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Comment by prng2021 | Hacker News Reader

prng2021

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?

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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.

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)

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