Do you have enough monitors? I do not. Multiple monitors are great, but they’re also something that’s hard to travel with. Even our Best Portable Monitors are a bit of a burden. At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit today, though, the chip company showed an AR application I could really jam with: monitors everywhere.
The specific tech involved was a pair of AR glasses attached to a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3-powered laptop, running special software that let the glasses display virtual monitors, which Windows saw as real monitors. You could “move” the monitors in “space” using a menu; I put them right above the laptop’s real monitor.
Beyond the additional screen real estate, the virtual monitor application is great for working on things privately. On my flight over here, I know the person directly behind me was reading everything I was working on. (She was a friend of mine.)
If your monitor is virtual, though, people around you can’t see what you’re working on.
I typed some text and scrolled Web pages on the virtual monitors. There was some noticeable latency, but the experience was usable, especially if you’re using the extra monitors for reference information.
The usual AR caveats apply; the display glasses I wore wobbled on my face and had a very limited field of vision. AR is right now being held back by dumb, physical-world things such as displays and optics. Ultimately the metaverse is made of glass as much as it is of data.
Qualcomm didn’t have a plan to commercialize this application. But it’s exactly the kind of thing Motorola’s Ruben Castano and Vlad Rozanovich were talking to me about yesterday when they talked about combining Lenovo laptops with the company’s new A3 glasses to create new experiences for the ThinkPad-toting office worker. Here’s hoping someone fixes the optics problem.
