Thread by @AlexandraErin

Ever since I tweeted about how I keep getting served fitness-themed Oculus ads because they don't know how else to advertise to people who aren't poking into VR stuff that isn't games, all my Twitter ads are just, "Games? Oculus is so much more than games."

And to be clear, this isn't me expressing surprise or feeling creeped out. Twitter is the medium I typed those thoughts into, about the ads Twitter was serving me. It makes sense.

But their "Oculus is not just games" ad is still not addressing my interest, which is practical uses for VR besides game. The ad I'm getting now is some kind of packaged virtual experience from a POV aboard the ISS. Which is cool, I guess. But still largely a novelty.

Like, here's the actual deal: I think I might be getting sick again. There's a cold going around our household. I might be largely bed bound for anywhere between a day and a week.

The existence of consumer VR rigs should be a huge boon in this situation.

But even though it's very extremely unsafe to actually ambulate physically while using a VR rig, almost all of the hardware and software on the market is designed and calibrated and optimized for an upright posture. Your virtual horizon is parallel to the material one.

And for all that Facebook is applying its might meta muscles to bend VR into another tool for extracting value from the "valued team members" of capitalism, there's very little focus on, say, replicating the desktop computing experience from bed.

If you want or need to compute in a reclined position, the VR on the market offers few solutions that can compete to plugging a micro PC into a good auto-keystoning projector angled up at the ceiling.

Which works, though keeping the projector stable is tricky.

There's no reason VR should be worse at this. If most people couldn't use it with a horizon decoupled from gravity without motion sickness, there's still no reason that "screen elements" and UI stuff in the virtual realm have to be perpendicular to the horizon.

Like, the Vive Flow's phone mirroring lets you put the giant floating phone screen on the ceiling, or where a notional wall meets a notional ceiling, angled down to face you. Which is great for watching videos or whatever with fatigue, and passable for writing with a keyboard.

But as soon as you need to pop up the Vive UI, you have to pull yourself up and face the right direction, because that stuff assumes that you're seated upright or standing. It's easier to just take the glasses off and put them aside when you're done, which is not ideal.

And that's not a huge hassle if you *are* done, but if you're trying to change a setting or make an adjustment or do something else within the Flow's system, you've got to assume the expected position.

I guess I should explain that by "stable" I mean "in one place because it's probably on the bed next to you". It's not like the antimatter flow is going to disrupt the dilithium crytals and explode.

My solution is to put it on the keyboard tray.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1486004967513206787

Which makes the image on the ceiling bounce a little as I'm typing. That sort of thing doesn't bother me, but I could see it being annoying or even distressing to more visually-oriented people.

Anyway. Just as a standard of design, there is no reason that somebody wearing a VR rig and experiencing a virtual environment should have to turn physically, sit up, or look around to face a menu that only appeared because they pressed the "Summon Menu" button.