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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

I love that eye tracking is built in this bodes well for my VR hypothesis:

The killer app for the VR platform is eye contact.

In my opinion Zoom should be investing heavily in this, and Zoom’s market is the one newcomers stand to gain.

The giant feature that Real Life™ has and teleconferencing lacks is the subtle baton passing, engagement reading, and tone modulation that is enabled by eye contact. A square of video just isn’t the same.

My corollary hypothesis for why this hasn’t been done yet is that the Mark Zuckerbergs and John Carmacks of the world are on the autism spectrum, they get by without this information, and therefore don’t realize how much the rest of us rely on it.

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I'm a UX Engineer. My phone was ringing off the hook to build VR meeting software in the early 2010s, and I couldn't understand the appeal of either seeing people wearing computers on their faces, or in having conferences with cartoon avatars.

I do. During the pandemic I experimented with some colleagues with VR meeting software like Spatial and Arthur. I thought they were great. These days there's also Viverse which is also impressive. And then there's Microsoft Mesh which we get for free but which is ridiculously behind all the others. It's cool but there's nothing you can actually do in it. You can't pull in a presentation, movie clip, 3D object, collaborate on a whiteboard etc. You can just watch a teams meeting and play some games and roast marshmallows.

For a regular "death by powerpoint" meeting where 95% of participants are just being bored by a single presenter, no, not for those. But for brainstorming workshops, yes definitely.

The avatars are cartoony but for me that doesn't matter. They represent the person for me after a small adjustment period.

It gave me a much stronger feeling of being together. And it's much easier to break out into little groups, much much easier than those 'breakout rooms' in teams which are pretty inflexible. Here you can just walk over to another group just in real life. It really felt like being there with them and after taking the headset off I had this feeling of suprise of being at home.

It was also great to be able to import 3D models of our products and discuss them.

> In my opinion Zoom should be investing heavily in this, and Zoom’s market is the one newcomers stand to gain.

I'm genuinely unsure if you're saying all this with a wink: we're into year 10 of VR Neue, it's been a tarpit for all who got in, and it sounds like an absolutely horrible idea for the video call company to dump money into VR for...eye contact?

Note the headset that supports this is $1200. And that's par for the course for eye tracking AFAIK.

I love VR and against my rational side, still invest in a premium headset every year two.

Price, historical market, corporate finances, and responsible stewardship aside, I absolutely cannot wrap my head around the idea that VR eye contact with an uncanny valley head replica and/or cartoon improves eye contact over...just seeing your eyes...so much that it's a killer app.

(my poor unfortunate Vision Pro and it's rapid dropoff in sales seem to indicate this very strongly as well)

Have you seen Google's project Starline?

https://blog.google/technology/research/project-starline/

Zoom should be investing in teleprompters. It's 80 year old technology at least and is a much less intrusive way to solve the eye contact problem.

Many people don't want to strap a device to their face for work meetings, the fidelity loss is acceptable to them.

I think the killer app is smart glasses for AR (non passthrough), and maybe virtual monitors with Immersed + Visor (when that ships), low likelihood imo still

Devices will not be mainstream until they reach a sufficiently small form factor

> smart glasses for AR

That's basically what the Apple Vision Pro is designed to be, in terms of UX and software. It just turns out we're still a long way away from the hardware being small and light enough to make that work.

I think it's more what the Hololens 2 was. Non passthrough, so not a VR device like AVP, something where i still see the real world with my own eyes and virtual objects are overlaid

Companies ditched that approach because it sucks. It needs all the same hardware as just sticking the screens in front of your eyes, except actually it's even bulkier and heavier because of the stuff needed for the combined optics to work, and for obvious reasons it makes a bunch of actual AR/XR functionality impossible, like anything involving dark colors in a lit room.

Whatever... you just want to be negative about everything it seems

No, he's patiently explaining something complicated that is blindingly obvious if you are deranged and/or lucky enough to try both.

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