I gotta say it - those 160 column printouts of code were awesome for debugging over a cup of coffee...
And they still are. When you can look at 500+ lines of code at once spread over a table, you can immediately see all sorts of things that aren't evident even on a 30" screen.
Those printouts remain one of my secret weapons for isolating really heinous bugs.
I recall debugging a monstrous web system (it woudl require more that one entry in the daily WTF to do it justice) by borrowing a large conference room and laying out the code over about 20 feet linear length of table
Apparently, the main issue with eye strain from close monitors and such is the fact that your eyes have to focus closer. But the oculus has two screens and optics, which they use to let your eyes focus at infinite distance. Hence, eye strain is not an issue.
You'll get sick in the stomach long before any effect on your eyes in any case - having it on for hours on end is extremely unrealistic right now.
There are other subtle effects like fish-eye that are lead to a disoriented feeling when I take off the Oculus.
Think of it this way: your cortex is always learning. Always. So if you present visual input that is subtly different (eye-spacing, fish-eye / pin-cushion, lag) for long periods your brain will learn that. Take it away and you've effectively got mild (hopefully reversible) brain damage wrt the physical world.
There are software issues caused by the game / simulation camera FOV mismatch.
E.g. if you walk up to a wall in the Tuscany demo, it'll look like the wall at the center of your view is slightly closer to you than the wall off-center. It's not such a bad artifact in-game, but when I take the goggles off, flat walls IRL look slightly bowed away from my center of view for a while, and things feel ... different.
It's similar to when you stare at a scrolling screen, and then look at a fixed object. The object seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
I tried one. The screen isn't there yet for long term productivity, or even long term gaming. They'll get it there though, the motion tracking and field of view are wonderful, it mostly would just need to be much higher res for non gaming activities.
For that to be of any practical benefit, it'd have to be 4K resolution, right?
If you're just feeding that 50" TV a standard 1080p signal, you're not going to be able to display significantly more code than you'd be able to display on a 23" screen that's also running at 1080p.
Heck, cover the side of a building with a 1080p projector image, and a 27" monitor running at 2560x1400 will still show more code. :)
And they still are. When you can look at 500+ lines of code at once spread over a table, you can immediately see all sorts of things that aren't evident even on a 30" screen.
Those printouts remain one of my secret weapons for isolating really heinous bugs.