While I agree virtual meeting may not be the answer, BUT it is important step in figuring out the balance. I think it's good that Meta is burning $$$ and advancing in figuring out the optimal solution on our behalf (consider it as RnD cost).
Irrespective of it, in case the headsets can become as easy as wearing glasses, I doubt why anyone wouldn't use it.
This isn’t more than efficient. Emulating real life is worse here.
I want to see innovations that take advantage of not being bounded by fucking office spaces.
It’s like writing an email client that forces you to hand write all of the emails and fill out the to field on a little envelope.
I hope meta also emulates how choosing a seat around a conference table is important.
Including because of power plugs, blinding or overheating sun from windows, and being closer to the boss makes you louder.
While not great, waaay better. Same as email isn’t great, but way better than mail.
Any other remote meeting features like virtual whiteboards are usually the same level of convenience, or more so. It’s almost like progressive enhancement when the meeting has both VR and non-VR attendees.
It’s hard to put into words. You have to try it. For some reason, that is not something a lot of HN users are willing to do with modern VR. Google Cardboard is not modern VR
But youtube obviously had something cable tv didn’t - user generated content. The Quest is the equivalent of youtube just being a crappy bootleg of cable TV.
> It’s hard to put into words. You have to try it. For some reason, that is not something a lot of HN users are willing to do with modern VR.
Because the current offer is “bad emulation of office meetings that weren’t great to begin with”.
Would you be thrilled to use a Quest to wait your turn in a virtual lobby of a DMV to talk to a teller to pay for a license renewal? Or would you rather just pay it online with a credit card on a web page?
Yes, but armchair pundits couldn’t see any advantage similar to how older people view VR now.
> Would you be thrilled to use a Quest to wait your turn in a virtual lobby of a DMV to talk to a teller to pay for a license renewal?
This is a terrible analogy because the DMV is not a meeting. It’s a service and it’s already being automated.
You have bad analogies because you haven’t used VR enough, if at all, to really have such a strong opinion. This is no different from senior citizens who used to constantly hurl insults at the internet, video games, comics, or any new trend
Today you don’t need to invest a lot of time or money in order to be familiar with VR. A meta quest is an affordable console, and so are many older gen PCVR headsets. You can also rent the meta quest or borrow it from certain libraries.
All of my analogies are exactly the same. It’s using technology to try to poorly replicate what already exists rather than using technology to enable a bunch of new things possible without the bounds of the physical world.
> This is a terrible analogy because the DMV is not a meeting. It’s a service and it’s already being automated.
You’re missing the point. Renewing a license over the Internet removed an instance of one of the worst facets of the DMV. Quest isn’t working on getting rid of the worst parts of meetings, it’s working on copying (poorly) the whole experience as-is.
The quest version of the DMV if the website didn’t already exist would be to sit in a waiting room. Innovation would be to get rid of it.
Given your comments, it’s very hard to believe that you’ve used VR much if at all. VR has many problems, but not the ones you’ve mentioned
After all this time, you’re still getting confused and think my complaints are about VR. They are not. I’ve used VR for gaming and simulations on and off for 6 years now.
The problem is not VR. The problem is Meta’s approach to what VR should be used for. They are taking some of the worst facets of business and copying them as-is into VR.
That’s why the DMV analogy. They’ve done nothing to improve the actual meetings which is why they would do nothing to improve the DMV experience beyond making the entire thing virtual.
You know what would be great? A VR DMV replacement for a basic driving test. Yet you didn’t even suggest that because your fixated on the most boring aspects of VR like Meta is.
That’s interesting because your complaints that are supposedly exclusive to meta are so generic that it seems to apply to VR at large. That and your DMV analogy would still lead me to conclude that you haven’t really used VR much if at all, but Ive been wrong before.
Coming back from the analogy, VR and specially AR should strive to use their advantages to create new intetaction experiences, instead of trying to mimic the onsite presence...
I want a high def AR whiteboard that I can "move" independently to my wall, while other people also move position it any way they want in their local environment.
Sure these bridges have plenty of problems today, and maybe they’ll go to nowhere. But maybe in the far future they’ll lead us to cruelty free, healthy designer tissues that taste better than anything an animal makes, and Bret Victor’s dynamic medium.
The discussion is in terms of using it for meetings and such, and in that case, there's nothing they've shown us that isn't "attend a meeting in person, remote", which I can do in zoom, without needing to wear a heavy, uncomfortable thing on my entire face, for most of a day. A number of things about it are actively worse. This is why I'm saying they're just showing us the same thing, in VR. There's nothing to be excited about.
That's too much effort to use.
Give me a minority report style interface, let me drag data and sites all around me in 360 degrees.
Take me on a walk through a 3d graph of your data as we discuss it.
Shrink me to the size of an ant, or explode me to the size of the sun in a model of the milky way to really understand scale.
But this... second life knockoff, "Hey lets have a meeting but we are on the beach" just feels so uninspired.
someone's not tried it.
VR meetings are, for a very select type of interaction, awesome. Talking to someone over VC is shite. Its half duplex, emotionally and physically draining. That effect is magnified when you add more than one other person.
VR meetings in a very supirsing way, feel more natural than VC. Its got 3d audio, which means low latency duplex talking can happen. You can have more than one conversation in the same VR "room"
None of that is possible with Video conferencing (yet).
Coffee shop, no 140ms ping time away, yes. But you are confusing latency with half duplex. VCs cut the sound to all other streams when someone is talking[1]. which causes huge stuttering.
[1] mostly
There's no way I'd want to have to strap a VR headset on to appear in a meeting I don't want to be in, and for it to be obvious when I'm ignoring it.
But I don't see any sign of that here. You're saying that, if the headsets were easy to wear, everyone would use them, but I can't imagine why. How's this better than a laptop with a camera? I can read text more easily on the laptop. I can share documents more easily on the camera. I can see people's faces and emotions more clearly with the camera. This gets me nothing, and it does so at significant cost.
This appears to be a solution desperately searching for a problem, and remote meetings certainly have problems, but this doesn't seem to be able to solve any of them.
Sure, I'll be excited about this if I really need to collaboratively design the frame of a car with a team that's all working remotely. It'll work great for that. But you know how often my meetings would be greatly eased with a collaborative 3D space? Not often.
Yep, agreed. I keep seeing glossy promos with people standing around collaborating on a design. But honestly how common is that? In my experience the collaborative moments are much fewer than the one person design marathons between meetings.
There seems to be a misplaced idea that everyone wants collaborative design. The Figma founder guy said something like "multiplayer design is the future". Really? I don't think so. The process of focused expertise in design is often driven by the designer, who then meets with colleagues or stakeholders to review and MAYBE try a few things in real time.
Collaborative real time design of course happens, but not as much as they're trying to express. Too many cooks being the basis of avoiding over-collaborative design!
for making the remote more efficient
Literally the worst of all worlds. Looks like you get the inefficiency of in person meetings... along with all of the tech headaches plus nausea... count me out
Whoa there - you’re speaking only for yourself! There’s a minority of us that abhor Teams and wish daily for another company to come up with something better. Of course, that doesn’t mean (badly) reinventing the wheel like this. Really, I’m just hoping for a snappier and more ergonomic Teams but I welcome any and all innovation in the space.
If your team is getting on a call to present things or to talk things through, you’re very likely on a train to nowhere.
In a remote setting, every ounce of effort spent toward emulating “meat space” distracts from the artifact, the work product, and the result.
I am on a team now who records meetings so they can re-watch them. Let that productivity drain set in.
If no meeting happened, but all the artifacts required to guide work exist and are accessible and understood, you come out ahead.
A pull request doesn't replace a meeting, but it can obviate the need for a meeting. Information sharing, done. Feedback and suggestions, captured. Goal and metrics, visible.
In my experience (working on both coding and non-coding initiatives) the most effective meetings are the ones teams ask for in addition to a thorough, async, text-driven collaborative process.
Can I type faster while wearing a headset and holding controllers? Can I navigate source code better than on my three 4k screens and ergonomic keyboard? Does it somehow improve my deployment workflow?
EDIT: I had the image of a "glasses" like VR form from the parent comment when making this comment. It is not talking about Meta's product.
There is nothing in the world that could convince me to bring a Meta VR headset into my home. May as well just install surveillance cameras and pipe the feed directly to Meta.
I don't personally want to wear a giant computer on my head all day.