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> VR is where computation becomes human. No keyboards, no monitors, no mice or joysticks, but instead hands, gaze, movement, and voice.

The VR optimists underestimate how deeply human it is to manipulate a tool with your hands. It's not a coincidence that the only intelligent mammal is also the only one with opposable thumbs. If voice was actually vastly preferable to the output of a keyboard, it wouldn't be the case that texting is more popular than calls (and that voicemail has more or less gone the way of the betamax).

> The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world. Today, this is not possible without co-location.

Are you being sarcastic? I do this every day in Google docs.

Texting being more common than calls is a pretty bad example. Texting is more popular because it allows asynchronous communication. Calls require both participants to be connected at the same time, which is a big hassle.

That's fair - comparing calls to texts is not apples to apples. But I think the issue is deeper than live vs async: voicemail is fully asynchronous, and it is by far the least popular of the three.

I don't think your objection diminishes my main argument, which is that many forms of communication don't receive any optimization from VR - including forms that the VR crowd seems to believe will be revolutionized (e.g. wildermuthn's whiteboard example).

I think part of it's due to the perceived privacy i.e you can 'text' at anytime without bringing any attention from surroundings, but that's not possible with 'calls' when you are in the office or when surrounded with friends/parents/relatives etc.

Err flaws in your argument but orangutans also have opposable things..

> The VR optimists underestimate how deeply human it is to manipulate a tool with your hands.

But that's exactly what VR enables. Instead of clicking a button to swing an axe, in VR you can naturally swing that axe with your own hand. Instead of dragging a mouse to draw a line, you can just move your hand. In many cases VR allows to skip that layer of indirection between input (keyboards/mice/joysticks) and output (screen).

> Instead of clicking a button to swing an axe, in VR you can naturally swing that axe with your own hand.

I agree. This is exactly the sort of inconsequential activity where VR will really excel.

> Instead of dragging a mouse to draw a line, you can just move your hand.

Dragging a mouse is "just moving your hand." If you really need less friction in this case, use a touch screen. What do a VR headset and VR hand tracking gloves add?

> In many cases VR allows to skip that layer of indirection between input (keyboards/mice/joysticks) and output (screen).

I like this point, and I think it might illuminate where the fundamental disagreement is: how many of these cases are there? For most of the things I do with my computer (writing code, email, listening to music, reading articles) I am simply not convinced that there is a layer of indirection. Keyboards, graphical user interfaces, and CLIs are already well-optimized for ease and efficiency in achieving their stated goal. Introducing VR would increase friction rather than remove it.

You mean you can swing your hand as if there were an axe there. It really is different and that’s why Wii sword fighting was never as good as I hoped.

>If voice was actually vastly preferable to the output of a keyboard, it wouldn't be the case that texting is more popular than calls

Texting is preferable to voice only when it's a break from human interaction.

That's why you call your parents but text the girl you met last weekend.

It's not because they're too old to text. If the only way they could communicate with their children was through text, they'd be typing on their phone more than a stereotypical teen. It's because you're comfortable talking to your parents. Even when it's at it's most-uncomfortable, it's still familiar, safe, and never going to be as bad as the painful conversations you've already had with them. You don't need the safety net of putting the phone down, distracting yourself from the conversation by stressing about the conversation, procrastinating, or the flexibility to workshop every response with your friends.

For human interaction, voice is vastly preferable.

> For human interaction, voice is vastly preferable.

This is trivial or false. If you define "human interaction" as "the sorts of interactions where we'd rather talk" then sure, voice is preferable by definition. On the other hand, if you define it as "interaction between humans" then your own example shows that it depends entirely on the nature of the interaction. Sometimes we'd rather talk and sometimes we'd rather text.

I should have originally written "If voice was _always_ preferable to the output of a keyboard". I'm obviously not suggesting that there are no cases where voice is better than sms.

What I'm suggesting is that our existing text/chat messaging, CLIs, GUIs etc are much more than a crude approximation of moving things with one's hands (or speaking) which will be obviated by VR. They are, in the appropriate cases, _more_ easy and efficient than moving things with one's hands or speaking.

> Most technological breakthroughs are first perceived as toys and hobbies of the rich: personal computers, cellphones, mechanical carriages, Facebook. In this context, sour-grape reactionism is unfortunate but not surprising.

But not every technology ends up being the next personal computer, cellphone, or Facebook. Someone probably once thought that hosting sites like GeoCities were the future before blogs/Facebook made it clear that the average user doesn't want to design their own website. It took something more approachable to come along.

VR vastly overestimates the amount of space people have in their living rooms. Unless we're designing houses with rooms just for VR, I don't ever see it taking off. Maybe as a destination like a holodeck?

> The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world.

Yes, chalkboards, I’ve heard of them and used them.

> The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world.

Yeah, sorry, but that’s just not how most real work gets done in the real world.

Make Excel a compelling VR app, then we’ll talk.

> The simple act of a talented group viewing and marking a large flat surface can change the world.

Is this really such a common way to work and collaborate? I’ve rarely seen this even in co-locates teams. More usually problems are such that people work offline, put and document/proof-of-concept, presentation together and then maybe discuss the presentation/document verbally, or over email.

Not so much movie style enthusiastic whiteboarding. Maybe that would be better way of working, but is it really that common? Is there any data on this?

> Is this really such a common way to work and collaborate?

Same observation: it absolutely isn’t how people work & collaborate. VR is DOA for most kinds of work because it just isn’t all that compatible with most kinds of work.

Once these virtual whiteboard trend toward Jupyter notebooks, VR will not only have triumphed over location-restricted bodies, but also location-restricted computers.

Why will VR be a better solution for this than AR? Surely being able to see your real surroundings with virtual whiteboards and controls 'stuck' to various surfaces will be more comfortable for people than a totally immersive world.

VR sounds great. Where it falls apart, IMHO, is biology. Tech is a world of plastic, glass, and metal. Eukaryotes just don't get along with those things in close contact for very long. Dermatitides are a thing.

People can wear clothes, shoes, glasses and jewellery 16 hours/day for decades, can work with thin food-protective or thick hand-protective gloves on for hours every day. Even when people suffer from chapped or sore skin problems with gloves, as some do, they still manage to do it because the value of (being employed, or being able to work with delicate or dangerous things) makes it worth enduring.

I don't know anything about VR and the biological costs of using it, but why is it necessarily more harsh on the body than glasses and headphones and gloves? Future-VR is likely to get smaller and lighter, like current VR is smaller and lighter than Steve Mann's 1980s and 1990s wearables. Won't there come a point where it's just .. light and easy and mostly fine?

Sebaceous glands and sinuses are going to be problems for as long as humans vaguely resemble other apes. Those are the sorts of problems you're up against, combined with the basic optics problems. Don't you think that if there was an easier way to put the required visual field in front of the eye closer, with a lighter lens, that wouldn't have been already done? There's some basic optics problems that fix the solution space in ways that are not great the particular sack of meat that biology produced.