This keeps getting repeated but aside from "it's not the status quo", I see little evidence for it. I'm sure nobody wanted to spend their entire waking and working life sitting in front of a computer screen back when PCs came out and yet here we are...
In the off chance that VR does work out, Meta's going to be a huge benefactor.
Besides the fact that only 50 people are in the Metaverse right now? Literally nobody is using VR for meetings and work and stuff. Nobody likes being cut off from all real human interactions. At least with a video call I can see your face and you can see mine. VR? it's just voice chat with a stupid headset.
> There is no reason they cannot be solved.
Explain?
How many people visit the metaverse multiple times per day?
What percent of the population spends hours per day in a VR headset?
The answer to those questions needs to be much better than "miniscule" for this project to be any sort of success.
This is a side project. Something to make sure FB has a foot in the game for when the technologies make "it all" (whatever that is) possible.
Part of me wonders if this is a decoy - look over here! While I do something useful elsewhere.
Saying we'll "never" get there, or that we couldn't get this into sunglasses-weight, does seem unrealistic. If joining a meeting was as easy as dropping on a pair of glasses, and I could "focus" on (virtually) further-away objects instead of just a computer screen in front of me, it would be pretty powerfully appealing.
I want this meeting to have higher immersion representations of the rest of the people in the meeting than boxes on a screen. I want to be able to shift my view to focus more on individuals. I want to be able to have a meeting with 40 people where I could still focus on a single person and see them with high-fidelity, instead of just having 20 of the boxes at low-res in front of me, with the rest off-screen. I want less eyestrain because I'm not just staring at a flat wall but my eyes are moving and shifting and re-focusing more. I want to have depth to things. I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody. All things I could do in the real world, but would be very hard to make seamless without a real-world interaction model.
Again, we clearly aren't there yet. But it's easy to imagine something better than what we have today.
>I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody.
None of this requires VR and is available in, for example, Jitsi video chats.
> How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.
My best guess of what this would look like would be much closer to glasses than a full headset (no "sticking" to the face) with very good ultra-wide cameras + image processing to capture your face and upper body language at the same time. Maybe toss in a desktop-mounted webcam too. Not 100% immersed/blackout, but quite possibly good enough to be better than a flat monitor with also isn't 100% of your FOV.