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Comment by radiorental | Hacker News Reader

Two thoughts, based on evaluating remote collaboration tech.

1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing beats a real whiteboard)

2) Observe people working at a whiteboard. It's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication. Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.

The best in class tool I've found to date is Microsoft's Whiteboard app running on their 84" Surface Hub. Anyone who has the budget I highly recommend taking a look at it.

The app itself is free on windows 10.

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It's definitely possible to have tactile feedback by drawing on a connected prop whiteboard that translates into the VR whiteboard.

>1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing beats a real whiteboard)

Well, the main benefit of writing on a whiteboard is for you to draw your thoughts and for others to see what you wrote/drew. Not to get tactile feedback.

Besides it would be trivial to actually write on a whiteboard on your office while wearing a VR headset and have it be seen by others in VR space in different offices/countries (thus getting the "tactile feedback" as well).

> Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.

Chalkboards are actually a great way to communicate and collaborate in small groups, and have been for a long time one of the main forms of communication in professional mathematics and some other technical fields.

The chalkboard is a very democratic medium, because anyone can more-or-less produce the same output, it is easy to add notes over / adjacent to other people’s writing (including formulas, diagrams, ...), and the possibilities are very free and open-ended. This stands in contrast to fancy typography and bespoke technical diagrams, which are often slow to produce, difficult to modify, and require great expertise to do well.

Using a chalkboard well as a collaborative thinking tool takes practice though.

He was saying that we don't communicate via everybody writing on the board simultaneously, not that its not a valid form of communication in groups. People take turns.

What he/she said is that “it's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication”.

And it is true that this is the way many people use whiteboards, as a kind of presentation tool rather than a thinking tool. But that is largely down to lack of practice with the chalkboard/whiteboard as a personal, one-on-one, or small group tool.

There are plenty of people who successfully use white boards as a tool for routine technical conversations in small groups, with multiple participants writing on the same board.

“Not everyone is writing literally simultaneously” would be a vacuous and uninteresting statement, so I’ll give the previous poster the benefit of the doubt that he/she was saying something more substantial. No kind of conversation involves every interlocutor literally simultaneously talking/writing in the same space at the same time: that would just be a cacophony of monologues, not a conversation at all.

This observation is crucial to how we approach collaborative technology, though: the assumed goal has always been to achieve lower latency and finer granularity of changes to create the experience of simultaneous editing with instant feedback.

What this means in practice is that we have a lot of software that makes it easy to bring a group of strangers in to pseudonoymously vandalize a whiteboard by drawing dicks on it - a true "cacophony of monologues." See also: most comment threads.

Having the technical capability to all speak/write at once is wonderful. It cuts friction in the conversation. (Think of the difference between a phone call and a sequence of voice memos.)

That doesn’t mean people collaborating won’t be taking turns as a practical matter, enforced by social convention.

I think one of the issues is you're never sure what someone is about to do. There is something about seeing someone take control of the drawing space where in VR your avatar would begin motioning towards the board or pickup the writing utensil.

Sometimes I'm hesitant to start scribbling on the drawing space because I don't have the social queues to not step on someone else's thoughts. Maybe this Whiteboard app solves that?

> 1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback.

To be fair, people said that in 2007 about virtual keyboards.

Are you talking about the iPhone?? That's not a virtual keyboard. Your finger knows when it's touching the screen. Also, tapping on designate target and freeform drawing are two very different things

There's no possible such affordance in virtual space. You're literally writing in air.

I think what she/he meant is that “doesn’t feel” right is a moving target

Guessing he was referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_keyboard

>Are you talking about the iPhone?? That's not a virtual keyboard. Your finger knows when it's touching the screen

But it doesn't feel that it's hitting a button (because the button it's virtual), and people then had made this point repeatedly (e.g. in favor of Blackberry).

I would've made that argument then, and it's the reason I have a Blackberry today. It's just straight up not as good, in my opinion. But yes, people in general seem to be fine with it. I just wanted to push back against the idea that "Well, everyone said it would be bad and then it was fine.". The people who thought it was awful in many cases probably still do, they're just quieter about it 'cause it's a lost cause.

There are haptic capabilities to give some feedback... and the software can place the whiteboard where there is a physical wall for you to press against if you wanted it to, it doesn't have to be "writing in air".

forget the whiteboard, imagine a regular 2D monitor with regular code on it except it wraps your field of view, so all the files of the entire codebase are open at once, let’s assume there is retina resolution everywhere, and it is collab edit like googledocs with a laser pointer attached to each cursor. Pair programming multi-cursor!

why do we need a 2 dimensional object to be in VR? That sounds like doing something without asking why...

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