The Floating Monitor: Can AR Glasses Realistically Replace Your Screen for Productivity?

There’s a tantalizing vision circulating in the tech community, a promise of ultimate portability and productivity. It’s perfectly encapsulated by a user named Andrew, who, after connecting his Rokid Max AR glasses to his phone, declared that Samsung DeX “works perfectly… turning them into an almost fully functional computer.” This is our experiment’s hypothesis: that a smartphone, paired with a pair of AR glasses and portable peripherals, can effectively replace a laptop or a traditional monitor, creating a truly mobile, private, large-screen workstation.

But is this vision a practical reality for the daily grind of knowledge work, or is it merely a futuristic novelty? We decided to move beyond the initial excitement and subject this “floating monitor” setup to a series of real-world productivity tasks. This is not a review, but a rigorous feasibility study.

Lab Setup: The Backpack Office

To test our hypothesis, we assembled a minimalist mobile workstation: * The Brain: A Samsung smartphone with DeX capabilities. * The Display: A pair of Rokid Max AR glasses, connected via USB-C. * The Peripherals: A compact Bluetooth keyboard and a portable mouse.

This entire setup fits comfortably in a small backpack, representing the pinnacle of mobile office potential. With the hardware in place, it was time to tackle the cornerstone of modern knowledge work: the relentless flow of text. The dream of a floating command center would live or die based on its ability to handle the humble written word.

Experiment Part 1: The Trial by Text

Task 1: Reading and Responding to Long Emails and Documents

The initial impression is impressive. A full-screen document floats in your vision, offering a sense of scale impossible on a phone. The center of the screen is sharp, and for a few paragraphs, the experience feels liberating. However, as your eyes naturally drift towards the edges of the page, the illusion begins to fray. As another user, Daniel D, accurately described, “the edges of the image are kind of blurry so it’s a little hard to read text in that area.”

This isn’t a simple defect but a consequence of the optical design. Correcting for distortion and chromatic aberration (color fringing) across the entire field of view is a massive challenge in such a compact form factor. While our brains can easily forgive slight edge softness in a movie, our eyes and cognitive processes are far more demanding when it comes to text. The subtle blur forces a degree of subconscious effort to decode characters, which, over time, can lead to significant eye strain.

Task 2: Coding and Spreadsheet Management

This is where the optical limitations become a critical flaw. In a code editor or a dense spreadsheet, every character, every symbol, and every cell border matters. The edge-blurriness that was a minor annoyance while reading prose becomes a major obstacle to productivity. Differentiating between a colon and a semicolon, or accurately selecting a specific cell near the edge of the screen, requires conscious effort and head-turning, rather than a simple flick of the eyes. For any work that demands pixel-perfect precision and clarity across a wide area, the current generation of consumer AR glasses falls short of the standard set by a basic physical monitor.

Experiment Part 2: The Visual and Interactive Workflow

The results from text-heavy tasks were sobering, revealing a clear limitation in the current optical technology. But knowledge work isn’t solely about text. What happens when we shift the focus to tasks that are more visual, interactive, and collaborative? It is here that the narrative begins to change.

Task 3: Attending a Video Conference

In this scenario, the AR glasses excel. The privacy is absolute. You can have a sensitive presentation or a team chat displayed on your virtual screen in a crowded coffee shop, and the person next to you will see nothing but a pair of futuristic sunglasses. The large screen allows you to comfortably view multiple participants and a shared screen simultaneously—a significant upgrade from a phone’s tiny display. This use case alone, for a frequent traveler or remote worker in a shared space, is a powerful argument for the device.

Task 4: Multitasking and Window Management

The ability to arrange multiple windows on a large virtual canvas feels powerful. However, the experience is constrained by a fundamental aspect of the technology, as noted by user Robert C. Hertlein: “Just a static screen directly in your vision.” These glasses provide 3 Degrees of Freedom (3DoF), meaning the screen follows your head’s rotation. It is, quite literally, attached to your face.

This creates a peculiar workflow limitation. When you look down at your keyboard to type, the screen follows you, blocking your view of your hands. When you want to glance at a physical note on your desk, you have to peer under the glasses. This lack of “spatial anchoring”—the ability for a virtual screen to be “pinned” in space, which requires 6DoF tracking—prevents a seamless blend of the digital and physical workspaces. It’s the difference between wearing a monitor and having a monitor in your room.

Conclusion: A Redefinition of Roles

So, can AR glasses realistically replace your screen for productivity? Our experiment leads to a nuanced conclusion: No, not as a general-purpose replacement for a physical monitor. The optical compromises on text readability and the 3DoF limitation on workflow integration are, for now, significant barriers for text-intensive and complex multitasking roles.

However, the hypothesis is not entirely false; it’s just misstated. The role of these devices is not to replace your monitor, but to act as a powerful new category of peripheral: the Portable Privacy Monitor.

Its killer application is not 8-hour coding sessions, but rather specific, high-value tasks where privacy and a large screen are paramount. It is for the business traveler reviewing a confidential report on a plane, the designer getting a large-scale preview of their work in a client’s office, or the remote worker taking a video call from a shared living space.

From an ergonomic perspective, it’s a double-edged sword. It could potentially alleviate the neck strain from hunching over a laptop, but it may introduce a new form of eye fatigue. The dream of a full workstation on your face remains just that—a dream. But the reality of a powerful, portable, and private secondary display is here, and for the right professional, it could be a game-changer.