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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

This, my friends, is how business travel becomes nearly irrelevant.

This is a beautifully executed idea and if the demos live up to expectation the hype may even be warranted. But on a much more fundamental level (i.e. fancy 3D imaging and spatial audio aside), this also possibly suggests people would benefit from dedicated videoconferencing hardware. TVs and telephones do one thing really well (or at least historically they did), which is why even my legally blind grandpa could call his friends or watch^W listen to the news. There's a market for having a plug-and-play videophone now that we have the software to go inside it.

What are Zoom, Facebook or Apple waiting for?

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From my experience business travel is as much about sharing an experience as it is the discussion or dissemination of information. That's a hard thing to replicate

My theory is that physical proximity means danger or love to our animal brains .. and knowing it's tech will disengage your brain from feeling close and will change your emotions and engagement to the other person. Now something more natural than a LCD screen might make video calls a bit more lively and efficient.

and business kickbacks and shared drinks at the hotel bar

Until technology can replicate the experience of staying out late, drunkenly chatting with coworkers in the back of a taxicab as you ride through Manhattan, then grabbing a midnight snack at a hole-in-the-wall diner someone recommended back at the office, business travel will have its place.

The real value of business travel is what you do with people outside of work hours.

> This, my friends, is how business travel becomes nearly irrelevant

the business trips i've been on either involved the installation of equipment, or were an excuse for somebody with budget to burn it on travel and expensive food/alcohol. or both.

i think plenty of business travel will survive just fine.

> There's a market for having a plug-and-play videophone now that we have the software to go inside it.

> What are Zoom, Facebook or Apple waiting for?

This is already a thing?

Facebook has Portal, Apple has iPad, Amazon has Echo, all of whom support Zoom and other video conferencing apps. The portal even has a moving camera to keep you centered if you're moving in frame, and the iPad does the same thing with an ultra-wide lens and some post-processing.

As far as dedicated videoconferencing hardware is concerned, Starline seems pretty late to the game. Although, I'll admit the fancy 3D imaging features is pretty insane.

Entertainingly, the technology to real-time impersonate someone over zoom photorealistically is also rapidly approaching - the window of irrelevant travel might be small.

I don't think this will actually be a real problem as you can just sign the call with your identity which renders deep fakes useless.

Better videoconferencing hardware is not a solution to people wanting to get together socially and serendipitously at events. And, by the way, how many people are going to turn a room in their house into a work videocall room?

Personally, I find that--for most people--the idea that working remote shoves a lot of cost onto employees vs. commuting probably off-base. (With some exceptions for people living in small city apartments near offices.) But installing a room-sized videoconferencing setup at home even for people with decent-sized houses is pretty silly.

> how many people are going to turn a room in their house into a work videocall room?

Very few while it's $20k+. But I can imagine a lot of people would want one if the price was reasonable. I'm sure you still use the room for other things.

Who said anything about a room in your house? This will be for offices first.

Sure. But given that this sort of thing has been discussed many times before it's hard to ignore the context of remote work.

Maybe for the set of people that don't mind gimmicks and facsimiles, but for those of us that don't want to even turn on video there is no way you're going to get me into an entire videoconferencing box!

Nothing beats in-person. Nothing!

> how business travel becomes nearly irrelevant

I hope not. Video chat can really never be the same thing as meeting people in person.

I immediately thought of business travel as well. Project us all in to a virtual conference room and give us a suite of collaboration tools to use while we're all there.

The only thing missing is the after meeting drinks and dinner, but there will inevitably be services to put us all in a restaurant/bar environment, pipe in some bar white noise, have food sent from a local restaurant, etc. for an "in-person" virtual happy hour...

That "the only thing missing" is the main reason to go to many conferences.

A lot of people (those with less social desire/social skills) seem to resent it, but it is true: Networking and casual technical conversations that happen afterhours are the draw for many technical conferences. Talks can be good, and occasionally there are well-constructed lab sandboxes. But mostly, it's going and speed-dating with peers and sales teams to talk about your needs and architecture, and building a good web of contacts.

I also believe fully remote technical/collaboration work, without any periodic physical meetups, will be awful for a lot of people. Sure, those who bought into it pre-pandemic prefer it, and that's fine. But I really think there is concern to be had for the fraying of social bonds and teamwork that can be done, even (or especially) with people you have a tough time working with.

Yeah, the last year has shown us that streaming videos with some side chat is the easy part. Heck, maybe it's even better than in-person a lot of the time. I can re-record stuff when I screw up and do some things I can't do in front of a room of 50-100 people.

And it's even good that people who just go to sessions for the content will be able to do so--for a lot less money and effort. But I'm planning to go back to in-person conferences as soon as possible.

A seemingly obscure feature of meeting in person or visiting a vendor at their own offices, it offers a chance to peak behind the curtains, to feel social cues that are hard to explain/justify. There’s a lot of bulls*t in the corporate/smb world.

> there will inevitably be services to put us all in a restaurant/bar environment, pipe in some bar white noise, have food sent from a local restaurant, etc. for an "in-person" virtual happy hour...

I honestly can’t believe this still sounds fun to anyone after a year of Zoom dystopia.

The last year has shown pretty clearly that for presented content, video works pretty well. Heck, it maybe even works better along with live chat than in person. (And, to be honest, for big events I would often watch live streamed keynotes rather than crowding into a conference center with 5,000 of my closest friends anyway.)

But everything else about virtual conferences has completely sucked and anyone running events is aggressively trying to get back to in-person. (With a hybrid component for presentations.)

Unfortunately, this stage of the Google product cycle is the hardest for me to start getting excited for. I hope for better, but I cannot resist the nagging feeling that this will 1) be very, very cool, 2) be sold to enterprise customers who are OK streaming business calls through Google's cloud, 3) suffer from having no support, 4) be renamed and reclaimed by another team inside Google, 5) sunset.

Is "Starlink" going to be a Gmail or a Wave? Hard to say.

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