VR Monitors

One of the first things I thought of when I saw VR coming was the idea of virtual monitors. Forget about having 3 monitors - get a dozen showing all around you! Well, maybe not all showing at once as there's only so much video memory, but a heck of a lot of them.

Unfortunately, it seems Windows wants there to be a display port for every monitor. But the possibilities of virtual monitors getting displayed in VR are still considerable.

It also seems that somebody is way ahead of me...
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It's limited to your monitor's size but you can get around that with something called the headless ghost that fakes a 4K monitor.

The virtual desktop software is supposed to be $15.

There's a Linux project working on a similar idea. It's still in development, and the idea is not to create whole desktops in VR, but to allow individual windows to be arranged VR space - it's more like one giant 3D desktop.

I expect that will be the long term solution - an actual "deskspace" instead of a desktop.

I've been wanting to bring up this topic with the all the news on VR upcoming releases these days but this is not on headsets but on monitors.

I have worked with a display wall. We had a three ATI 5870's rigged up to 9 monitors. XP at the time allowed Windows to span three monitors ATI's Catalyst software allowed us to emulate three monitors as a single one. The only problem was the bezels which we were able to eliminate with the software. Three of the monitors kept crashing.

One of the girls in the lab kept complaining that our fellow student kept using it to play video games but the staff backed him. I mean, you could always argue we were putting it through its paces. AFAIK the display is still there.

When I was at Metrotown in Vancouver over a decade ago the arcade had multiple walls and projectors as well as motion detector sensors. We were playing Resident Evil. That was quite a trip - and no need for goggles!

I kind of fail to see the point of this, but eh, what do I know about VR and the like? All I know is that when I get the money, I'm getting 2 Occulus Rift headsets for my parents and one for me. Bring on the virtual reality future.

Well, if you've got this program and you want an additional monitor, all you have to do is buy one of those $30 'headless' dongles to convince Windows you have an additional monitor and you'll have it - though only in VR mode.

Of course, even if you set that monitor to 4K, the VR screens' resolution is still going to be a limiter. So you've got yourself a $30 additional monitor that you can set at any distance and curve however you like. Set it right next to your other monitor if you like with no monitor frame between the two at all.

This could be even nicer if he can manage to get 3D Vision or something similar working. A VR headset makes for one heck of a fine pair of stereoscopic glasses: no ghosting from a screen that can't quite switch images fast enough, no added darkness because the glasses can't get perfectly clear, no problems with the glasses getting even slightly out of sync with the monitor…. basically, you'll have a better 3D Vision for free. (Especially if all the shader hacking that's been done to help 3D Vision games works with this system - but now I'm getting deep into fantasy land.)