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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

> It's funny that HN is pro-remote work but anti-innovations for making the remote more efficient

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.

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I find VR remote work'emulations' of onsite work to be akin to vegan food "emulation" of the non-vegan stuff: trying to "emulate " a non-vegan dish using th HF e vegan "replacement" ingredients makes it gross for me. Instead, there are plenty of great "originally vegan" dishes.

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.

The meat and meatspace “replacements” are bridge technologies that reduce the suffering of animals and people respectively. Sometimes a vegan just wants a burger. Sometimes an exec just needs a little help to let go.

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.

This is just like early smart phones, early PCs, and the internet before the 2000s. Yes, there are many flaws, but can’t people see the future potential?

People can't see the future potential because the people actively working on it aren't showing us any future potential. Everything they're showing is worse versions of what we currently have, but "in VR!".

That’s not true. The main reason you’ve written this is simply because you have yet to try a VR system that wasn’t the equivalent to Google cardboard

I used one of the newer oculus recently. It was fun for a short period of time. It wasn't so great that I'd spend a considerably amount of time wearing it, because it's so much effort to use.

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.

Zoom is terrible for presence, as in feeling like both of you are in the same place which VR achieves quite easily even with terrible graphics. That is very hard to demo. You have to experience it yourself for more than one 5 minute session. I strongly doubt that you’ve even used a Quest just based on your comments. It has many problems and flaws, but “too much effort to use” isn’t one of them.

Putting something on that requires full immersion requires you to be able to fully block out time, and have physical space available, with all of the necessary equipment is effort. That physical space also needs to be a trusted space, since you're unable to know what's going on around you. For zoom, I can join on my cell phone, from basically anywhere.

That's too much effort to use.

Absolutely!

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.

That email client analogy is brilliant.

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.

Have you tried meeting in VR on quest compared to zoom?

While not great, waaay better. Same as email isn’t great, but way better than mail.

I haven’t but am curious what you thought were the biggest improvements over a standard meeting. Did you try virtual sticky notes/whiteboarding or any other collaborative tasks?

VR adds a third dimension compared to a typical remote meeting. For me, this gives a sense of locality, as if you’re sitting next to a specific person (not a bunch of tiles) and can communicate with them naturally. Features like breakout rooms are not required.

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.

That’s a big thing that I find missing. In zoom meetings you can’t talk over each other. Like in a normal room of people there can be a bunch of conversations happening at once (like you can whisper to the person next to you if there’s a presentation, or even during a gathering you can walk around and say hi to different people)

It’s the immersion of “being there”. It’s the same reason why playing poker in VR is better than playing it on a flatscreen against your friends and family who are hundreds of miles away. Yes, visual fidelity isn’t the best when using something like a Quest, but there’s still something there just like when people first tried out YouTube. I’m sure there were people going, “why not watch cable Tv instead?”

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

> like when people first tried out YouTube. I’m sure there were people going, “why not watch cable Tv instead?”

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?

> But youtube obviously had something cable tv didn’t - user generated content.

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

I think the point is that the goal of a meeting is not to have a meeting, so being more meeting-like is not necessarily a good thing.

My point is that a lot of the people complaining about VR haven’t even tried it to experience its immersion. Until you understand that, you won’t understand what VR brings to meetings. It doesn’t demo well on a flat screen.

These comments are extremely unconvincing. If the best sales pitch for VR is that you need to invest a bunch of time and money in order to see why it's worth investing a bunch of time and money into, that makes me even more skeptical about it's future. VR will never grow beyond a niche of technical fans until less interested users can see the value.

No, the point we’re making is that you need to just try it instead of making lots of terrible and wrong assumptions about a subject matter that you’re not very familiar with

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.

I have used VR a lot. What Quest is chasing is the old person’s vision of what VR should be - a bad mirror of reality. All of the good VR innovation I’ve seen has been in games.

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.

I feel that you’re missing the point. Your DMV example is just terrible and not applicable. If it ever gets translated from the web to VR, it is not going to being a line queue / waiting game. It’s a ridiculous assertion.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Emails still retain the structure of intra-office memos, something which hasn't existed for at least 20 years. We don't really notice with emails, because the initial real-world analogy became a minor detail of the more technologically evolved system. An optimistic view would be that VR will follow a similar trajectory, and attempts to recreate the real world will eventually give way to real innovations. The idea of the metaverse (and especially Meta's version), though, is so focussed on the real world analogy, I think it's more likely to be a barrier to this kind of innovation than an early version of it.

> 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.

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).

VR doesn’t solve low latency, which is what causes people to talk over each other. I assume you haven’t tried VR with one participant on a saturated coffee shop WiFi 2k miles away.

> I assume you haven’t tried VR with one participant on a saturated coffee shop WiFi 2k miles away.

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

Amen. I'm happy being able to join all-hands Teams meetings, mute them and do something I want to with my life. When I was in the office I had to sit there and waste my life. Now I don't have to keep up the pretense of caring.

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.

Perhaps emulating real life is a prerequisite to real innovations in VR. It may be hard to get mass adoption of more unfamiliar paradigms.

And perhaps it's not. Perhaps the boundaries of the imagination of the product people are limiting what is being created here. "Wouldn't it be cool if you could travel in a virtual car and go to a virtual mall where there were virtual shops and you could walk around them and buy stuff?" Well no it wouldn't be cool. The internet is better than that already and most people who look at this think it's terrible because it is. If you produce something that is a facsimile of the real world it's always going to be a pale imitation. If you want people to adopt it, it has to be better in some important way that they care about.

There's many VR headsets and even the Oculus store has tons of other productivity apps. The most popular one on Oculus isn't Horizon Workrooms, it's ImmersedVR. This is a Meta announcement so of course it's about Meta, but it's not like WWDC coverage means only Apple makes computers, phones, and OSes.

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