I get that it can scan a physical space and then I can see a digital reproduction of that space on VR goggles...but then what? Do I just stand there looking around the space?
A common one is VR visits for real estate companies and travel agencies, for example. Also virtual previews for investors and C-suite execs in meetings where there was a ton of money involved - think someone trying to sell the creation of a whole neighbourhood and this is a fancy version of a powerpoint slide for their pitch.
This tech could probably have saved us a good amount of work, though It's still a head scratcher why Zuck thinks this is the one thing in which to bet the company's future.
Lack of imagination and willingness to rely on someone else's judgement - other than the cyberpunk authors he read as a teen?
> Lack of imagination and willingness to rely on someone else's judgement
Perhaps, but given that his financial and investment judgement so far has netted him $250b, I think he gets the benefit of the doubt.
Yes. There's a mini-industry doing this for real estate.[1] Some systems let you place furniture in the 3D model.
Versions of this idea go all the way back to Apple's "Quicktime VR", which was a chain of spherical images through which you could navigate.
It's a long way from a fun metaverse. (Doing a big metaverse at all is difficult. Making it fun is even harder.)
Either way, I don't see this taking off. I'm surprised they're still pursuing VR.
I get that some people have a psychological mindset to "be in a place so as to do work" but offices are a compromise on so many things, most notably space.
Now you have tech to create entire wondrously imaginative virtual worlds and you want to recreate a bland little open plan box to cram avatars into?
Set some specifics, like open space, chair, table/desk. And you could have Hogwarts theme while I have a viking feasting hall.
I want a little virtual office and hallways and I can have hallway interactions and knock on virtual doors, etc.
He seems to have an obsession of breaking free of Apples control.
I imagine if you ever want to "hang out in VR", it would be nice to do it in your own virtual living room, instead of the imaginary virtual spaces.
The technology is neat. I don't know that either of those justifies the R&D effort. So just try to enjoy that neat technology exists for its own sake.
One of those use cases is training in industrial settings like factories, mines, or construction sites. It is a lot cheaper and safer to have workers take their first steps in a VR environment rather than on the actual location.
At the moment, a lot of this training is implemented as custom 3D applications using e.g. Unity. I imagine that something like Hyperscape would make it much easier and faster to create and share VR environments for this purpose.
At that point you can have a very convincing VR performance with cheap hardware. That handles much much more viewer IPDs and head positions etc, than one of those expensive omni-directional camera rigs.
That said, the more general aspect of "accessible, user generatable content" is a better way to look at it.
Online meetup for Disney fans: each week in a different scan of the park
Online consultation with interior design or architect: takes place in you existing house and saves travel for someone billing $x hundred an hour.
Online highschool reunion planning meeting with people spread over the world: takes place at the highschool or potential venues
Deployed military personel meeting remotely on his anniversary with his wife: takes place where they had their first date
I thought we would have already had this with photogrammetry back in 2016 when the Vive released with a camera, but that usually involved too much cleanup and optimizing geometry and couldn't be done automatically, along with the issues with reflections. I was also really surprised Google Earth VR didn't add in multiplayer soon after launch for similar use cases.