Samsung Prototype Lets You Use Your Desktop in VR

Sure, a pair of augmented reality glasses can transport you to a Martian desert, but Samsung is experimenting with tech that can also transport you to something far more familiar and likely more useful: your desktop PC.

Samsung's Monitorless prototype, which the company plans to show off next week at Mobile World Congress, evokes services like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn. It lets you remotely access your complete home or office desktop but instead of connecting via another desktop, laptop, or iPad, you'll use AR glasses and a smartphone to interact with the display, keyboard, and mouse.

Unlike the Microsoft HoloLens or pretty much any other AR glasses we've seen, the Monitorless glasses have electrochromic lenses, which let you adjust their opacity. That means you can view your desktop in complete virtual reality, as an opaque layer on top of the real world, or pretty much any combination in between.

Monitorless uses a combination of Wi-Fi and 4G LTE to send data from your PC to a smartphone, and Wi-Fi Direct for the link between the phone and the glasses. And don't think it's all about productivity: Samsung says it will also enable users to play PC games. Check it out in the video demo below.

In addition to Monitorless, Samsung has a few more VR and AR projects to show off at MWC. They include an app for the Samsung Gear VR ($48.40 at Amazon) that boosts the quality of text to make it easier for visually impaired people to read, and apps that harness 360-degree video and audio to let you visualize a home renovation project or your next vacation destination in VR.