This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
My whole desk setup now easily fits into a backpack and I can take it anywhere
My laptop easily fits in a backpack. Hell I can fit TWO laptops in my backpack.
And a whole bunch of other shit.
I carry two laptops in my work bag regularly, a 15" and 14"
He has reached douchevana
He needs an actual typewriter instead of a keyboard to go where no douche has gone before.
I can fit my PC in a backpack. It's got a mini-ITX motherboard, SFX power supply, 240mm AIO water cooler, and an RX 9070 XT in a Lian Li A4-H2O case.
I went to the trouble of building it small mainly because of the possibility that I decide to flee the US. Thanks, Trump. 😡
I think you have my pc build, except a 9070 XT for a 6800 XT. But the case is huge, I don't see how it fits in anyone's backpack.
Maybe you're thinking of some other case? Mine is a little under 13"x10"x6", about the size of a (large) shoebox:
Granted, not a whole lot else would fit in a backpack along with it, but I'm quite confident it would fit. A stack of three or four textbooks would be bigger.
I mean I do have that case, and I don't think it fits in to any of my backpacks, I guess I need to take everything out of my backpack and then it will barely fit if I shove it in.
I was looking at mini-ITX cases for exactly this purpose a while back
wanted sturdy and small for portable use, something that could go in a backpack or suitcase or the like.
I remember seeing the Velka and one other whose name escapes me right now.
https://velkase.com/products/velka-3
184 x 99 x 219 mm
7.2 x 3.9 x 8.6 in
Optimus makes insane builds, check out his mini itx build with a fucking rtx 5090. It's also smaller than OPs pc build
im a pretty big fan of AR/VR for productivity, reading books, watching films. the resolution and lenses need to be pretty good for the first 2. but it's promising. laying in bed and looking up at a book or movie is really something else. standing up once in a while is great also. i think there is a future here.
It's a novel idea. But despite the article's claims this is not a practical alternative to a laptop in planes, coffee shops, etc. Nor is a minipc inherently more serviceable than a laptop as others have pointed out.
For traveling, if it's a longer trip, it almost makes sense to me as you'd have it set up for a while. Though I'd do a mini ITX system. The ones with external power supplies and no drive bays or expansion slots are pretty small. But even then, I don't feel like this would be significantly better than a laptop. And that's a lot to buy for a niche use case.
Edit: spelling and grammar
At this point, something like a steam deck would go better with the glasses, at least it has its own battery
That's actually pretty cool idea. Wasn't there some effort by Valve to support VR anyway on the Deck?
Idk about VR, the hardware is kinda weak, but just projecting the screen should be easy
I've looked at this before and I agree that mini-ITX is probably the most realistic. You want to look hard for a small mini-ITX case. Though even that isn't that small. I think that you could maybe save some space
the mini-ITX power supply pushes the case size out in one dimension, so there's probably some unused internal volume -- if you could stick components, like the HMD, into part of what would normally be airspace interior to the case.
You wouldn't use a typical SFX power supply for something where size matters; you'd likely use a Flex PSU, which are often long and thin. If you got a lower-power CPU with integrated graphics, you could manage a case that's not much bigger than the motherboard or much thicker than the IO shroud.
Lemmy doesn't have a lot of SFF or Ultra SFF content yet, but getting the most out of limited space is definitely a thing people are into, and they can get quite creative.
The final product is often portable but still rarely as tiny as a mini PC or NUC-like. Depending on your needs, someone might be better off making a Steam Brick.
I own a pair of these. Depending on the game, they add a lot of value to my Steamdeck. But for everyday computing, they are actually very impractical.
Or – hear me out – what if he used his already owned laptop with the VR goggles, instead of advertising the proprietary-connector Khadas mind?
I really would like to try those glasses. They sound cool. But at $500 they are too expensive for an impulse and there is no place around where one can try those offline
Much to my surprise, it didn’t take long at all to get used to working while wearing AR glasses.
Could you see yourself spending a full day working with smart glasses instead of using a monitor?
For me at least, that "HMD all day" is the limiting factor. I don't want to wear an HMD all day. My experience has been that they're sensitive to being slightly misaligned and going blurry. Traditional displays are nice and crisp.
I think that to be something that I'd want to use, the thing would need to do something like mechanically move the displays or optics internal to the HMD to keep it at a very precise, calibrated position relative to my eyeball, so that I don't need to futz with not having my movements slightly misalign the HMD.
In 2025, we don't have an HMD that can do that.
EDIT: Also, this doesn't matter much if you're watching a movie or something. Not visible then. But it's a visible issue if you're working with text or the like, if you want to full-on replace your display.
The quest 3 stays sharp when alignment changes, its surprisingly nice to work in outside of the brick on my face. I would hope the xreal glasses can match quest 3 clarity
I imagine it would be really annoying to set up after taking it out of a backpack. I think it would be much more practical to just use a laptop with the xreal glasses
It's longer than a laptop, but honestly, I have my laptop set up to hibernate if I have it closed for more than ten minutes or so, and it takes several seconds to get that dehibernated, even off NVMe, and some of that is happening in parallel. My last laptop was a lot slower, took something north of ten seconds to get dehibernated. He's gotta drop a keyboard on his desk, unzip his HMD case, and plug each in (if he's not using a wireless keyboard or the wireless accessory for that HMD, neither of which I would personally use). Some of that at least can be parallelized. And that HMD has integrated headphones, IIRC
I carry headphones with me for my laptop, so he doesn't need to do that bit.
EDIT: Oh, and his trackball/trackpad/mouse or whatever. I carry a trackball with my laptop, but don't usually use it.
