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Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

I was waiting for this, knew it was only a matter of time before Microsoft came out with something like this since it's right in their field of office products.

Hopefully this is the catalyst needed to create better work/life balance and lower the barrier for remote work and make it just as productive as being present in the office.

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I know it may sound trivial, but I work from home almost every day using short pants and no shoes. What I want to say is that home is still home, my kids will appear and yield, my tv might be turned on, and the dog would eventually bark. By no means I would want to transform my home in an office, I work from home for lot of things that wont be allowed in an office ever. And thats fine, I guess.

I work for MSFT but don't work on HoloLens.

Not all remote work is created equal. There are certain kinds of work that require richer kinds of interaction. E.g. whiteboarding, prioritizing with Post-It notes, brainstorming. Anyone who tries to "dial in" to one of these meetings is perpetually behind those in the room given they can't see what's on the wall/whiteboard. I could imagine technology like this making that kind of remote work much more productive.

We already have the technology needed to be much better at remote meetings, but people don't use it.

What technology do you have in mind? I've suffered through far too many awful Google Hangout meetings - if anything can improve remote meetings then I'd love to hear about it.

But only if they manage to drastically reduce/eliminate the latency that's present with video conferencing.

It gets us one step closer by allowing virtual eye contact, but if the latency is still there, it will still be subpar to in-person interactions.

The other thing that wasn't so evident by this video is that everyone you were taking to would have to be wearing Hololenses, so it will still be a bit awkward.

Not trying to be a downer, just that as a remote worker, I think about all of these things that make remote interactions hard.

> The other thing that wasn't so evident by this video is that everyone you were taking to would have to be wearing Hololenses, so it will still be a bit awkward.

I remember seeing the guy who invented the selfie stick present it to Canada's Dragon's Den: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7YbcoCkbs. My reaction was: this is ridiculous and stupid. Nobody will ever use that let alone buy it.

Let's just say I was slightly wrong.

Not only that, but people go crazy over VR. This will take off, I'm sure.

https://quikpod.com/quik-pod-selfie-stick-cbc-dragons-den-20...

You're sure it will take off. But at the same time you confess that you are very bad at predicting these kind of things. So, not sure what you're saying.

> So, not sure what you're saying.

That naysayers are usually wrong.

Though most things fail... So bettering against something is generally a good bet.

I said that sinxoveretothex_atThatTime was wrong.

The reason I dismissed the product then was because of the aesthetics. The same reason that my parent commenter pointed to to suggest holoportation wouldn't work.

I gave the example of VR. I can also give the example of "portable" phones and "portable" computers (have you seen how fugly those things were back then?). Or bluetooth earpieces.

That being said, I'm not predicting the end of in-person meetings or anything remotely like that. I wrote too candidly when I wrote "this will take off". Let's just say that we'll see more and more of that type of technology in the future.

I expect this to reach Bluetooth earpieces level of ubiquitousness: not quite without haters and not quite everyone-has-one, but rather everyone-knows-someone-who-uses-one kind of thing.

That dragon's den episode is baffling. The guy's reason for not licensing it to other companies is baffling. His valuation is baffling. I could practically feel them trying to not look too eager to take his 30% while calmly forcing out the words.

Here is something that never took off. And never will despite the popularity of this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg

The difference? Selfie stick does exactly what it says it does and isn't more awkward, lowres, latency prone or difficult to use than a normal person would expect.

Unfortunately it's blocked in the UK "This video contains content from BBTV_SonyPictures, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

this is an alternative video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzu_5xd-AlM

For remote work, what are the advantages of this over a good video conferencing/screen sharing type of setup.

It's really hard to say exactly what it is, just as I can't tell you exactly why being physically next to somebody is better than a video conference, but it is. This would bring us one step closer to being physically present without actually being so just as video brought us one step closer than we were with just phone calls.

Field of view and peripheral vision?

Better visibility of non-verbal interaction cues. Also, not sharing screen real-estate between the person you're talking to and the work you're collaborating on.

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