Hacker News Reader

Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

We need a killer app for collaboration. I think VR tech could solve this by building a shared IDE-space for pair programming.

View on HN

The far more relevant collaboration problem is being together with other people in a room and sketch out ideas, etc. on a whiteboard, have interactive conversations, read body language, etc. There have been so many attempts to solve this over the years and there's never been close to a "killer app."

I do believe that remote work can work in many cases but it needs to be complemented with a decent dose of F2F to complement our only somewhat successful video conferencing systems, chat, shared documents and other tools that exist today. I suspect at the end of the day we'll just keep iterating on the various tools we have and they'll get better but still will lag everyone being in the same room.

There is a no-true-Scotsman position here. If you extrapolate from science fiction, there is a level of VR implementation that we can imagine, if not implement, that would enable distant collaboration with out the defects that are mentioned in the siblings of this comment. I feel that VR today cannot deliver enough to resemble Holodeck fidelity, more like .1 H, and maybe at least .5 H is needed.

Maybe pair programming needs less to be fluid enough to be beneficial.

It actually doesn't need to be, like, flashy 3D game stuff! It can just be a 360-degree screen-space that lets me have every file in the system open at once. The problem with pairing in 2D is there is only one cursor, and even if there were two cursors like google docs, there is not nearly enough screen real estate for us both to work at the same time. These are mostly 2D problems, but VR still solves them.

VR might provide more communication bandwidth than a phone call or a video chat, but it's still nowhere near close enough to actually collaborating in person.

And wear VR goggles all day at work?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com