So I've started using my Quest 3 as a cheap alternative to having enormous monitors, and while mixed reality works, I prefer VR as it shuts out the room and lets me focus. But this is borderline impossible because of how much kit I'm messing round with.
I've got:
my phone
the left and right controllers
a keyboard and mouse
my personal laptop, end client's laptop and the consultancy's laptop
my headphones
my vape
a cup of tea or coffee / can of coke / snacks
I'm constantly popping out of VR and into AR to find something, and back again, feeling lost when I'm in VR. Because if an object was invisible when I lost track of it, the VR experience has cost me object permanence.
This would be pretty easy to fix. AR Toolkit lets you detect the position and orientation of objects via printed stickers that look kinda like QR codes. Pop a printed sticker on an object, draw a bounding volume around it and have that area be visible via passthrough. Or replace them with a 3D mesh of my choice if you want to get fancy.
"tracked keyboards" sound like a good idea, but having a special case for every object seems suboptimal. My Das Keyboard isn't ever going to be supported, and Meta are never going to enter into an agreement with vape companies. My wallet, keys, bank cards, my light switch, remote for my stereo, the chess clock I use to time how long I've been procrastinating instead of working - all these things are arbitrary and personal to me and how I live.
I could actually do this myself, but I'd have to build yet another mixed reality productivity environment - and I've got my own code to hack. Stickers might be a bit ugly but they are CPU-light thing that would be a massive win for all apps on the platform.
Plus if users let Meta use them to gather image data, it could be used to bootstrap object recognition in general. They'd know which objects are actually important to people, how often they're used, what they look like and where they usually are. Without judgement or corporate optics filters - an ashtray, bong or bottle of whisky gets equal treatment to more wholesome things like a dumbbell or a keyboard.
