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Comment by pitched | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been a very early adopter of this tech (Kickstarter backer of Oculus), get zero motion sickness and have a great time working in VR through a virtual desktop. This looks like a few floating screens in front of my face, in a space station and I’m typing on a real Bluetooth keyboard. I think this is the only way companies will be able to keep remote-friendly polices and stay competitive with product. YMMV because I am biased to be for this, but, the way they’ve tuned this Pro model looks like it’s exactly for my use-case.

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There are a lot of people pooh-poohing this who haven't tried a meeting in Workrooms. I was skeptical going in, even as a VR early adopter, and it exceeded my expectations by a long way. It feels a whole lot more like a real meeting than a Zoom call does.

I don't know if it's enough better for me to choose it over Zoom in everyday use, but this was on Quest 2. A meeting where everyone is wearing Quest Pro will be significantly better. I expect that the combination of the better screen/lenses, better comfort, much better AR passthrough, and of course the new eye/face tracking will make for a very compelling experience.

> enough better for me to choose it over Zoom in everyday use

It doesn’t have to be better than Zoom. It has to be $1500 better than Zoom. Per employee.

I’m in agreement with you — I like Immersed and I like the idea of VR meetings. But will people/employers opt for this over a hybrid on-site/remote system? How do VR meetings work when half the team is onsite in a conference zoom? I don’t want to put on a VR a headset to talk to the coworker sitting physically next to me in a conference room.

Sadly, I see this as useful only for remote-only teams. As one of a handful of remote people on my team, it doesn’t seem like a workable option, even if I already like/use VR.

My team has been using Quest 2 for meetings for the past 4 months. My verdict is that it is highly preferable to video calls IFF you didn’t have to wear that terribly uncomfortable device with laggy external cameras. We’re knocking at the door of the future here but the tech is still way behind where it needs to be for widespread adoption. Is this headset that leap forward?

I'm waiting to see what the rumored Apple headset is like. It seems like minimizing the size and weight of actual electronics in the headset is the missing part of the current round of competition, and Apple is very good at that.

I think there needs to be a few things solved:

1. The lenses. Fresnel lens are a pain, if you aren't dead centre of the headset slips because of sweat, you get blurriness.

2. The weight. I have a Quest 2, and while light, it's still noticeable, and I definitely wouldn't want to work on it.

3. Resolution. You're trying to replace IRL UHD Human Vision, a resolution of 1920 x 1832 isn't going to cut it.

I enjoyed the stuff I tried in VR when it was novel, but mostly now it sits on the side, doing nothing. It just didn't hold my attention for long enough.

Good thing Quest Pro improves on all of those things. (Technically not weight, but weight distribution which is huge).

> It doesn’t have to be better than Zoom. It has to be $1500 better than Zoom. Per employee.

Is this sarcasm? That's less than 2/3rds of the entry-level price of a 16" MacBook Pro.

If whatever your (remote) business makes isn't valuable enough to spend $125 / month per employee on (assuming you buy a new system every year!), then the future is bleak...

I think you’re doing the math wrong.

The question isn’t if your business can afford to spend $125/mo on VR headset for every employee (I’d even amortize that over 2-3 years to $42-62/mo).

The question is — does the employer get more than $125/mo of benefit out of the VR solution — for every employee that needs to attend meetings. Because this only works if everyone in a meeting has a headset. And you’re only going to see $CORP buying these headsets if they get more benefit out of them than they cost.

Buying a ten seat license for Zoom Pro is an easy thing to approve. The laptop/computer required for a zoom meeting (as you pointed out) is already a sunk cost. Buying $15k of VR gear to have that same 10-person meeting is a much tougher pill to swallow.

For some small teams, I could see this absolutely making sense. But Facebook needs to sell this to large enterprises to have the transformational impact they are looking for.

There is zero chance my enterprise would go for this - besides which taking on and off VR headsets during the day vs opening Microsoft Teams just doesn't currently seem that practical.

I'm sure the day will come where this is more normal, but there are still a few more cultural and technical hurdles to overcome.

During the last lockdown here, I took a few meetings in VR with a digital avatar (using teams) and it was a pretty good experience and broke up the monotony of working from home, but I haven't done it again since being back in hybrid mode...

All that being said, I desperately want one of these to try out as essentially a 'replacement' for my monitor at home.

> All that being said, I desperately want one of these to try out as essentially a 'replacement' for my monitor at home.

I’m very much in the same situation. I have a Quest 1 and 2. And they were great during lock down to have something for my kids to do to be active indoors. I had a few meetings that way too and liked Immersed the few times I used it.

But, this has me excited. (But not for meetings)

I’m very interested to see how this new headset will work as a monitor replacement. Especially if I can take my “work” environment home with me, or when I’m working in the car while waiting for my kid’s $SPORT practice.

It’s just as difficult to swallow a $15K cloud bill and companies do that every month. They will have money to buy employees VR equipment to improve productivity with the money they saved on real estate.

My company profits millions a year and I can barely get a new keyboard as a top SW developer :) While working for a small startup of 5, I had very nice equipment.

$1500 is nothing if it makes remote collaboration competitive with IRL collaboration.

But how often do you have exclusively remote collaboration?

I’m sure for many people that is common. It’s not for me. Normally I’m talking with a few people remote in zoom and the rest of the team on site in a conference room.

For remote exclusive groups, this makes sense.

But does it make sense for businesses to buy this for all of their employees — if they have a hybrid workforce? I would expect most employers will or are shifting towards a hybrid setup.

How many remote-only employers are there? Is it enough of a market to make this more than a gimmick?

I get VR for personal use. I get it for one-to-one communication. But I’m skeptical for business communication.

I work at a place that technically has an office, but 99% of the time only a single person is in it during the week, and 80% of my team now lives across the world (they started here in Aus but moved) -- we're as close to "remote only" as you can get, but my boss and I had a laugh at the Quest Pro (despite us both being VR users!) today when it was announced. Even for remote-only work, it's just not there yet, and not at $2500 AUD per device. Maybe if the next version has a much higher resolution for better text rendering on N virtual screens, so they can have dual-purpose.

The resolution is a real disappointment. Having experimented with a regular quest for virtual monitors its clear that insufficient resolution is one of the biggest problems currently. They have made some other improvements that in theory improve the effective resolution. I will watch the reviews to see how much that actually helps but its hard to imagine it making the kind of difference I think is necessary.

i have no idea how well it addresses it but Zuckerberg did specifically acknowledge this in his keynote. He talked specifically about ensuring seamless experience for people using flat screens with Zoom and Teams mixed with those in VR. I don't think your assumption that it's only for pure remote is valid, at least certainly in terms of what Meta is working on.

1500$/employee is cheaper than flying them to an offsite. Heck you could buy 100 of these and ship them to employees temporarily for their offsite.

Why bother with offsites when video conferencing is ubiquitous?

After working in an extremely remote friendly workplace prior to the pandemic, and then with everyone working remotely for two years, I think the results of the natural experiment is in. There's zero benefit to being physically together in the 2020s.

Even when I've been offsite before, it's just a waste money. Sit in a room with my laptop? Uh... I was already doing that. Look at this person's screen? Already can did that. Go out and get Thai food and cocktails on corporate account? Well, I couldn't do that.

I joined a company and worked remotely for about a year before meeting anyone I worked with (in person). We eventually did all meet up and it was great.

There is just enough latency in video conferencing that people start talking at the same time a lot. This is fine in short meetings. But when we wanted to discuss larger structural changes for longer periods of time, it was exhausting. It worked much better in person.

> Go out and get Thai food and cocktails on corporate account? Well, I couldn't do that.

That also provides lots of value in my book. People talk about random shit and sometimes that creates good ideas. Also it's just nice to actually meet the people you work with.

I'm not saying you need constant off-sites, but meeting up sometimes is great.

> There's zero benefit to being physically together in the 2020s.

Correction - 0 benefit for you. And that’s fine. For many others not getting together in person severely impacts productivity.

You’re going to have to do better than simply stating that somewhere someone might possibly benefit and therefore everyone has to change their life to accommodate.

Me and most of coworkers in my org of 50 people fully voluntary come to the office, as being together in person increases our productivity, that was down during COVID.

Meanwhile you claim that because it works for you, it becomes a dogma that people shouldn't work together in person?

Sorry, it hard to take your arguments seriously.

The point of mixed reality is that you can beam people into the space. So the people in the room could watch on a TV and be there in person if they wanted, while everyone else was there in VR.

The main reason I don't see it working for meetings is because it's relatively a hassle to put it on and going into meetings I want everything to happen fast and painless. Every delay or extra step is to be avoided. Sometimes you have a series of back to back meetings where things really need to work fast.

Besides, haven't tried the Pro but everything else I did try isn't there in terms of comfort. A lot of people wear glasses and it's just a bad experience for them.

The last point that seems to be unaccounted for is the flexibility of current voice meetings. You can connect from almost any device anywhere. You can join a meeting from your car. I somehow sense that's going to be a tad problematic with a VR headset.

Quest Pro actually addresses those concerns. The head mount style is miles easier than the Quest 2 strap; it looks much more like PSVR if you've tried that. Putting on PSVR feels more like putting on a hat. It rests more on top of your head and doesn't smash your face. In fact, unlike other VR headsets it looks like Quest Pro doesn't contact your face at all, and leaves plenty of room for glasses. There's no charging cable to plug/unplug, no external tracker, and you don't need the controllers for meetings, so the headset is entirely self-contained. It could literally be as simple as five seconds to pick the headset up off your desk and put it on like a hat and it turns on automatically and you're in.

Of course the ultimate idea is you'll be doing your regular work on virtual screens in VR, so you won't even need to don/doff the headset. But I think comfort and battery life and screen resolution will need to improve further for that to be realistic for most people.

As for flexibility, Workrooms supports standard video calling just fine. You can join from your laptop or phone and still participate. To the VR participants you appear on a large projection screen, and you see the VR participants using a virtual meeting room camera. So you lose nothing in terms of flexibility.

Exactly, people show up 5-10 minutes late to meetings where they have to click a single button to join, and we expect them to hook in to a VR setup before joining?

Not to mention that "too many meetings" is a thing many of us complain about. Just because they might be "VR meetings" doesn't take away the feeling that you're having too many meetings.

I tried out Horizon Worlds recently and I was honestly amazed by how immersive it was. I genuinely felt like I was out socialising with people while sat at home.

I can definitely see the use cases, especially as the technology improves. If there were live VR music events that me and my friends in different cities and countries could all attend to feel together I imagine I'd use it quite often.

This comment reminds me my first times in geocities chatrooms, talking with people all over the world. Welcome to the future.

> live VR music events

How does that work? Do you mean the band members are avatars too? Or are you talking about a DJ pressing play, and you're in VR space with your friends basically listening to a playlist?

Or are you in a VR cinema with your friends, watching a live stream of a real band?

It's done a few different ways, I don't think the perfect solution has been found yet. DJs or bands have performed as avatars by using full body tracking. More commonly, the performer will have a camera on them and the video is displayed on a screen in the VR event. They can also see what's happening in the event so it's possible for them to interact with the crowd. As headsets become lighter and more comfortable and FBT gets easier with inside out camera tracking or better trackers; performing as an avatar will become more common. The events are usually in environments that look like clubs or concert halls.

Aren't there several companies that do that ?

Maybe https://wavexr.com/ for example?

Is agreeing to the third party abusive Meta/Facebook TOS going to be a requirement of employment with third parties then?

Will users be permitted to create accounts only for work?

If not, when your personal account gets banned or disabled, will you be unable to work?

The Facebook login requirement is gone. If you are banned from Facebook you can use Quest, no problem. Yes, you can create a separate work account. In fact, Workplace accounts are separate already.

This is what kept me from trying Quest despite being a VR superfan. Once they finally announced the account change I took the plunge and picked one up

I just didn't want to risk losing hundreds of dollars' worth of games because Facebook's retarded algorithms decided they don't like some meme I posted years ago.

(Actually, Facebook's moderation has kept me from using it for anything other than posting family photos and clicking the "like" button on others' photos.. it's just too risky that I'll cross a line and get deleted)

I’ve heard they still maintain real name basis for the Meta login requirement though…

That is incorrect.

From https://www.meta.com/help/accounts/set-up-meta-account/#:~:t....

> Email: You can only create one Meta account per email address. First and last name: We recommend using your real name in case you need to recover your account or manage your store purchases, but it is not required.

My Meta account doesn't have my real name and I don't recall anything requesting I add it.

Do something to get it in trouble and see if you can get back in without showing ID.

Is this a general change? My Rift was nice but it has been gathering dust since that change, it would be cool to hear they've relented.

Yes it is a general change. A Facebook account is no longer needed to use VR. You can link a Facebook account if you so choose, but even then a ban on Facebook has no effect on your access to VR.

If you have an old Oculus account, it can be converted directly into a Meta account.

See https://www.meta.com/help/accounts/set-up-meta-account/ and https://www.oculus.com/blog/getting-started-with-meta-accoun....

Note that it will be far easier to convert your Oculus account before 1 January 2023.

I've been reluctant to try getting my coworkers into VR because they'd probably just laugh at me, but a couple of friends and I met up in VR (we're all fully-grown professionals) and it was great. Meetings in VR would be a lot more productive, IMO.

Never tried it,

Can you see the micro expressions on your audience faces?

Can you draw on a whiteboard with fidelity similar to that of RL chalkboard?

Can I take notes?

> Can you see the micro expressions on your audience faces?

No, but you get an amazing amount of context from their body language

> Can you draw on a whiteboard with fidelity similar to that of RL chalkboard?

Yes

> Can I take notes?

I never tried this, but I can imagine several ways to do so (the simplest of which is to just record the meeting & the contents of the whiteboard).

The idea of being painted as a literal second class citizen if you have lower end hardware is gross, but it's also the natural destination of progressive enhancement if e.g. facial expressions only work with the expensive thing.

Snow Crash is getting closer and closer it seems, the distinction between the rich folks with their outrageous avatars in the inner city and the plebeians who access the 'net through some public terminal which provides them with a nondescript black-and-white avatar - which is not allowed to enter the inner city - is a clear feature of its world.

It’s the other way around. Wealthy people can opt out of Meta’s VR surveillance apparatus, others cannot.

Many if not most things in life can be improved by spending more money, in ways that give you practical and social advantages. It's not as if VR is unique in that respect.

> The idea of being painted as a literal second class citizen if you have lower end hardware is gross

This is true for cars, houses, PC gamers, console gamers, mechanics, chefs, etc etc etc

On the Internet, by default, I have no idea how nice your car, house, computer, or food is. We're talking on a website that would comfortably load on 1990s hardware.

Meta is just one small corner of this and as such doesn't perhaps deserve particular blame, but it's sad to think about how we've slowly eroded the Internet's fundamentally democratic, equalizing nature.

The lowest common denominator poses heavy limitations of what can be done. I agree with you but also sympathize with those who want to go beyond text and still images.

I agree! The Internet can be way more than a text forum like this. My point was merely that we don't have to build an online world that reflects our real world's democratic leakages. We can simply choose to do better, so long as we're willing to say no to some (but not all!) forms of profit.

There's a big difference between driving a lowend car and literally not being able to express yourself.

I am well aware that status and appearance are already things in real life, but it becomes a whole different thing when it gets intermixed with your identity. Your actual person is worse because you didn't buy the upgrade. That's way different than not having a cool shirt or whatever.

This is something to worry about when we're at the level of VR adoption where people are conducting their daily business in the metaverse. At that point, camera based face and body tracking will likely be dirt cheap and included with even the most basic headset. Having a good network connection will be a bigger divider since that technology is improving much more slowly and unevenly.

If we weren't already talking about a luxury item such as a VR headset, I might agree. But I can't feel sorry for someone who buys a non-essential item and then feels hard done by because they didn't buy a better non-essential item to be honest.

> It feels a whole lot more like a real meeting than a Zoom call does.

I haven't had the chance to try it myself, so can you explain how it's better?

I feel like the main problem with remote meetings is the audio latency. You cannot speak as you would naturally, you'd speak in turn instead. I'm guessing VR allows you to give and receive visual cues about this so it might be better, is this what you had in mind?

The audio latency is better. You're not sending or receiving HD video so your connection is less loaded and the audio doesn't ever have to be delayed to synchronize with video. And VR devices are better optimized for low latency than your average system. Visual cues for turn taking while speaking work better, as you mentioned. Spatial audio is awesome for locating speakers and differentiating multiple speakers at once. Hand gestures work better; you can actually point at things in a shared 3D space.

People just won’t put on world-occluding headsets to talk to cartoons, end of the day. Only in bubble-land does this pass the smell test imo.

I remember swearing up and down that I didn't need a phone I could carry everywhere with me. This was in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

What communication was so important that it couldn't wait until I was home, next to my land line and answering machine?

Phones work because they are so simple, unobtrusive and easy to position and use contextually. They are the argument against VR.

Have you seen the cellphones of the late 1980s? https://techcentral.co.za/the-cellphones-of-the-1980s/191544...

While phones now are "simple, unobtrusive and easy to position and use contextually", they certainly weren't then.

And they weren’t as popular then. They also were unobtrusive in the ways that matter - you could walk around and talk while doing other things. David Foster Wallace has a whole thing on this in IJ that really captures it well, where even corded phones are really better than we give credit because they give you freedom and privacy. You can do chores, look in the mirror, and signal to people in the room all while talking.

If anything I think things move more towards Slack Huddle where you retain your freedom of movement in favor of just voice + screen. It’s an anachronistic pov to try and force real world into virtual so literally.

It’s just a very SV thing to ignore all the social and emotional needs and just look at “oh it’s higher fidelity” or whatever. If it was all about immersion people would carry iPads around, but they don’t.

The difference in asking someone to give 10% of their vision to a TV or phone screen that can be turned away from with 0 effort, vs giving 100% of their vision, with considerable effort to enter and leave, is so under appreciated.

I don't think you've spent enough time learning about the technology or the goals of its proponents to argue against it. You're starting to veer off into strawman territory. Most VR proponents see two big use cases: immersive entertainment and augmented reality.

Immersive entertainment will demand 100% of your attention but you will want to give it 100% because there is no other way to have such a deep experience otherwise. Watching a movie or playing a game on a screen is fine but it doesn't give you the same visceral reactions that you have with even the simplest VR experiences like standing on a ledge 10 stories up or killing an NPC in melee combat. Both feel real and the second one can be quite disturbing the first time you do it even though the graphics are still low res. I've never experienced anything that even came close through a normal screen

Augmented reality will be unobtrusive and only demand part of your attention. It will be additive to the world around you and it will replace the phone in your pocket along with thousands of other things. This technology is still a long ways off but we're already building the bridge to it with mixed reality and high-res passthrough.

I don’t think you have the capability to understand this thread.

I’m talking about virtual meetings specifically, and then adding a note about why it’ll never be generally popular like we see smartphones only because someone replied with that.

I’ve used VR and whatever joke AR exists (the MS headset) extensively and I don’t need to be familiar with “proponents” to make any argument whatsoever.

VR will be cool for sunset of gaming, some may like it for work. Meetings not so much. AR doesn’t even really exist and no passthrough doesn’t count at least not this decade.

Hey man, I wasn't trying to start a fight so reel it in a bit. If you don't like VR personally, that's fine but I don't think your personal experience generalizes to everyone.

I'm perfectly happy admitting that VR will remain niche for quite some time, just like cellphones did and pretty much for the same reasons: size, cost, battery life, cold start of a tech that requires network effects to grow, and social acceptability of use in public spaces. Similar cycles played a factor in the adoption of home computers and the internet, it takes a while for new technology to get off the ground and the initial versions of it are always clunky and unergonomic compared to later revisions that take into account knowledge gained by building and deploying the naive and constrained design.

VR headsets won't always look like they do now, that can be guaranteed as long as technological progress continues. We can argue about the timeline but I admit that no one can predict the future so what's the point. I do think VR will matter for meetings and social activities, there's a huge market consisting of people who live far away from their loved ones or who lose touch with friends after a move. As the technology and UX improve it will become more common to visit someone in VR instead of calling them occasionally. I did say AR doesn't exist and that what we have right now is MR (Mixed Reality) which involves passthrough. I don't even know what sunset of gaming means, it sounds as non-sensical as sunset of movies or sunset of radio to me.

Subset.

Hey man, I don't think you've spent enough time learning about technology nor humanity to argue any of this.

Your own fault for a bad conversation.

VR with inside-out tracking is way easier to use casually than wired PCVR.

> People just won’t put on world-occluding headsets to talk to cartoons

People already do with VRChat (current average about 19,000 users/day on Steam, likely much more on the standalone app on the Quest 2), and it frankly sucks in a ton of ways. Take an app that captures the same user interest, fix all the shitty parts, and put it on better hardware and I would expect user numbers to explode.

The headset here doesn’t occlude the world it has video pass through.

I think the entire player population of VRChat would like to disagree with you.

The audio latency problem is solved with spatial audio. In VRChat you can easily follow a conversation with 10 people talking over each other, because the audio comes from the direction of their avatars and you can tune it in and out naturally like you do in real life.

$1800 to ram the concept of physical meetings remotely instead of adapting to the benefits of remote work is a comically steep price that only SV tech bros will consider.

Even the NYC finance people blowing that weekly on cocaïne will laugh their asses off at the idea.

The hardware looks pretty good. I bought a HP reverb G2 because it had the highest resolution. While not bad, i learned that resolution isn't everything as the picture is pretty blurry anywhere except dead ahead due to the Fresnel lenses, so the new pancake lenses sound promising. I also don't get motion sickness and might be interested in working in VR if the readability is good. My only other hold up is that even at 36 years old and using computers since I was 5, I still don't type properly and do occasionally look down at the keyboard lol. Would be great if the forward facing cameras will allow this.

The Quest 1 and 2 also have fresnel lenses but they're not all that blurry. Sharpest dead ahead sure but it's not terrible.

And I wonder if the pancake lenses are really better there. I think god rays will be significantly reduced but edge sharpness is really hard to do with such close focus. The light path at the edges of the LCD to the eye could be twice as long than in the middle.

Meta Workrooms has passthrough mode for just the keyboard so you can still look down at your fingers when you're typing.

This feature is surprisingly polished. Your keyboard is tracked by the headset and it renders a high quality model in place of it, and when the headset sees your hands go over the keyboard, it overlays the video of your hands into the scene.

I think this is the only way companies will be able to keep remote-friendly polices and stay competitive with product.

People have built billion dollar companies entirely remotely without VR (eg Gitlab), so why will it become a requirement in the future? What change will happen to make it a necessity?

> get zero motion sickness

Whatever the opposite of a killer app is called (maybe "app killer"?) this is it.

Even if it afflicts a relatively small number of users, it's a serious problem. Besides terrible PR (people less likely to try it because of the risk of a bad experience) it's the fact that any technology that arbitrarily excludes some non-tiny portion of the population is problematic for broad acceptance.

Does anybody actually get motion sickness in apps where there's no motion?

I've never seen an instance of that. If it does happen to some people I'd be very curious about what causes it since there's no obvious reason why it should occur.

I’ve gotten motion sickness just looking at static images from Google Earth. I used to work at Facebook and saw some talks on this. As I understand it, the problem is basically one of latency; the time between when your head moves and when the image updates should be < 7 ms or something like that.

If getting the response times below 7ms is all that's required to fix that problem for the small minority of people who have it then that still seems pretty doable. You would need a 144hz display though.

Are you sure you weren't experiencing other problems though, like stuttering or dropped frames? I've noticed Google Earth can have performance issues sometimes depending on how detailed the 3d imagery is in the area you're viewing.

> If getting the response times below 7ms is all that's required to fix that problem for the small minority of people who have it then that still seems pretty doable. You would need a 144hz display though.

It's not just the frame rate. When your eyes and inner ear don't agree on the perception of movement you can end up with motion sickness. It's very easy in VR for your eyes to see movement counter to what's being perceived by your inner ear.

You should try the original Oculus Rift dev kit.

It didn’t do any head (other than rotation) tracking, and it’s extremely disorienting to move your head and have the view be static.

I'd count that as motion. Instead of the world remaining static when you move your head, it moves with you.

This gets better and better as the hardware improves. Most VR nausea is caused by poor hardware performance

That's probably going to be the inevitable problem with VR solutions though, right? Maybe not in the tech bubble, but outside of that, I absolutely can see this going down as some version of "execs get the latest and greatest VR headset, average employee gets the shitty thing from 5 generations ago that induces massive motion sickness" in non-tech companies.

No, it isn’t because that would mean lost productivity if you’re hinting that anyone not c level gets a nausea inducing headset.

Apparently its also a problem that affects older people more than younger ones.

Good luck getting your VR meetings product off the ground when your 50 year old boss can’t use it without getting sick.

The worst part is that if you try and fight through the sickness, you'll actually condition yourself to get sicker. If you power through sim sickness enough, you'll get to a point where you feel like tossing your cookies when you just look at or think about a VR headset.

I think it's become a major problem in the VR game market. Everyone except the super hard core has been burned away by sim sickness, so now all the remaining fans demand intense but nausea-inducing experiences with no comfort options (or too-easily disabled comfort options)

> The worst part is that if you try and fight through the sickness, you'll actually condition yourself to get sicker.

Yes. This is absolutely true. Whatever you do: DON'T try to 'fight through it'. As soon as you don't feel well, STOP. Then pick it up later. Soon you will be able to go for a longer time and it'll disappear completely. Make sure your IDP is set correctly. Get an optometrist to check it for you to make sure. Looking crosseyed (unknowingly) really does not help things.

If you tried doing it that way you were really doing it wrong. You could indeed develop a negative association to the headset. I had this with the DK1 (Development Kit 1) of the Rift, but this was because it simply had horribly inaccurate 3DOF tracking (not 6DOF as required in the real world), and also a high persistance display.

> I think it's become a major problem in the VR game market. Everyone except the super hard core has been burned away by sim sickness, so now all the remaining fans demand intense but nausea-inducing experiences with no comfort options (or too-easily disabled comfort options)

It's not. First of all, you have to take it easy like I described. You will accomodate to it much better. Yes some people will never manage it but it's a really small percentage. If you can ride in the back of a car without getting sick, you can do this as long as you take it easy.

Also, the experiences Meta is aiming for here don't involve rollercoasters and the like. VR is totally fine if you're moving normally within your free tracked space. The problem starts happening when you move with the stick without actually moving, because the disassociation between the visual and inertial senses. The teleportation option helps a lot.

But in a business meeting really you don't have to move around a lot. As long as your motions within that small space are tracked accurately, there will be no motion sickness.

> If you can ride in the back of a car without getting sick

I can do that if I'm looking out the window, but not if I try to read a book or watch a video.

Attention and focus seems to have a lot to do with the problem, which makes sense since the issue is a disconnect between what your brain is experiencing and what your inner ear is experiencing.

> Get an optometrist to check it for you to make sure.

There are plenty of phone apps that can get you an IPD measurement that's accurate enough for glasses prescriptions.

I get motion sickness when I'm playing regular video games, not even VR, that's entirely out of the question.

If I don't stop at the first sign of queasiness, which for me creeps up quite slowly, if I don't notice and it gets reasonably strong, it will keep building for another half hour after I stop and can take up to 2 hours to go away. The only thing I can do is lie down with my eyes closed and think about not throwing up.

With me, the more focused I am on the game, even if the screen takes up a smaller part of my vision, the sicker I get. The more my lizard brain thinks its reality, the worse it is.

I don't think that's true in every case. When I first started playing VR I would sometimes get a little motion sick. I kept playing and only took breaks when it got bad. Now almost nothing makes me motion sick except when my headset massively bugs out and the world freezes and even then I don't get that sick just a bit uncomfortable.

I've heard of other people purposely training themselves to not be motion sick by playing fairly extreme games or in one case a developer who built a world that would repeatedly drop him from a height.

I don't doubt that it's possible to have the opposite outcome, it probably depends on the person and the process they're going through. I just don't think it's a general rule.

> get zero motion sickness and have a great time working in VR through a virtual desktop

Do you not wind up sweaty? Every time I wear a VR headset for more than a few minutes it's .....moist.

The inserts that come with the headset are not very breathable. You could change those.

There are small fans that attach to the headset. I've found that they help quite a bit.

I don't, as long as ambient temperature is below 25 or so degrees C.

I'm in Spain so this kinda rules out using it in summer for long. But most of the year it's fine.

I have to say the new silicone 'skin' they provided to Quest 2 owners makes the sweatiness a bit worse, but it is easier to clean. And the original Quest 2 material was prone to causing skin irritation so I didn't want to risk it for too long.

What headset are you using? This is the setup I'd like to try rather than buying new monitors.

The main sticking point for me is that my real desktop/workspace has much better privacy than these new virtual ones

What do you mean by that? How does a physical display on your desk provide better privacy than a physical display a few inches from you eyes? It’s not some shared/cloud display.

When you use a meta headset, the cameras on the outside film the environment around you. In order to use for example the gesture recognition feature, you consent for that video to be sent to meta as an AI training input.

Although your boss, today, doesn't get extra information, you are inviting a faceless organisation to collect hugely intrusive data about your home, much as if you install an Alexa or Google home.

How much privacy we sacrifice for convenience and features is a decision we all need to make - and it's a difficult decision because I actually don't care if facebook have photos of my messy desk. But I would care if they got hacked an my credit card got leaked, very practically, or if an employer provided unit fed my HR telemetry about my stress levels or how much of the time I spent pooping. That would not be an acceptable tradeoff and it is possible.

> In order to use for example the gesture recognition feature, you consent for that video to be sent to meta as an AI training input.

Then don’t consent to the 10ft tall disclaimer, if it exists. I never use hand tracking, and work in VR just fine. I imagine that need will go away once they have enough training data. The hand tracking has improved tremendously since launch.

It sounds like you believe there are data leaks that aren’t being disclosed in the privacy policy. You should contact a lawyer if you have insider information on this.

>I’ve been a very early adopter of this tech (Kickstarter backer of Oculus), get zero motion sickness

Me too!

Have you written about your setup anywhere? Are you willing to dump some notes and share?

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