter than it was before. Here and there, certain objects glow fuzzily in pink or red. This comes from the infrared, and it means that these things are warm or hot; people are pink, engines and fires are red.
The millimeter-wave radar stuff is superimposed much more cleanly and crisply in neon green. Anything made of metal shows up. Hiro is now navigating down a grainy, charcoal-gray avenue of water lined with grainy, light gray pontoon bridges tied up to crisp neon-green barges and ships that glow reddishly from place to place, wherever they are generating heat, It’s not pretty. In fact, it’s so ugly that it probably explains why gargoyles are, in general, so socially retarded. But it’s a lot more useful than the charcoal-on-ebony view he had before.
And it saves his life. As he’s buzzing down a curving, narrow canal, a narrow green parabola appears hanging across the water in front of him, suddenly rising out of the water and snapping into a perfectly straight line at neck level. It’s a piece of piano wire. Hiro ducks under it, waves to the young Chinese men who set the booby trap, and keeps going.
The radar picks out three fuzzy pink individuals holding Chinese AK47s standing by the side of the channel. Hiro cuts into a side channel and avoids them.
Overlaying blueprint data can permit “seeing through walls”:
YOU ARE HERE," he says. His view of the Enterprise’s hull – a gently curved expanse of gray steel – turns into a three-dimensional wire frame drawing, showing him all the guts of the ship on the other side. Down here along the waterline, the Enterprise has a belt of thick antitorpedo armor. It’s not too promising. Farther up, the armor is thinner, and there’s good stuff on the other side of it, actual rooms instead of fuel tanks or ammunition holds.
Hiro chooses a room marked WARDROOM and opens fire. The hull of the Enterprise is surprisingly tough. Reason doesn’t just blow a crater straight through; it takes a few moments for the burst to penetrate. And then all it does is make a hole about six inches across.
A lot of the obvious stuff that one might display in AR goggles doesn’t compete well with just showing reality in terms of usefuless:
He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the same time, a yellow sputtering light overrides the loglo. A screaming red display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?
Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire. All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts. The Enforcer has given up on bullets and whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro’s goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN).
He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.
The author is looking for a monitor replacement.
Yes, and he’s not wrong, as that appears to be the primary use case for these glasses. For full AR, you still need the Beam Pro, which costs half of the price of the glasses alone.
I do love Snow Crash (it was one of my favorite novels growing up), but I think Google Glass was probably much closer to that vision than these are. Personally, all I want is a big fucking screen fixed in space before me that doesn’t make me dizzy when I look at it for more than 5 minutes, or wear out my neck muscles too much because the headset is too heavy.
Really. That’s a bummer. if there is an advantage to the glasses it should be that you can have as many displays going as you’d want.
Much to my surprise, it didn’t take long at all to get used to working while wearing AR glasses.
Could you see yourself spending a full day working with smart glasses instead of using a monitor?
For me at least, that “HMD all day” is the limiting factor. I don’t want to wear an HMD all day. My experience has been that they’re sensitive to being slightly misaligned and going blurry. Traditional displays are nice and crisp.
I think that to be something that I’d want to use, the thing would need to do something like mechanically move the displays or optics internal to the HMD to keep it at a very precise, calibrated position relative to my eyeball, so that I don’t need to futz with not having my movements slightly misalign the HMD.
In 2025, we don’t have an HMD that can do that.
EDIT: Also, this doesn’t matter much if you’re watching a movie or something. Not visible then. But it’s a visible issue if you’re working with text or the like, if you want to full-on replace your display.
The quest 3 stays sharp when alignment changes, its surprisingly nice to work in outside of the brick on my face. I would hope the xreal glasses can match quest 3 clarity
I own a pair of these. Depending on the game, they add a lot of value to my Steamdeck. But for everyday computing, they are actually very impractical.
I imagine it would be really annoying to set up after taking it out of a backpack. I think it would be much more practical to just use a laptop with the xreal glasses
It’s longer than a laptop, but honestly, I have my laptop set up to hibernate if I have it closed for more than ten minutes or so, and it takes several seconds to get that dehibernated, even off NVMe, and some of that is happening in parallel. My last laptop was a lot slower, took something north of ten seconds to get dehibernated. He’s gotta drop a keyboard on his desk, unzip his HMD case, and plug each in (if he’s not using a wireless keyboard or the wireless accessory for that HMD, neither of which I would personally use). Some of that at least can be parallelized. And that HMD has integrated headphones, IIRC — I carry headphones with me for my laptop, so he doesn’t need to do that bit.
EDIT: Oh, and his trackball/trackpad/mouse or whatever. I carry a trackball with my laptop, but don’t usually use it.
Or, and hear me out, I could just carry a single device with a charging cable that weighs less than 5lbs that does all of that without all of the cables and BS associated with trying to be a tech edgelord for clicks. Hell, if that device is a Framework is will probably be way more repairable than that mini PC and probably super fragile AR glasses as well.
I’m pretty sure that the Xreal glasses have a carrying case, based on when I was looking at them. I carry a pair of headphones with my laptop, and they come with one. Does require some volume in a backpack or bag, though.
