7 ms·

Dream launches online VR collaboration and productivity tool

61 points by idanb 8y ago

idanb 8y ago
We're super excited to get this out after nearly 3 years of work by our team - we've put together some further thoughts here: https://medium.com/@idanbeck/announcing-dream-754c0f374da0 https://medium.com/@idanbeck/announcing-dream-754c0f374da0 Dream is now available in early access on the Oculus store, so we'd really appreciate any feedback and thoughts people have. We truly believe that immersive technologies like virtual reality can make remote work and collaboration better than existing 2D form factors - especially as the new standalone VR headsets like Quest come to fruition in the coming year. Dream has been built entirely from scratch, so we got to rethink a lot of the stack. We prioritized certain things, like networking and UI, and we're really proud of the outcome. Doing so also meant it took us a lot longer to bring a product to release, since there was a lot more to do - but it allowed us to integrate WebRTC at the native level as well as chromium (by way of CEF) so we can do things like bring up our keyboard when a user hits a text field. Hope people like it, and want to say thanks to everyone that made it possible!
- mattnewport 8y ago
  I'm a big believer in the potential of VR for remote collaboration and as a fully remote VR development team we already make some use of it. Congrats on shipping but from what I've seen so far its not clear to me what this offers over Bigscreen or Oculus Dash desktop sharing? There's a bunch of functionality I'd like to see in this space that nobody has really nailed yet that I've seen but while this looks like an interesting project the articles I've seen so far don't do great job of explaining what new functionality it brings to the space.
  - idanb 8y ago
    Would be super interested in what kind of functionality you're specifically looking for, or is it more that existing functionality doesn't hit the mark? Our goal with this release is to get some great feedback so we can make Dream better, and more useful for users so please let us know what you'd like to see! To respond to some of your other questions - one thing that we've noticed isn't super clear is that Dream is not doing any form of desktop sharing. We integrated chromium at the native layer (by way of a forked version of CEF) and the content views are all web browsers. This allows for a level of integration with the rest of our stack in a way that is difficult or impossible to achieve if you're doing desktop sharing (we actually built desktop sharing, but disabled it in the build for now until we can solve some inherent usability problems). We're big fans of Bigscreen, but I think they're heavily shifting their focus on entertainment and watching movies in VR together. Also, we were working on Dream for 1.5+ years when Dash was announced and were excited to see some similar ideas there! We're trying to find ways to make VR as a viable solution for remote working and collaboration, and this has led many hard decisions we've had to make - especially as we've decided to build the entire stack. This obviously meant it took us a lot longer to get something out there, but as a result Dream is a lot more intuitive and seamless than you might expect. For example, our keyboard was heavily inspired by an early Google VR experiment we saw, but after building out a version of it we quickly understood why it wasn't getting people to a viable text-entry solution. We built our own collision system and "interaction "engine" to allow views and apps in Dream to respond at the event level of "touch start, touch end" similar to what you'd expect in building an iOS app - and underlying this the interaction engine would be updating the collision / position of everything in real time. As a result, we've seen people hit 30-40 WPM on our keyboard due to the tactile cues we've included (audio/haptics) as well as a kind of activation region, which allows you to really time and feel out the key press. Definitely hard to describe this or show this in videos since it's all happening at 90 FPS - but hey, it's a free download so give it a shot! Dream never asks you to revert to your monitor or take off your headset, this was a strict rule. This means that everything from logging in, to inviting someone new to your team had to be possible in VR. To accomplish this, we create a kind of chromium integration with Dream so that we could run web views that manipulated our engine directly. To us, asking the end user to remove their HMD for any reason is equivalent to asking them to restart their computer - it's really not acceptable. Our goal is to demonstrate how immersive technologies like virtual reality can enable remote collaboration and communication use cases. Especially in terms of how VR, by comparison to existing 2D formats of video/voice, provides an improved layer of presence through nonverbal communication cues.
    - mattnewport 8y ago
      Ah, ok, yeah that wasn't clear to me from the articles I saw, it sounded like desktop sharing. I went to the BigScreen talk at Oculus Connect and yeah it's pretty clear that their focus at the moment is on people watching video content together in VR but we have used it with some success for code reviews (desktop sharing is key there, I can jump between Visual Studio and the Unity Editor). Your keyboard sounds interesting and I'll have to check it out but to be honest it's not a big selling point for me as a touch typist: I don't have any trouble using my keyboard in VR. We do have some non touch typists on the team though and it's not always convenient to put your Touch controllers down to type so I can see it being useful. My ideal VR collaboration app would support at least solid desktop sharing support, well implemented VR whiteboards (including annotation on the shared desktop) and 3D sketching like Quill / Tilt Brush. We use whiteboards and 3D sketching in Rec Room but they're quite primitive. The sketching doesn't have to match a dedicated sketching app but should be better than Rec Room. It would also be useful to be able to easily import 3D assets for review, Dash support for GLTF is looking like a good implementation of that. Custom environments would also be useful for us so we could do collaborative design of environments for our own VR app.
      - gfodor 8y ago
        You should give Hubs a try, it's a WebVR based collaboration and communication tool we're working on at Mozilla. Screen sharing is behind a feature flag (and not quite working atm) but you can bring in GLTF models, images, and do simple 3d drawing. Also, by being the browser, it avoids a lot of the installation and coordination steps of native apps, and works on phone and PC. https://hubs.mozilla.com https://hubs.mozilla.com
      - idanb 8y ago
        I was actually at that session as well! It was a bit surprising for me to hear that they're taking such a strong stance with regards to shared movie watching, but generally it's always felt that Bigscreen has been tuned for gamers / entertainment type use cases. Totally hear you with regards to being comfortable touch typing while in VR, but I think that this is a pretty big barrier for a lot of users that are not as comfortable in VR. In our early experiences demoing Dream to people, we noticed just how overwhelming going into VR is for a lot of people that have had either no exposure, or very little to it. We used to have computer keyboard pass-thru, and this could be something that we add back as we continue to iterate and make the experience better. In terms of desktop sharing - we used to have this capability, and it's still in the build but disabled. We pulled it back due to some inherent usability issues that we're working on as well as performance limits on low-end machines. Annotation (whiteboarding on shared content or a white screen) is next up on our road map, we just didn't have sufficient time to get it into the initial release - so excited to hear that's something you would be looking for. Similarly, 3D model import / review is something that we're about to tackle as well. One of the big things we're excited about exploring is actually using chromium to do this vs. forcing every client to download what could be a big file, or push performance limitations on a varied set of machines. Instead, we'd find a way to utilize WebRTC to stream the content in a way that provides a 3D review experience for all clients with no performance limit. On environments, we agree as well - right now we have one environment, and have 2 others in the pipeline. In the future, it'd be great to allow for 360 stereo videos to be used as the environment or allow teams to customize their environments if they've got the in house capabilities to do so! Thanks for the feedback, and hope you get a chance to try Dream out a bit and give us some hands on experience if you get a minute a well!
- King-Aaron 8y ago
  So how much inspiration was rekindled when you guys watched Ready Player One after working on this?
  - wormhoudt 8y ago
    We were definitely anticipating the movie. We saw it as a team. We had hoped it would do more for general recognition and understanding of VR, but I think that was not the effect. Obviously that was in no way the job of the filmmakers. They are there to make an entertaining movie, not advance the adoption of VR. I will say though, the book itself was a big part of me personally deciding to get into this project after I left my last one.
Roritharr 8y ago
Isnt resolution the big killer for all of these applications? Even in the video Trello looked really blurry, i can only imagine what it would look with the Rift instead of an Vive Pro for example.
- idanb 8y ago
  Resolution is a big deal for sure, but because we're using chromium instead of desktop sharing we are able to set the resolution to ensure fair visibility for most content sources. Generally, we see people trying out Dream and bringing up CNN or NYT and having little issue with reading articles. Sure, if the resolution of the HMD was better we could do a lot more - but we set the parameters to optimize for content viewing, and also added FXAA to help without hurting low-spec machines in terms of performance. Dream is currently only available for Oculus Rift - and the video was actually shot with an in-engine camera that we developed, and captured on a mirror pipeline at 4K - so I think the blurriness in the video may be an artifact of streaming potentially? Here's a link to the vimeo, which might let you watch it at the set 1080p resolution we scaled it down to: https://vimeo.com/291432708/4c32095226 https://vimeo.com/291432708/4c32095226 We're excited to get Dream onto other HMDs, especially the mobile standalone ones coming soon - really great that the Quest is going up to 1600x1440 as it will make use cases like ours work even better!
ipsum2 8y ago
Name collision is unfortunate, thought this was related to Google Daydream at first, since it uses Google Chrome to access VR. How is this different than BigScreen? It allows people to view computer screens (video games, browsers, movies) in VR with other people. Edit: saw that you answered the bigscreen question earlier.
- idanb 8y ago
  Agreed, the name collision is unfortunate - we actually incorporated before Daydream was announced. If there are real issues / conflicts with the name, we're the smaller guys here (our team is just 4 people), so we'll obviously make the corrections that we need to make over time! Let me know if my response to the Bigscreen question above is sufficient, or if you have other specific questions about anything. Would be happy to dig deeper into anything. Super excited to share the hard work of our team - we've basically been quietly coding for years now, so this is the first time we really get to talk about what we've been up to.
sprash 8y ago
I work in finance and talked to somebody who implemented a Bloomberg terminal wall in VR. This would be a great application for VR since you never can have enough Bloomberg terminals open and usually never have enough screen space. However he told me that VR can not be used for anything productive right now because of many problems. One thing is, only very few people can wear a VR headpiece for 8 to 10 hours straight without getting serious headaches and dizziness. The resolution has to at least be one order of magnitude higher for meaningful sized fonts being properly readable. The head pieces have to be one order of magnitude lighter. If you want to do more than a 2D wall displayed like a canvas in 3D you have to solve the problem that your eyes automatically try to focus differently on different depths which is also one major source of headache. All in all I was convinced by him that the VR technology is at least 2 generations behind what you would need for serious work. Until then all kinds of software, SDKs and Hardware will change dramatically. Hence investing in VR productivity software development right now is a complete waste of time and money.
- idanb 8y ago
  I think the application of VR for finance applications like what you describe is definitely a really exciting use case that will become more realistic as the headsets improve in terms of comfort and resolution - per your comments. We actually explored some other similar use cases, for example customer service - where a VR HMD could in effect replace the 2-3 monitor / desktop + headset set up that customer service reps drive to call centers to use every day. However, these "full day" applications are definitely a few years out. We've seen sessions of dream where people have little issue of up to 90 minutes, and on average something like 45 minutes. Effectively the duration of a meeting - and this is where we're focusing our efforts, where productivity and collaboration intersect. I think that from the perspective of investing into these technologies as a financial institution to change the way people access financial data all day, it's a not here yet. However, to get there, we need to start building these platforms today. This has been our intention, and think that even in the meanwhile - being able to have a remote meeting with 4-6 people that are all over the world. Then being able to bring in content like presentations or generic web pages will provide a level of utility out of reach of even some of the $300K teleconferencing solutions out there. Regardless of the hype the industry has received, these headsets are still in their infancy. One of the big steps is about to be taken by the upcoming Quest headset due to launch Spring 2019 by Oculus. The big step this HMD takes is detaching the umbilical cord to the computer, and providing the first fully 6DOF headset (both HMD and controllers). They even through in a healthy resolution bump, which we're excited about. This well could be the 'blackberry' moment for VR.
ensiferum 8y ago
I'm sorry, what's the value added here? In the demo video (in vimeo) the team is going over some work tasks in Trello. Considering the bad HMD resolution and general clumsiness of doing things such as typing, I'm really unsure as to what is the value added of doing a meeting in Dream VR session as opposed to just regulard desktop/webex type of thing with possibly desktop sharing and voice/video conf. I work extensively with VR and I have a hard time seeing the catch here. Thanks!
- idanb 8y ago
  Thanks for the question! It sounds like you have easy access to VR HMDs, so if you get a chance to plug into an Oculus rift any time soon I recommend you try it out - and would definitely love your hands on feedback. We've done a fair bit of jiggering to make sure a majority of web based content is both legible and usable - and our UI has been built to try to be as intuitive as possible, and eliminate a lot of the bumbles that we too associate with many VR experiences. It's a free download, and you don't have to create an account if you don't like - once you download, you'll be presented with an account sign up / log in form where the keyboard can be used and messed with a bit. We also use chromium for all of our login / account creation flow in VR - so you can get a taste of what that feels like as well. If you want to try something like Trello out, just create a throwaway account and never verify the email - then you can pull up a website like Trello or NYT, where you can assess the usability and legibility. I think that if you're coming from a place of comparing this to existing 2D based collab tools like Skype / Zoom etc you'll have a hard time seeing the benefit, but if instead you try to look at how those tools are insufficient compared to a real-life meeting you might see where we fit. Our goal is not to replace 2D based methods, but to allow for a level of presence previously only possible with in-person interactions. This shines in particular in situations where you're meeting with three or more people along with content at the core of the meeting. Hope you get a chance to try it, and would love to hear what you think and how we can make it better!
  - ensiferum 8y ago
    Thanks for the reply. Incidentally I've also worked on a bunch of problems you guys must have had related to the UX in VR. For example I've also implemented a bunch of virtual keyboards ;-) Are you using straight CEF or have you improved the compositor to composit directly into a texture? IIRC CEF only provides the composited web page in a bitmap and then you're going to have to do repeated texture uploads which is going to be a drag. Does this support VIVE too or only Oculus?
Bobbleoxs 8y ago
How possible is it for users to have haptic gloves for typing instead of using controllers? I remain positive on VR productivity tools in future but think we have to get flexible and creative on hardware. Personally, I would love to have collaborative meetings with my colleagues worldwide, even just to demo my modelling ideas on a whiteboard which I think would be tremendously helpful (I believe FB keynote last year also voiced the same sentiment). I fully agree with the hardware limitations at the moment but certainly don't think investment and work now is a waste of time. To push this area forward, we also need to find compelling experiences that are unique to VR, like remote presentation rehearsal, collaborative white board brainstorming sessions for 3D design etc. Wearing a VR headset to work 8 to 10 hours straight is not the answer I look forward to, at least not for now. What VR is strong about to me todate are: minimising limitations resulted from physical distances and fading memories of past experience, as well as its ability to create limitless imaginary worlds, boosting multi-dimensional communication.
- idanb 8y ago
  Early on we actually built out support for leap motion in dream, and this was super cool because of the networking stack we built - we were able to send all 20 points per hand in real time at 90 FPS at low latencies. This was really an amazing experience, but there were a lot of issues we simply couldn't overcome - like wrist occlusion where your hands would suddenly fly off into the distance, or when your hands didn't do what you intended due to incorrect data from the sensors. As a product minded company, we had to make the hard decision to hold on this - at the end of the day, users don't care whose fault a bad experience is, they just uninstall your app and never come back. Really excited for new HW and capabilities to become available commercially. We built out our keyboard to be effective without anything but what's currently available (6DOF HMD with 6DOF controllers), and we'll continue to expand support for commercially available capabilities. Maybe it's an unorthodox perspective, but we really only want to ship and represent capabilities that any user can attain easily - and not tease things that are soon to (but may not ever) come.
KineticLensman 8y ago
Watching the video I was struck by my own experience of creating a virtual art gallery (of real world photography and 3D renders) in Second Life. It felt really amazing when I was alerted by a sensor in the gallery that someone was visiting it and I could teleport back to the gallery to meet them. Their location in the virtual space (which pictures they were stood in front of) said something about the pictures that they liked. I could read something about their personas from the avatar they were using (especially in conjunction with other scanning tools). My own little gallery was just one of many and other organisations and groups created much more impressive interactive environments (admittedly a lot of them seemed to be for various forms of role-play, some very unsavoury). The promo video shows the participants in effect in a completely conventional conference room - one screen and chairs around a table. The wider space doesn't seem to contribute functionally at all - it's a pretty backdrop but doesn't display more info that contributes to the meeting. So I'm curious - could this sort of capability be used to create more dynamic interactions - or are we limited by the tech (tethered interaction by seated people) to more constrained situations? (please don't get me wrong - I'm supportive of the concept - but I'm encountering pushback from colleagues and customers who don't see the potential)
- wormhoudt 8y ago
  I will say that we at Dream, hold a pretty contrarian point of view on this. So let me start by saying, it is an opinion, but one we hold pretty strongly. I can talk a little bit about locomotion, but this sort of philosophy applies to many of the design decisions we made, for better or worse. Dream doesn't allow for locomotion by design. Dream is meant to be a place where people meet to be productive. The environments are intentionally pretty but not distracting. The focus is on interaction with the other participants and the shared content. We feel that removing locomotion and reducing dimensionality is how we will make the interactions with Dream simpler, especially for new users. Mechanisms like teleportation are super fun and certainly add to immersion and are the right choice for all sorts of VR experiences. However, Dream has been built from the perspective that users are here to collaborate and then go back to real life. In that context, something like teleportation is fun and novel the first time you use it, but the 10th time, we feel like most users would just prefer a menu. The overall idea being, reduce dimensionality to increase precision and simplicity. I'm happy to hear a critique of this philosophy. Ultimately we have to create software people love to use, and we certainly understand that we might be proven wrong about this.

61 points by idanb 8y ago

We're super excited to get this out after nearly 3 years of work by our team - we've put together some further thoughts here: https://medium.com/@idanbeck/announcing-dream-754c0f374da0 https://medium.com/@idanbeck/announcing-dream-754c0f374da0 Dream is now available in early access on the Oculus store, so we'd really appreciate any feedback and thoughts people have. We truly believe that immersive technologies like virtual reality can make remote work and collaboration better than existing 2D form factors - especially as the new standalone VR headsets like Quest come to fruition in the coming year. Dream has been built entirely from scratch, so we got to rethink a lot of the stack. We prioritized certain things, like networking and UI, and we're really proud of the outcome. Doing so also meant it took us a lot longer to bring a product to release, since there was a lot more to do - but it allowed us to integrate WebRTC at the native level as well as chromium (by way of CEF) so we can do things like bring up our keyboard when a user hits a text field. Hope people like it, and want to say thanks to everyone that made it possible!

mattnewport 8y ago
I'm a big believer in the potential of VR for remote collaboration and as a fully remote VR development team we already make some use of it. Congrats on shipping but from what I've seen so far its not clear to me what this offers over Bigscreen or Oculus Dash desktop sharing? There's a bunch of functionality I'd like to see in this space that nobody has really nailed yet that I've seen but while this looks like an interesting project the articles I've seen so far don't do great job of explaining what new functionality it brings to the space.
- idanb 8y ago
  Would be super interested in what kind of functionality you're specifically looking for, or is it more that existing functionality doesn't hit the mark? Our goal with this release is to get some great feedback so we can make Dream better, and more useful for users so please let us know what you'd like to see! To respond to some of your other questions - one thing that we've noticed isn't super clear is that Dream is not doing any form of desktop sharing. We integrated chromium at the native layer (by way of a forked version of CEF) and the content views are all web browsers. This allows for a level of integration with the rest of our stack in a way that is difficult or impossible to achieve if you're doing desktop sharing (we actually built desktop sharing, but disabled it in the build for now until we can solve some inherent usability problems). We're big fans of Bigscreen, but I think they're heavily shifting their focus on entertainment and watching movies in VR together. Also, we were working on Dream for 1.5+ years when Dash was announced and were excited to see some similar ideas there! We're trying to find ways to make VR as a viable solution for remote working and collaboration, and this has led many hard decisions we've had to make - especially as we've decided to build the entire stack. This obviously meant it took us a lot longer to get something out there, but as a result Dream is a lot more intuitive and seamless than you might expect. For example, our keyboard was heavily inspired by an early Google VR experiment we saw, but after building out a version of it we quickly understood why it wasn't getting people to a viable text-entry solution. We built our own collision system and "interaction "engine" to allow views and apps in Dream to respond at the event level of "touch start, touch end" similar to what you'd expect in building an iOS app - and underlying this the interaction engine would be updating the collision / position of everything in real time. As a result, we've seen people hit 30-40 WPM on our keyboard due to the tactile cues we've included (audio/haptics) as well as a kind of activation region, which allows you to really time and feel out the key press. Definitely hard to describe this or show this in videos since it's all happening at 90 FPS - but hey, it's a free download so give it a shot! Dream never asks you to revert to your monitor or take off your headset, this was a strict rule. This means that everything from logging in, to inviting someone new to your team had to be possible in VR. To accomplish this, we create a kind of chromium integration with Dream so that we could run web views that manipulated our engine directly. To us, asking the end user to remove their HMD for any reason is equivalent to asking them to restart their computer - it's really not acceptable. Our goal is to demonstrate how immersive technologies like virtual reality can enable remote collaboration and communication use cases. Especially in terms of how VR, by comparison to existing 2D formats of video/voice, provides an improved layer of presence through nonverbal communication cues.
  - mattnewport 8y ago
    Ah, ok, yeah that wasn't clear to me from the articles I saw, it sounded like desktop sharing. I went to the BigScreen talk at Oculus Connect and yeah it's pretty clear that their focus at the moment is on people watching video content together in VR but we have used it with some success for code reviews (desktop sharing is key there, I can jump between Visual Studio and the Unity Editor). Your keyboard sounds interesting and I'll have to check it out but to be honest it's not a big selling point for me as a touch typist: I don't have any trouble using my keyboard in VR. We do have some non touch typists on the team though and it's not always convenient to put your Touch controllers down to type so I can see it being useful. My ideal VR collaboration app would support at least solid desktop sharing support, well implemented VR whiteboards (including annotation on the shared desktop) and 3D sketching like Quill / Tilt Brush. We use whiteboards and 3D sketching in Rec Room but they're quite primitive. The sketching doesn't have to match a dedicated sketching app but should be better than Rec Room. It would also be useful to be able to easily import 3D assets for review, Dash support for GLTF is looking like a good implementation of that. Custom environments would also be useful for us so we could do collaborative design of environments for our own VR app.
    - gfodor 8y ago
      You should give Hubs a try, it's a WebVR based collaboration and communication tool we're working on at Mozilla. Screen sharing is behind a feature flag (and not quite working atm) but you can bring in GLTF models, images, and do simple 3d drawing. Also, by being the browser, it avoids a lot of the installation and coordination steps of native apps, and works on phone and PC. https://hubs.mozilla.com https://hubs.mozilla.com
    - idanb 8y ago
      I was actually at that session as well! It was a bit surprising for me to hear that they're taking such a strong stance with regards to shared movie watching, but generally it's always felt that Bigscreen has been tuned for gamers / entertainment type use cases. Totally hear you with regards to being comfortable touch typing while in VR, but I think that this is a pretty big barrier for a lot of users that are not as comfortable in VR. In our early experiences demoing Dream to people, we noticed just how overwhelming going into VR is for a lot of people that have had either no exposure, or very little to it. We used to have computer keyboard pass-thru, and this could be something that we add back as we continue to iterate and make the experience better. In terms of desktop sharing - we used to have this capability, and it's still in the build but disabled. We pulled it back due to some inherent usability issues that we're working on as well as performance limits on low-end machines. Annotation (whiteboarding on shared content or a white screen) is next up on our road map, we just didn't have sufficient time to get it into the initial release - so excited to hear that's something you would be looking for. Similarly, 3D model import / review is something that we're about to tackle as well. One of the big things we're excited about exploring is actually using chromium to do this vs. forcing every client to download what could be a big file, or push performance limitations on a varied set of machines. Instead, we'd find a way to utilize WebRTC to stream the content in a way that provides a 3D review experience for all clients with no performance limit. On environments, we agree as well - right now we have one environment, and have 2 others in the pipeline. In the future, it'd be great to allow for 360 stereo videos to be used as the environment or allow teams to customize their environments if they've got the in house capabilities to do so! Thanks for the feedback, and hope you get a chance to try Dream out a bit and give us some hands on experience if you get a minute a well!
King-Aaron 8y ago
So how much inspiration was rekindled when you guys watched Ready Player One after working on this?
- wormhoudt 8y ago
  We were definitely anticipating the movie. We saw it as a team. We had hoped it would do more for general recognition and understanding of VR, but I think that was not the effect. Obviously that was in no way the job of the filmmakers. They are there to make an entertaining movie, not advance the adoption of VR. I will say though, the book itself was a big part of me personally deciding to get into this project after I left my last one.

Roritharr 8y ago

Isnt resolution the big killer for all of these applications? Even in the video Trello looked really blurry, i can only imagine what it would look with the Rift instead of an Vive Pro for example.

idanb 8y ago
Resolution is a big deal for sure, but because we're using chromium instead of desktop sharing we are able to set the resolution to ensure fair visibility for most content sources. Generally, we see people trying out Dream and bringing up CNN or NYT and having little issue with reading articles. Sure, if the resolution of the HMD was better we could do a lot more - but we set the parameters to optimize for content viewing, and also added FXAA to help without hurting low-spec machines in terms of performance. Dream is currently only available for Oculus Rift - and the video was actually shot with an in-engine camera that we developed, and captured on a mirror pipeline at 4K - so I think the blurriness in the video may be an artifact of streaming potentially? Here's a link to the vimeo, which might let you watch it at the set 1080p resolution we scaled it down to: https://vimeo.com/291432708/4c32095226 https://vimeo.com/291432708/4c32095226 We're excited to get Dream onto other HMDs, especially the mobile standalone ones coming soon - really great that the Quest is going up to 1600x1440 as it will make use cases like ours work even better!

ipsum2 8y ago

Name collision is unfortunate, thought this was related to Google Daydream at first, since it uses Google Chrome to access VR. How is this different than BigScreen? It allows people to view computer screens (video games, browsers, movies) in VR with other people. Edit: saw that you answered the bigscreen question earlier.

idanb 8y ago
Agreed, the name collision is unfortunate - we actually incorporated before Daydream was announced. If there are real issues / conflicts with the name, we're the smaller guys here (our team is just 4 people), so we'll obviously make the corrections that we need to make over time! Let me know if my response to the Bigscreen question above is sufficient, or if you have other specific questions about anything. Would be happy to dig deeper into anything. Super excited to share the hard work of our team - we've basically been quietly coding for years now, so this is the first time we really get to talk about what we've been up to.

sprash 8y ago

I work in finance and talked to somebody who implemented a Bloomberg terminal wall in VR. This would be a great application for VR since you never can have enough Bloomberg terminals open and usually never have enough screen space. However he told me that VR can not be used for anything productive right now because of many problems. One thing is, only very few people can wear a VR headpiece for 8 to 10 hours straight without getting serious headaches and dizziness. The resolution has to at least be one order of magnitude higher for meaningful sized fonts being properly readable. The head pieces have to be one order of magnitude lighter. If you want to do more than a 2D wall displayed like a canvas in 3D you have to solve the problem that your eyes automatically try to focus differently on different depths which is also one major source of headache. All in all I was convinced by him that the VR technology is at least 2 generations behind what you would need for serious work. Until then all kinds of software, SDKs and Hardware will change dramatically. Hence investing in VR productivity software development right now is a complete waste of time and money.

idanb 8y ago
I think the application of VR for finance applications like what you describe is definitely a really exciting use case that will become more realistic as the headsets improve in terms of comfort and resolution - per your comments. We actually explored some other similar use cases, for example customer service - where a VR HMD could in effect replace the 2-3 monitor / desktop + headset set up that customer service reps drive to call centers to use every day. However, these "full day" applications are definitely a few years out. We've seen sessions of dream where people have little issue of up to 90 minutes, and on average something like 45 minutes. Effectively the duration of a meeting - and this is where we're focusing our efforts, where productivity and collaboration intersect. I think that from the perspective of investing into these technologies as a financial institution to change the way people access financial data all day, it's a not here yet. However, to get there, we need to start building these platforms today. This has been our intention, and think that even in the meanwhile - being able to have a remote meeting with 4-6 people that are all over the world. Then being able to bring in content like presentations or generic web pages will provide a level of utility out of reach of even some of the $300K teleconferencing solutions out there. Regardless of the hype the industry has received, these headsets are still in their infancy. One of the big steps is about to be taken by the upcoming Quest headset due to launch Spring 2019 by Oculus. The big step this HMD takes is detaching the umbilical cord to the computer, and providing the first fully 6DOF headset (both HMD and controllers). They even through in a healthy resolution bump, which we're excited about. This well could be the 'blackberry' moment for VR.

ensiferum 8y ago

I'm sorry, what's the value added here? In the demo video (in vimeo) the team is going over some work tasks in Trello. Considering the bad HMD resolution and general clumsiness of doing things such as typing, I'm really unsure as to what is the value added of doing a meeting in Dream VR session as opposed to just regulard desktop/webex type of thing with possibly desktop sharing and voice/video conf. I work extensively with VR and I have a hard time seeing the catch here. Thanks!

idanb 8y ago
Thanks for the question! It sounds like you have easy access to VR HMDs, so if you get a chance to plug into an Oculus rift any time soon I recommend you try it out - and would definitely love your hands on feedback. We've done a fair bit of jiggering to make sure a majority of web based content is both legible and usable - and our UI has been built to try to be as intuitive as possible, and eliminate a lot of the bumbles that we too associate with many VR experiences. It's a free download, and you don't have to create an account if you don't like - once you download, you'll be presented with an account sign up / log in form where the keyboard can be used and messed with a bit. We also use chromium for all of our login / account creation flow in VR - so you can get a taste of what that feels like as well. If you want to try something like Trello out, just create a throwaway account and never verify the email - then you can pull up a website like Trello or NYT, where you can assess the usability and legibility. I think that if you're coming from a place of comparing this to existing 2D based collab tools like Skype / Zoom etc you'll have a hard time seeing the benefit, but if instead you try to look at how those tools are insufficient compared to a real-life meeting you might see where we fit. Our goal is not to replace 2D based methods, but to allow for a level of presence previously only possible with in-person interactions. This shines in particular in situations where you're meeting with three or more people along with content at the core of the meeting. Hope you get a chance to try it, and would love to hear what you think and how we can make it better!
- ensiferum 8y ago
  Thanks for the reply. Incidentally I've also worked on a bunch of problems you guys must have had related to the UX in VR. For example I've also implemented a bunch of virtual keyboards ;-) Are you using straight CEF or have you improved the compositor to composit directly into a texture? IIRC CEF only provides the composited web page in a bitmap and then you're going to have to do repeated texture uploads which is going to be a drag. Does this support VIVE too or only Oculus?

Bobbleoxs 8y ago

How possible is it for users to have haptic gloves for typing instead of using controllers? I remain positive on VR productivity tools in future but think we have to get flexible and creative on hardware. Personally, I would love to have collaborative meetings with my colleagues worldwide, even just to demo my modelling ideas on a whiteboard which I think would be tremendously helpful (I believe FB keynote last year also voiced the same sentiment). I fully agree with the hardware limitations at the moment but certainly don't think investment and work now is a waste of time. To push this area forward, we also need to find compelling experiences that are unique to VR, like remote presentation rehearsal, collaborative white board brainstorming sessions for 3D design etc. Wearing a VR headset to work 8 to 10 hours straight is not the answer I look forward to, at least not for now. What VR is strong about to me todate are: minimising limitations resulted from physical distances and fading memories of past experience, as well as its ability to create limitless imaginary worlds, boosting multi-dimensional communication.

idanb 8y ago
Early on we actually built out support for leap motion in dream, and this was super cool because of the networking stack we built - we were able to send all 20 points per hand in real time at 90 FPS at low latencies. This was really an amazing experience, but there were a lot of issues we simply couldn't overcome - like wrist occlusion where your hands would suddenly fly off into the distance, or when your hands didn't do what you intended due to incorrect data from the sensors. As a product minded company, we had to make the hard decision to hold on this - at the end of the day, users don't care whose fault a bad experience is, they just uninstall your app and never come back. Really excited for new HW and capabilities to become available commercially. We built out our keyboard to be effective without anything but what's currently available (6DOF HMD with 6DOF controllers), and we'll continue to expand support for commercially available capabilities. Maybe it's an unorthodox perspective, but we really only want to ship and represent capabilities that any user can attain easily - and not tease things that are soon to (but may not ever) come.

KineticLensman 8y ago

Watching the video I was struck by my own experience of creating a virtual art gallery (of real world photography and 3D renders) in Second Life. It felt really amazing when I was alerted by a sensor in the gallery that someone was visiting it and I could teleport back to the gallery to meet them. Their location in the virtual space (which pictures they were stood in front of) said something about the pictures that they liked. I could read something about their personas from the avatar they were using (especially in conjunction with other scanning tools). My own little gallery was just one of many and other organisations and groups created much more impressive interactive environments (admittedly a lot of them seemed to be for various forms of role-play, some very unsavoury). The promo video shows the participants in effect in a completely conventional conference room - one screen and chairs around a table. The wider space doesn't seem to contribute functionally at all - it's a pretty backdrop but doesn't display more info that contributes to the meeting. So I'm curious - could this sort of capability be used to create more dynamic interactions - or are we limited by the tech (tethered interaction by seated people) to more constrained situations? (please don't get me wrong - I'm supportive of the concept - but I'm encountering pushback from colleagues and customers who don't see the potential)

wormhoudt 8y ago
I will say that we at Dream, hold a pretty contrarian point of view on this. So let me start by saying, it is an opinion, but one we hold pretty strongly. I can talk a little bit about locomotion, but this sort of philosophy applies to many of the design decisions we made, for better or worse. Dream doesn't allow for locomotion by design. Dream is meant to be a place where people meet to be productive. The environments are intentionally pretty but not distracting. The focus is on interaction with the other participants and the shared content. We feel that removing locomotion and reducing dimensionality is how we will make the interactions with Dream simpler, especially for new users. Mechanisms like teleportation are super fun and certainly add to immersion and are the right choice for all sorts of VR experiences. However, Dream has been built from the perspective that users are here to collaborate and then go back to real life. In that context, something like teleportation is fun and novel the first time you use it, but the 10th time, we feel like most users would just prefer a menu. The overall idea being, reduce dimensionality to increase precision and simplicity. I'm happy to hear a critique of this philosophy. Ultimately we have to create software people love to use, and we certainly understand that we might be proven wrong about this.