‘Horizon Workrooms’: remote collaboration reimagined
oculus.com
oculus.com
the premise: Wiimes sitting in a room talking.
Expected outcome: utter shit show.
Actual outcome: Surprisingly good
Why is it good?
1) Audio.
you can turn to the person next to you and talk privately without interrupting the main flow of the meeting. There is none of this "no.... you speak......no.... you". You can interact normally like they were just there.
The spatial audio is top notch.
2) presentations
presenting is really simple, and you can see the people who are asking you questions. Not only that but taking Q&As is much better and quicker than on VC.
3) drawings, you can have a white board thats persistent in that meeting series.
yes, I know, yaaaa booo facebook sucks. But actually this is quite good, you should try it.
What don't I like about it?
I don't like using the controller as a pen, its clumsy and only works on a flat, clean surface. but, if that can be fixed, it'll be a brilliant addition
I would love to be able to use my wacom, but I suspect thats a long way down the list of feature requests that are important
It's coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3XcQtoja_Y
There are really two types of meetings (at the extremes).
Some (the minority) are where a small engaged group is actively collaborating. I can imagine more immersive tools are good for this sort of thing.
But a lot of meetings are the sort you multitask in. You want the general update and you're paying enough attention so that you can participate if something relevant to you comes up. For that, I may turn my camera off and certainly don't want deep immersion.
1. A surprising amount of emotional communication is possible with these avatars. The combination of arm/hand/finger articulation and movement + head nod/move/position + hearing someone's voice... that is synthesized at a much higher level than you might anticipate. I was truly surprised at the level of nuance we were all able to glean from fairly minor, almost involuntary movements people make, how that is represented through avatars, and then translates effectively to accurate social communication.
2. The physical representation of space and the avatars around that space carry the same "tribal" rules that exist in RealSpace. Certain groups tend to gravitate to each other. Side conversations can occur in a way that can actually be helpful to the overall gestalt. Leaders position as leaders, subordinates as subordinates. (Avatar group interaction is a fascinating, evolving sociology.)
3. Most importantly - all participants across multiple meetings and multiple clients agree it was far more effective then Zoom/Meet/Teams/etc. Latency is rarely perceived as an issue, the brain adapts and adjusts amazingly quickly to the new representation of space and human interaction, and decisions are made quickly because of the interactions, not in spite of them.
Of course it is in its infancy. But once you have done real business and interaction in these environments, it's disappointing (and counter-productive) to return to the endless talking squares on a monitor.
YMMV, but I doubt it. ;)
But please, someone, anyone, make a system that doesn't use the Corporate Memphis style. [2] Hire a team of real artists and make it beautiful. The avatars in the link are so aesthetically unappealing.
1. https://www.engadget.com/google-project-starline-191228699.h...
2. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tec...
Horizon's style is terrible and likely workshopped to be as bland and inoffensive as possible but it's not really Memphis style.
> Using Workrooms requires a Workrooms account, which is separate from your Oculus or Facebook accounts, although your Oculus username may be visible to other users in some cases……And to experience Workrooms in VR, you’ll need to access the app on Quest 2, which requires a Facebook login.
And the lead of the Reality Platform team at Facebook said “I did ~3 meetings in VR” https://twitter.com/marklucovsky/status/1424050798342807554?...
That was an awful answer.
I'm going with the lead of Reality Platform just admitted they have only ever done ~3 meetings in VR.
And OT what's with kids like this being so unprofessional on Twitter? The only imaginative thing the Facebook lead of AR can mention on Twitter is their politics, in a pretty unimaginative retweet way. No wonder software is doomed.
- How was it?
- Underwhelming. Hot and sweaty face, battery nearly dead, impossible to drink coffee or water. So I guess there is only upside :)
The problem these kinds of tools are trying to solve is the one thing video conferencing can't do, which is the ability to communicate using the semantics of 3d space. In a meeting room, I can direct an audience to different parts of a room for different conceptual "spaces". For example, I might use one part of a room to collect and display engineering drawing, another for prototypes, another for a Kanban, etc.
After a solid year of literally thousands of teleconference calls, it's clear to me and my team at least that this spatial component is important in real-life meetings and is noticeable when it's not there. When we all come into the office and hit a meeting room together, the ad-hoc ability to use a whiteboard (often together and collaboratively), or sit together in groups around the conference table, it all has important value.
So far I've messed with Spatial.io and a couple other remote training applications, and while they're "ok", they're fussy to use in practice. Most importantly they don't really have a smooth way of integrating work artifacts from your computer into the experience, and the whiteboarding frankly stinks. Lots of comments here also talk about how this kind of meeting eliminates subtle facial cues and can be kind of uncomfortable for the wearer. I also totally agree with this.
But I'm also aware that this is a technology in its absolute infancy, and I'm expecting it to get better at some point.
https://facebook.com/communitystandards/inauthentic_behavior
I don't know if such kind of collaboration would work in actuality, but I'm rooting for it. Sometimes the applications for the technology are realized after that technology becomes more fully realized.
Also, VR makes me throw-up so probably not the best look in meetings!
My fun in such a meeting would be ridiculing the silly tech. I bet it'll be a hit, nonetheless.
I have been tentatively thinking that once resolution is high enough to really do work (probably Quest 3 will be there), buying a headset for our full remote team.
Great work by the Oculus team working on this, for me the most important VR feature to figure out.
In normal human interaction you can see people's reactions to what you're saying and doing within microseconds of taking an action, you can subtly and automatically adjust your presentation, your pace and your expressions to build greater rapport. Over video calls you need to introduce artificial pauses to make sure that everyone has caught up, and it's really jarring compared to being face to face.
However, you don't notice it in other people's movements until there is a mismatch between social clues, Even then you have up to 250 ms (sometimes more, depending on the pace of the conversation)
In practice that means you can do an atlantic call without really noticing it.
the problem with VC calls is that because video needs to be matched to audio, the audio is buffered to make sure its lined up, this means that you have a 250ms+ delay plus any time to switch presenters.
Since all the character assets are downloaded locally, the only visual data that needs to be sent across network is the positioning of facial features and hand movements - which is a much smaller payload than streaming video. More akin to the latency you'd see playing Call of Duty or something.
I could see this experience being higher fidelity than video calls, especially in poor network conditions.
The application is taking the positional data of your headset/controllers and translating that into how your avatar moves around. There isn't any video analysis going on.
I don't need to see a 3D avatar of colleagues. I don't need to see that avatar stand up and walk around.
Mainly what I'm missing is being able to better see those subtle emotional cues & the ability to build deeper relationships. Both of which I think our brains & office norms are catching up to after 18 months of zoom meetings.
[1] How much is "too much"? There's plenty of room for debate, but a decade of alone-remote and a year of all-remote made it pretty clear that it's a threshold many of my colleagues at multiple companies exceed.
OTOH, it doesn't address bad remote-meeting etiquette like side conversations or eating next to the microphone. It doesn't address latency (might even make it worse), so a single remote might still find it impossible to break in when majority-site participants are interrupting and talking over each other so there are no gaps. These are limitations, but they don't totally negate the benefits of increasing visual/spatial awareness.
Edit: Not necessarily latency since latency is not related to data size, but I mean the general performance should be better.
Interestingly, my team has found that side conversations taking place in the meeting chat are extremely helpful (to the point that as some members of the team have been resuming in-person meetings, they have been bringing laptops and having a Slack thread running for the meeting).
It's great for questions/comments that may not be worth interrupting the flow of the conversation for, but are important enough that they shouldn't get lost entirely.
Heck, I just realized but I have a much harder time understanding accents when speakers are masked (before masking I considered myself great at understanding even the strongest accents.)
I don't understand what do you need these for. In the 21st century, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly emotionless office worker. I just had my unconscious bias training, and I can assure you, my thoughts are now completely rational, without any hint of emotional judgment. Frankly, "having deeper relationships" sounds like a recipe for a potential conflict of interests. As Salaried Professionals, we find Other emotional Cues of any Kind to be deeply distracting from our mission.
Like someone pointed out, it’s pretty obvious they never used it themselves. Or, if they did, they are lying to the product managers and telling them it’s awesome.
Because I would never even think of releasing something like this as an actual product. Not even a preview.
I have never met a single one of them in person and almost no one in a video call and yet their avatars feel like a person I know to me.
The technology has a lot of limitations, no questions about that, and with Covid as an accelerator none of those virtual meeting spaces would have had the growth they had, but the technology is moving fast and even the - admittedly - limited experience we have now does bring a lot of value to my and probably my colleagues as well.
[1] spatialape.com
There's some irony in the many people saying this who have clearly not used it themselves.
I have found most office meetings are unnessary.
I am for anything that prevents me from commuting to that office I don't like.
2/ The biggest obstacle for now is still comfort. VR is now comfortable enough for 30-min sessions for lots of people, but still not for everyone. For those who complains about Zoom fatigue, VR as of today is just 10X more painful. We need better hardware. There are obviously lots of room to improve.
3/ Horizon Workrooms is not the first and spatial.io already moving towards that direction. After some 30-mins trial, I feel Horizon is more polished and feels better than spatial.io already.
They promised they won't track you at work.
Trust is hard earned, unfortunately.
Social presence is the best killer app of VR so far besides porn.
edit: will admit to understanding the hate for the fb 'stench' altho at this point people are falling into a bit of a sports-team level of blind love and hate towards particular FAANG members, but people utterly failing to see the potential of virtual 3d/physical environments for communication/collaboration? c'mon, it's ok to hate oculus/fb but have some sense of the bigger picture as far as what this could turn into in 20 years.
No doubt there are people who really express a need to meet in the same room with others; but as this new remote reality we're currently in has shown, quite a lot of people can get quite a lot done with just audio or audio+video meetings.
So is social presence valuable enough to outweigh the certain technical challenges, additional expenses and complexity, and other as yet unidentified challenges that would come with VR meetings? If I were betting, I would say no. (And I'm a fan of VR.)
But I would also disagree with "quite a lot of people can get quite a lot done with just audio or audio+video meetings" at least to the extent that I would say people who will enjoy this work culture long-term are in the minority. I truly don't believe most people are meant to work in a room alone for hours everyday (even though some thrive on it!).
It’s true without adding value.
Just because they doubted that and they doubt VR meetings doesn’t mean VR meetings will be a hit.
Humans are really skilled at making fast comparisons between things. Unfortunately, that means we tend to make superficial comparisons. We then over-generalize while ignoring most evidence we don't like.
Smartphones caught on like wildfire and were quickly used for loads of different things, by millions of people. Now after less than 20 years billions of people use them hours a day.
VR is only used by 100,000s according to you, after 30 years. And almost only for gaming. The thing is that it’s not even mainstream among gamers, which I don’t get. I don’t play games but it just seems strange, the VR experience is so much cooler.
The technology now is very advanced, and cheap, and you could imagine lots of use cases but almost nobody uses it.
I don't see what problem this is solving.
If I see a colleague confused during a presentation, I can adjust my delivery. I can’t do the same unless the avatar communicates that to me in no uncertain terms.
The future is better remote working practices, not skeumorphic remote tools that recreate (poorly) an office environment.
This meeting stuff sounds like it is incredibly gimmicky with not much, if any, upside. Zoom calls are already a pita, can't imagine what a waste of time starting vr meetings would be.