Working in VR with Immersed — Week 1
--
I got an Oculus Quest 2, the Virtual Reality (or VR) headset, for Christmas. I wanted one for three reasons.
- Video games
- Fitness “games”
- VR workspaces
Let me start by saying that I’m loving this thing. The games are fun, the fitness makes exercise more manageable, especially for someone like me who doesn’t get a whole lot of exercise to begin with! There there is working in VR. Let’s dive into that experience.
To begin I’d like to talk about why I’m trying to bring my daily work into VR, and what I’ve enjoyed about it so far. By day I am a software engineer. I write code. Although being head down with a code editor isn’t all there is to the job, it’s a big part of it, and a lot of times uninterrupted focus is needed to solve tough problems.
Like many folks I work 100% remote, and at times achieving focus can be difficult. VR workspace tools like the one I’ll be talking about here, Immersed, claim to improve productivity through improved focus.
To begin I installed Immersed per the instructions on their site. This process is pretty painless. Install the agent on your computer and install the app on the Oculus. Once I opened the application I was presented with a short tutorial on how the basics of Immersed work. After this I found myself in a super cool virtual space, with my real-world monitor projected in 3D!
From here I started fiddling with adding monitors of various sizes and orientations. In the end I settled on 3 screens (my main + 2 virtual screens). You can have 5, but I stopped at 3 because of two reasons…
- I found that positioning two more screens put them in places that made my neck hurt when looking at them for too long
- I also found that, at the time of this writing, I had weird glitches with more than 3.
So, 3 screens it is. From here I started to do a little work. I open my terminal window and some code. The clarity is good, and as long as my 5Ghz WiFi signal is strong the latency is low. On occasion I did experience high lag and…
