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‘Horizon Workrooms’: remote collaboration reimagined

107 points by bemmu 5y ago

maxehmookau 5y ago
Clever. I'll never actually use it though. The future is better remote working practices, not skeumorphic remote tools that recreate (poorly) an office environment.
camillomiller 5y ago
I would love not to, but I just can’t think positively about anything Oculus does. In this case, applying VR to the most boring and misused of all corporate tools: the meeting.
- rebuilder 5y ago
  I wonder if it tracks whether or not participants have their headsets on. Talk about golden fetters!
- bostonsre 5y ago
  Have you tried any of its games? There are a few that are different and fun. This meeting stuff sounds like it is incredibly gimmicky with not much, if any, upside. Zoom calls are already a pita, can't imagine what a waste of time starting vr meetings would be.
sithadmin 5y ago
Pitching this as a remote collaboration tool for business seems dangerously close to infringing on VMware's Horizon trademark (for VDI/app streaming).
nomoreplease 5y ago
The classroom setting is something I might use this for (ship it to my colleagues) but the identity & access mess is a dealbreaker. Requires two different identities, and one of them is Facebook? No enterprise federation? > Using Workrooms requires a Workrooms account, which is separate from your Oculus or Facebook accounts, although your Oculus username may be visible to other users in some cases……And to experience Workrooms in VR, you’ll need to access the app on Quest 2, which requires a Facebook login.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  There's a corporate version of the Quest 2 that doesn't have the FB account requirement, that's probably how this will go for enterprise.
  - baby 5y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if this is paired with Workplace (if there's demand)
mehphp 5y ago
This just doesn't strike me as "professional" whatever that means. I'm supposed to talk to an avatar of my co-worker when I can already just have a video call with them? I don't see what problem this is solving.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  I think positional audio is a big one, so is the sense of presence and shared space VR brings. I don't think this has any chance of taking off before these headset include eye and face tracking so those cartoon avatars can have realistic human expressions.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Not only they need to be realistic, they need to be accurate and real-time. If I see a colleague confused during a presentation, I can adjust my delivery. I can’t do the same unless the avatar communicates that to me in no uncertain terms.
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      A potential advantage for latency is having every participant on the same known set of hardware that can be optimized for low latency. Though the Quest 2 has high latency, it would be plausible to make a low latency headset and have every participant on that hardware for the best experience.
  - baby 5y ago
    whiteboarding!
sytse 5y ago
Relevant to this I recently asked on Twitter: “I wonder if Facebook is dogfooding the metaverse. Are they holding many meetings in VR? The Oculus Quest is a great device but I want to use it about as much as I use rollercoasters, not as much as I use YouTube.” And the lead of the Reality Platform team at Facebook said “I did ~3 meetings in VR” https://twitter.com/marklucovsky/status/1424050798342807554?s=21 https://twitter.com/marklucovsky/status/1424050798342807554?...
- aaron695 5y ago
  Like.... today, or ever? That was an awful answer. I'm going with the lead of Reality Platform just admitted they have only ever done ~3 meetings in VR. And OT what's with kids like this being so unprofessional on Twitter? The only imaginative thing the Facebook lead of AR can mention on Twitter is their politics, in a pretty unimaginative retweet way. No wonder software is doomed.
  - jhncls 5y ago
    You probably want to read the follow-up: - How was it? - Underwhelming. Hot and sweaty face, battery nearly dead, impossible to drink coffee or water. So I guess there is only upside :)
nazca 5y ago
This seems like the fundamentally don't understand the challenges of working remote & not being collocated with colleagues. I don't need to see a 3D avatar of colleagues. I don't need to see that avatar stand up and walk around. Mainly what I'm missing is being able to better see those subtle emotional cues & the ability to build deeper relationships. Both of which I think our brains & office norms are catching up to after 18 months of zoom meetings.
- okokwhatever 5y ago
  Then your problem isn't the medium. Your problem is a lack of trust and to rely too much on facial signal that, in other scale of things, are a very bad way to measure your collaborators
  - throwaways885 5y ago
    Last time I checked, I'm a human being who is hardwired to understand these social cues. They're essential for having a conversation in any way that isn't just exhausting for me. It's not a lack of trust. My monkey brain just struggles to parse remotely held conversations.
    - notacoward 5y ago
      Yes, they're useful, but I challenge the claim that they're essential. People have been communicating effectively over both time and distance for centuries, using media where these cues are absent. They're nice to have, they can make things easier and improve comfort/trust levels, but whether you rely on them is up to you. Lots of people at all levels of language competency and introversion etc. manage to collaborate just fine, even without any form of video at all.
  - Bjartr 5y ago
    Facial and body language is a HUGE part of in person communication. For better or for worse, that is just how the vast majority of humans are wired. If you willfully ignore these signals you WILL be misunderstood and you WILL misunderstand others. I hate that things are this way because of how much effort it takes for me to decipher these cues when a neurotypical person gets it from intuition, but it absolutely does exist and isn't going away any time soon.
muglug 5y ago
This doesn't make sense to me, product-wise. Putting on a bulky headset with limited FOV to talk to my colleagues feels like the opposite of a natural experience.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Anything is better than commuting to a unnessary meeting. I have found most office meetings are unnessary. I am for anything that prevents me from commuting to that office I don't like.
phpnode 5y ago
Latency is the biggest problem with video meetings and I can only imagine it's worse with this. In normal human interaction you can see people's reactions to what you're saying and doing within microseconds of taking an action, you can subtly and automatically adjust your presentation, your pace and your expressions to build greater rapport. Over video calls you need to introduce artificial pauses to make sure that everyone has caught up, and it's really jarring compared to being face to face.
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  In a previous role we did some light research into this, you tend to notice latency in movement at around 40-80ms, but thats from your own movement vs avatar. However, you don't notice it in other people's movements until there is a mismatch between social clues, Even then you have up to 250 ms (sometimes more, depending on the pace of the conversation) In practice that means you can do an atlantic call without really noticing it. the problem with VC calls is that because video needs to be matched to audio, the audio is buffered to make sure its lined up, this means that you have a 250ms+ delay plus any time to switch presenters.
- crakhamster01 5y ago
  The latency on this should actually be better than video calls. Since all the character assets are downloaded locally, the only visual data that needs to be sent across network is the positioning of facial features and hand movements - which is a much smaller payload than streaming video. More akin to the latency you'd see playing Call of Duty or something. I could see this experience being higher fidelity than video calls, especially in poor network conditions.
  - ghusbands 5y ago
    This is only true under the assumption that you can analyse the video and extract the movement/features as quickly as you can stream video to the network. Given how optimised streaming of live video is and how hard video analysis can be, it's not at all a given.
flohofwoe 5y ago
Jeez, those avatars are nightmare fuel, truly the Comic Sans of 3D character design, or in the Snow Crash universe "Brandies" and "Clints". Imagine being fired by one of those.
- baby 5y ago
  They look like miis, which everybody finds cute.
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    More like Microsoft's soulless knock-off for Xbox Live IMHO. At least Miis had some style.
doctoboggan 5y ago
Unlike many of the other commenters here I am really excited for this sort of experience. I just wish it wasn’t Facebook bringing this to market.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Gonna be real awkward for employers adopting this if their non-fb-using employees get permabanned from Oculus for using Oculus...
  - reidjs 5y ago
    Can’t they just make a new Facebook account for work or is that not possible for some reason?
    - klyrs 5y ago
      No, that falls under "inauthentic behavior" in fb's Commmunity Standards. https://facebook.com/communitystandards/inauthentic_behavior https://facebook.com/communitystandards/inauthentic_behavior
rbanffy 5y ago
I can’t imagine having meetings feeling I have a scuba helmet on. Like someone pointed out, it’s pretty obvious they never used it themselves. Or, if they did, they are lying to the product managers and telling them it’s awesome. Because I would never even think of releasing something like this as an actual product. Not even a preview.
- blensor 5y ago
  There is a weekly XR developers meetup int SpatialApe [1] each Thursday and I have been attending it every week since back in September. I have never met a single one of them in person and almost no one in a video call and yet their avatars feel like a person I know to me. The technology has a lot of limitations, no questions about that, and with Covid as an accelerator none of those virtual meeting spaces would have had the growth they had, but the technology is moving fast and even the - admittedly - limited experience we have now does bring a lot of value to my and probably my colleagues as well. [1] spatialape.com
- MikusR 5y ago
  Have you actually used Quest?
- bart_spoon 5y ago
  > Like someone pointed out, it’s pretty obvious they never used it themselves. There's some irony in the many people saying this who have clearly not used it themselves.
mchusma 5y ago
This is awesome, I am very excited for vr for work purposes. Glad to see they are making progress on the software side. I have been tentatively thinking that once resolution is high enough to really do work (probably Quest 3 will be there), buying a headset for our full remote team. Great work by the Oculus team working on this, for me the most important VR feature to figure out.
nickdothutton 5y ago
I forget now if this is the 4th or 5th iteration of this kind of technology that I’m seeing. 1st time around was 1994. We used to schedule QoS on the ATM network between sites for each of our Sun workstations. I really feel like this kind of representation is a dead end. It’s a failure of imagination, not of technology.
bostonsre 5y ago
It's pretty hilarious to think of Zuckerberg and his upper level colleagues all sitting in their offices dog fooding it for a meeting with all of them virtually nodding their avatar heads and telling him it's amazing.
- tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
  My first thought was what it would be like to get fired by a wide-eyed, partially smiling cartoon character. Half hilarious, half dystopian.
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    If you join a virtual meeting with intervention like seating with a bunch of bobbleheads surrounding you with the angry inward sloping eye brows, you know you're in trouble. I wonder if you are able to make hand gestures in the meetings to flip off the other bobbleheads...
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      There is indeed hand tracking so you can make some obscene hand gestures if you need to.
  - baby 5y ago
    You just gave a movie idea to someone in hollywood reading your comment.
- mLuby 5y ago
  HBO's Silicon Valley did something similar 7 years ago: https://youtu.be/9YOEEpWAXgU https://youtu.be/9YOEEpWAXgU
keiferski 5y ago
I spent about a decade playing MMOs as a kid and would love a properly-implemented remote 3D meeting system. Not sure it needs to be VR, but it seems likely that we'll eventually move away from headsets to walls/projections anyway. [1] But please, someone, anyone, make a system that doesn't use the Corporate Memphis style. [2] Hire a team of real artists and make it beautiful. The avatars in the link are so aesthetically unappealing. 1. https://www.engadget.com/google-project-starline-191228699.html https://www.engadget.com/google-project-starline-191228699.h... 2. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tech https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tec...
- Miraste 5y ago
  VR is a lot cheaper and more scalable than those walls. I think we'll eventually land on AR glasses that do this but without blocking out your own environment. Horizon's style is terrible and likely workshopped to be as bland and inoffensive as possible but it's not really Memphis style.
deleted 5y ago
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ramesh31 5y ago
Current VR tech will never cut it for productivity use. They are simply too bulky and low res/low FOV to be useful. It won't be until we have it perfected in the form factor of a pair of glasses that VR goes mainstream.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  I tried this app today on the Quest 2 and think it's pretty damn close. My virtual computer screen was easy to see with probably a 1080p equivalent resolution, the whiteboard was easy to see, as were PowerPoint slides. The FOV is not much of an issue for looking at virtual screens and avatars. The headset weight is fine for me for about an hour but would need to be way lighter for all day use.
- baby 5y ago
  I haven't tried the Quest 2, but the first Quest was really not too far from that reality. I wouldn't be surprised if the Quest 2 is there already.
kyoob 5y ago
"It works" is not the same thing as "it's useful."
dijit 5y ago
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istorical 5y ago
Reading these comments is like the "640k ought to be enough [memory] for anybody" quote by Bill Gates or the "Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop." Time Magazine quote. Social presence is the best killer app of VR so far besides porn. edit: will admit to understanding the hate for the fb 'stench' altho at this point people are falling into a bit of a sports-team level of blind love and hate towards particular FAANG members, but people utterly failing to see the potential of virtual 3d/physical environments for communication/collaboration? c'mon, it's ok to hate oculus/fb but have some sense of the bigger picture as far as what this could turn into in 20 years.
- blunte 5y ago
  That may be true, but a bigger question is, "How much value does social presence provide?" No doubt there are people who really express a need to meet in the same room with others; but as this new remote reality we're currently in has shown, quite a lot of people can get quite a lot done with just audio or audio+video meetings. So is social presence valuable enough to outweigh the certain technical challenges, additional expenses and complexity, and other as yet unidentified challenges that would come with VR meetings? If I were betting, I would say no. (And I'm a fan of VR.)
  - baby 5y ago
    I tend to agree here, while everybody put their camera on at the beginning of the covid, now I see much more people turning off their cameras during meetings. That being said, having an avatar is a much different feeling, and I could see how one could tune what degree of realism they want to expose to others. Perhaps some people could just look like robots, while others could show all of their facial expressions.
  - istorical 5y ago
    I would say that for most meetings, the current state of VR is not worth it. So no to your question. But I would also disagree with "quite a lot of people can get quite a lot done with just audio or audio+video meetings" at least to the extent that I would say people who will enjoy this work culture long-term are in the minority. I truly don't believe most people are meant to work in a room alone for hours everyday (even though some thrive on it!).
avnigo 5y ago
I see a lot of negative sentiment in the comments, but looking forward to a real-life demo of this. Whether it's for work or not, pushing this kind of technology forward is the first step of the VR/AR future we've envisioned. I don't know if such kind of collaboration would work in actuality, but I'm rooting for it. Sometimes the applications for the technology are realized after that technology becomes more fully realized.
makerofthings 5y ago
If using this would require creating a facebook account then it's a non-starter for most of the engineers I work with. I just won't have a facebook account. Also, VR makes me throw-up so probably not the best look in meetings!
- eplanit 5y ago
  But, it would be funny cartoon vomit spewing out of a cute little avatar face. My fun in such a meeting would be ridiculing the silly tech. I bet it'll be a hit, nonetheless.
KaiserPro 5y ago
I have tried this, and despite my best efforts, its actually good. the premise: Wiimes sitting in a room talking. Expected outcome: utter shit show. Actual outcome: Surprisingly good Why is it good? 1) Audio. you can turn to the person next to you and talk privately without interrupting the main flow of the meeting. There is none of this "no.... you speak......no.... you". You can interact normally like they were just there. The spatial audio is top notch. 2) presentations presenting is really simple, and you can see the people who are asking you questions. Not only that but taking Q&As is much better and quicker than on VC. 3) drawings, you can have a white board thats persistent in that meeting series. yes, I know, yaaaa booo facebook sucks. But actually this is quite good, you should try it. What don't I like about it? I don't like using the controller as a pen, its clumsy and only works on a flat, clean surface. but, if that can be fixed, it'll be a brilliant addition
- wantsanagent 5y ago
  About the pen, can you tell us more about what you'd like to see there? How would you like to use it?
  - KaiserPro 5y ago
    Thats a good question, I would love to be able to use just one finger and treat it like making marks in sand, however thats challenging as if you don't have a "touch" sensor to let you know when you're touching the paper. I would love to be able to use my wacom, but I suspect thats a long way down the list of feature requests that are important
    - josephg 5y ago
      A Wacom might be a reasonable option because those tablets can tell when you’re hovering over them. So long as the user can find the pen on their desk, you wouldn’t need to track the pen location just from the VR cameras. You could use the tablet data stream directly.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    I also don't like the pen. It's clever to turn the controller upsidedown, that at least makes it tolerable. The desk whiteboard works a lot better than drawing in space without tactile feedback as well. If this went mainstream, I would need a tracked pen that I could hold normally and see on the VR desk. The Quest seems to be able to track known objects like with a few keyboard models, so maybe load in the model of a standard dry erase marker.
apples_oranges 5y ago
I am worried about ruining my eyes by spending too much time in VR. Am I wrong?
emptysongglass 5y ago
Tangential but does anyone else know how it's legal for Facebook/Oculus to pop up a cookie notice that only offers, "I Accept" as an option? Even if I wanted to try it (and I had a Facebook login, which I do not) these are the kinds of things that make me run for the hills.
alphabetting 5y ago
Seems like a ripoff of spatial.io which I really enjoyed on Oculus at the onset of the pandemic. Should do well with FB's reach as Spatial never really gained traction.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Yeah Spatial is totally screwed
brightstep 5y ago
This will be huge for remote team cohesion. It's really, really too bad that it's facebook. Not too jazzed to be tracked and datamined at home AND work.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > Not too jazzed to be tracked and datamined at home AND work. They promised they won't track you at work. Trust is hard earned, unfortunately.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
This is a dystopian nightmare, what the everloving fffff.
Kye 5y ago
As always, furries do it better (even when they're poking fun) https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1428445312511795201 https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1428445312511795201
bane 5y ago
I'm actually starting to evaluate some VR collaborative work/presentation tools and I'm very interested to try this. The problem these kinds of tools are trying to solve is the one thing video conferencing can't do, which is the ability to communicate using the semantics of 3d space. In a meeting room, I can direct an audience to different parts of a room for different conceptual "spaces". For example, I might use one part of a room to collect and display engineering drawing, another for prototypes, another for a Kanban, etc. After a solid year of literally thousands of teleconference calls, it's clear to me and my team at least that this spatial component is important in real-life meetings and is noticeable when it's not there. When we all come into the office and hit a meeting room together, the ad-hoc ability to use a whiteboard (often together and collaboratively), or sit together in groups around the conference table, it all has important value. So far I've messed with Spatial.io and a couple other remote training applications, and while they're "ok", they're fussy to use in practice. Most importantly they don't really have a smooth way of integrating work artifacts from your computer into the experience, and the whiteboarding frankly stinks. Lots of comments here also talk about how this kind of meeting eliminates subtle facial cues and can be kind of uncomfortable for the wearer. I also totally agree with this. But I'm also aware that this is a technology in its absolute infancy, and I'm expecting it to get better at some point.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Try vrland.io/lobby instead. It's web-based and works across mobile, PC/Mac, as well as VR via WebXR. We have many template rooms you can access in addition to an office, like a gallery, concert venue, conference hall, and much more.
goodcjw2 5y ago
1/ There is definitely potential there. Spatial audio, shared white board, avatar in HD, etc. 2/ The biggest obstacle for now is still comfort. VR is now comfortable enough for 30-min sessions for lots of people, but still not for everyone. For those who complains about Zoom fatigue, VR as of today is just 10X more painful. We need better hardware. There are obviously lots of room to improve. 3/ Horizon Workrooms is not the first and spatial.io already moving towards that direction. After some 30-mins trial, I feel Horizon is more polished and feels better than spatial.io already.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Try vrland.io/lobby, a WebXR alternative to Spatial and Horizon Workrooms. Even works on mobile web and computers too!
lucasgw 5y ago
We have done high-level client review and approval meetings in a Horizon-style interface (Venues), with a surprising level of success. We were hesitant at first because of our client-base and the significant dollars at stake in these reviews. Comments: 1. A surprising amount of emotional communication is possible with these avatars. The combination of arm/hand/finger articulation and movement + head nod/move/position + hearing someone's voice... that is synthesized at a much higher level than you might anticipate. I was truly surprised at the level of nuance we were all able to glean from fairly minor, almost involuntary movements people make, how that is represented through avatars, and then translates effectively to accurate social communication. 2. The physical representation of space and the avatars around that space carry the same "tribal" rules that exist in RealSpace. Certain groups tend to gravitate to each other. Side conversations can occur in a way that can actually be helpful to the overall gestalt. Leaders position as leaders, subordinates as subordinates. (Avatar group interaction is a fascinating, evolving sociology.) 3. Most importantly - all participants across multiple meetings and multiple clients agree it was far more effective then Zoom/Meet/Teams/etc. Latency is rarely perceived as an issue, the brain adapts and adjusts amazingly quickly to the new representation of space and human interaction, and decisions are made quickly because of the interactions, not in spite of them. Of course it is in its infancy. But once you have done real business and interaction in these environments, it's disappointing (and counter-productive) to return to the endless talking squares on a monitor. YMMV, but I doubt it. ;)
sneak 5y ago
Reminder: friends don't encourage or entice other friends to communicate via Facebook's spyware platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus.
stemlord 5y ago
I dont want to be in a facebook owned vr space in order to do my job. That plus these cartoons in a corporate context is so disgusting to me
ekianjo 5y ago
Not sure why we have to VR the despicable environment of meeting rooms where everyone is sitting looking at a screen that they cant read well. Meeting rooms have never been made for this kind of things.
Mizza 5y ago
A shocking indignity. Not only must we be relentlessly subjected to Corporate Memphis, soon we must embody it.

107 points by bemmu 5y ago

Clever. I'll never actually use it though. The future is better remote working practices, not skeumorphic remote tools that recreate (poorly) an office environment.

camillomiller 5y ago

I would love not to, but I just can’t think positively about anything Oculus does. In this case, applying VR to the most boring and misused of all corporate tools: the meeting.

rebuilder 5y ago
I wonder if it tracks whether or not participants have their headsets on. Talk about golden fetters!
bostonsre 5y ago
Have you tried any of its games? There are a few that are different and fun. This meeting stuff sounds like it is incredibly gimmicky with not much, if any, upside. Zoom calls are already a pita, can't imagine what a waste of time starting vr meetings would be.

sithadmin 5y ago

Pitching this as a remote collaboration tool for business seems dangerously close to infringing on VMware's Horizon trademark (for VDI/app streaming).

nomoreplease 5y ago

The classroom setting is something I might use this for (ship it to my colleagues) but the identity & access mess is a dealbreaker. Requires two different identities, and one of them is Facebook? No enterprise federation? > Using Workrooms requires a Workrooms account, which is separate from your Oculus or Facebook accounts, although your Oculus username may be visible to other users in some cases……And to experience Workrooms in VR, you’ll need to access the app on Quest 2, which requires a Facebook login.

dougmwne 5y ago
There's a corporate version of the Quest 2 that doesn't have the FB account requirement, that's probably how this will go for enterprise.
- baby 5y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if this is paired with Workplace (if there's demand)

mehphp 5y ago

This just doesn't strike me as "professional" whatever that means. I'm supposed to talk to an avatar of my co-worker when I can already just have a video call with them? I don't see what problem this is solving.

dougmwne 5y ago
I think positional audio is a big one, so is the sense of presence and shared space VR brings. I don't think this has any chance of taking off before these headset include eye and face tracking so those cartoon avatars can have realistic human expressions.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Not only they need to be realistic, they need to be accurate and real-time. If I see a colleague confused during a presentation, I can adjust my delivery. I can’t do the same unless the avatar communicates that to me in no uncertain terms.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    A potential advantage for latency is having every participant on the same known set of hardware that can be optimized for low latency. Though the Quest 2 has high latency, it would be plausible to make a low latency headset and have every participant on that hardware for the best experience.
- baby 5y ago
  whiteboarding!

sytse 5y ago

Relevant to this I recently asked on Twitter: “I wonder if Facebook is dogfooding the metaverse. Are they holding many meetings in VR? The Oculus Quest is a great device but I want to use it about as much as I use rollercoasters, not as much as I use YouTube.” And the lead of the Reality Platform team at Facebook said “I did ~3 meetings in VR” https://twitter.com/marklucovsky/status/1424050798342807554?s=21 https://twitter.com/marklucovsky/status/1424050798342807554?...

aaron695 5y ago
Like.... today, or ever? That was an awful answer. I'm going with the lead of Reality Platform just admitted they have only ever done ~3 meetings in VR. And OT what's with kids like this being so unprofessional on Twitter? The only imaginative thing the Facebook lead of AR can mention on Twitter is their politics, in a pretty unimaginative retweet way. No wonder software is doomed.
- jhncls 5y ago
  You probably want to read the follow-up: - How was it? - Underwhelming. Hot and sweaty face, battery nearly dead, impossible to drink coffee or water. So I guess there is only upside :)

nazca 5y ago

This seems like the fundamentally don't understand the challenges of working remote & not being collocated with colleagues. I don't need to see a 3D avatar of colleagues. I don't need to see that avatar stand up and walk around. Mainly what I'm missing is being able to better see those subtle emotional cues & the ability to build deeper relationships. Both of which I think our brains & office norms are catching up to after 18 months of zoom meetings.

okokwhatever 5y ago
Then your problem isn't the medium. Your problem is a lack of trust and to rely too much on facial signal that, in other scale of things, are a very bad way to measure your collaborators
- throwaways885 5y ago
  Last time I checked, I'm a human being who is hardwired to understand these social cues. They're essential for having a conversation in any way that isn't just exhausting for me. It's not a lack of trust. My monkey brain just struggles to parse remotely held conversations.
  - notacoward 5y ago
    Yes, they're useful, but I challenge the claim that they're essential. People have been communicating effectively over both time and distance for centuries, using media where these cues are absent. They're nice to have, they can make things easier and improve comfort/trust levels, but whether you rely on them is up to you. Lots of people at all levels of language competency and introversion etc. manage to collaborate just fine, even without any form of video at all.
- Bjartr 5y ago
  Facial and body language is a HUGE part of in person communication. For better or for worse, that is just how the vast majority of humans are wired. If you willfully ignore these signals you WILL be misunderstood and you WILL misunderstand others. I hate that things are this way because of how much effort it takes for me to decipher these cues when a neurotypical person gets it from intuition, but it absolutely does exist and isn't going away any time soon.

muglug 5y ago

This doesn't make sense to me, product-wise. Putting on a bulky headset with limited FOV to talk to my colleagues feels like the opposite of a natural experience.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
Anything is better than commuting to a unnessary meeting. I have found most office meetings are unnessary. I am for anything that prevents me from commuting to that office I don't like.

phpnode 5y ago

Latency is the biggest problem with video meetings and I can only imagine it's worse with this. In normal human interaction you can see people's reactions to what you're saying and doing within microseconds of taking an action, you can subtly and automatically adjust your presentation, your pace and your expressions to build greater rapport. Over video calls you need to introduce artificial pauses to make sure that everyone has caught up, and it's really jarring compared to being face to face.

KaiserPro 5y ago
In a previous role we did some light research into this, you tend to notice latency in movement at around 40-80ms, but thats from your own movement vs avatar. However, you don't notice it in other people's movements until there is a mismatch between social clues, Even then you have up to 250 ms (sometimes more, depending on the pace of the conversation) In practice that means you can do an atlantic call without really noticing it. the problem with VC calls is that because video needs to be matched to audio, the audio is buffered to make sure its lined up, this means that you have a 250ms+ delay plus any time to switch presenters.
crakhamster01 5y ago
The latency on this should actually be better than video calls. Since all the character assets are downloaded locally, the only visual data that needs to be sent across network is the positioning of facial features and hand movements - which is a much smaller payload than streaming video. More akin to the latency you'd see playing Call of Duty or something. I could see this experience being higher fidelity than video calls, especially in poor network conditions.
- ghusbands 5y ago
  This is only true under the assumption that you can analyse the video and extract the movement/features as quickly as you can stream video to the network. Given how optimised streaming of live video is and how hard video analysis can be, it's not at all a given.

flohofwoe 5y ago

Jeez, those avatars are nightmare fuel, truly the Comic Sans of 3D character design, or in the Snow Crash universe "Brandies" and "Clints". Imagine being fired by one of those.

baby 5y ago
They look like miis, which everybody finds cute.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  More like Microsoft's soulless knock-off for Xbox Live IMHO. At least Miis had some style.

doctoboggan 5y ago

Unlike many of the other commenters here I am really excited for this sort of experience. I just wish it wasn’t Facebook bringing this to market.

klyrs 5y ago
Gonna be real awkward for employers adopting this if their non-fb-using employees get permabanned from Oculus for using Oculus...
- reidjs 5y ago
  Can’t they just make a new Facebook account for work or is that not possible for some reason?
  - klyrs 5y ago
    No, that falls under "inauthentic behavior" in fb's Commmunity Standards. https://facebook.com/communitystandards/inauthentic_behavior https://facebook.com/communitystandards/inauthentic_behavior

rbanffy 5y ago

I can’t imagine having meetings feeling I have a scuba helmet on. Like someone pointed out, it’s pretty obvious they never used it themselves. Or, if they did, they are lying to the product managers and telling them it’s awesome. Because I would never even think of releasing something like this as an actual product. Not even a preview.

blensor 5y ago
There is a weekly XR developers meetup int SpatialApe [1] each Thursday and I have been attending it every week since back in September. I have never met a single one of them in person and almost no one in a video call and yet their avatars feel like a person I know to me. The technology has a lot of limitations, no questions about that, and with Covid as an accelerator none of those virtual meeting spaces would have had the growth they had, but the technology is moving fast and even the - admittedly - limited experience we have now does bring a lot of value to my and probably my colleagues as well. [1] spatialape.com
MikusR 5y ago
Have you actually used Quest?
bart_spoon 5y ago
> Like someone pointed out, it’s pretty obvious they never used it themselves. There's some irony in the many people saying this who have clearly not used it themselves.

mchusma 5y ago

This is awesome, I am very excited for vr for work purposes. Glad to see they are making progress on the software side. I have been tentatively thinking that once resolution is high enough to really do work (probably Quest 3 will be there), buying a headset for our full remote team. Great work by the Oculus team working on this, for me the most important VR feature to figure out.

nickdothutton 5y ago

I forget now if this is the 4th or 5th iteration of this kind of technology that I’m seeing. 1st time around was 1994. We used to schedule QoS on the ATM network between sites for each of our Sun workstations. I really feel like this kind of representation is a dead end. It’s a failure of imagination, not of technology.

bostonsre 5y ago

It's pretty hilarious to think of Zuckerberg and his upper level colleagues all sitting in their offices dog fooding it for a meeting with all of them virtually nodding their avatar heads and telling him it's amazing.

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
My first thought was what it would be like to get fired by a wide-eyed, partially smiling cartoon character. Half hilarious, half dystopian.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  If you join a virtual meeting with intervention like seating with a bunch of bobbleheads surrounding you with the angry inward sloping eye brows, you know you're in trouble. I wonder if you are able to make hand gestures in the meetings to flip off the other bobbleheads...
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    There is indeed hand tracking so you can make some obscene hand gestures if you need to.
- baby 5y ago
  You just gave a movie idea to someone in hollywood reading your comment.
mLuby 5y ago
HBO's Silicon Valley did something similar 7 years ago: https://youtu.be/9YOEEpWAXgU https://youtu.be/9YOEEpWAXgU

keiferski 5y ago

I spent about a decade playing MMOs as a kid and would love a properly-implemented remote 3D meeting system. Not sure it needs to be VR, but it seems likely that we'll eventually move away from headsets to walls/projections anyway. [1] But please, someone, anyone, make a system that doesn't use the Corporate Memphis style. [2] Hire a team of real artists and make it beautiful. The avatars in the link are so aesthetically unappealing. 1. https://www.engadget.com/google-project-starline-191228699.html https://www.engadget.com/google-project-starline-191228699.h... 2. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tech https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tec...

Miraste 5y ago
VR is a lot cheaper and more scalable than those walls. I think we'll eventually land on AR glasses that do this but without blocking out your own environment. Horizon's style is terrible and likely workshopped to be as bland and inoffensive as possible but it's not really Memphis style.

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ramesh31 5y ago

Current VR tech will never cut it for productivity use. They are simply too bulky and low res/low FOV to be useful. It won't be until we have it perfected in the form factor of a pair of glasses that VR goes mainstream.

dougmwne 5y ago
I tried this app today on the Quest 2 and think it's pretty damn close. My virtual computer screen was easy to see with probably a 1080p equivalent resolution, the whiteboard was easy to see, as were PowerPoint slides. The FOV is not much of an issue for looking at virtual screens and avatars. The headset weight is fine for me for about an hour but would need to be way lighter for all day use.
baby 5y ago
I haven't tried the Quest 2, but the first Quest was really not too far from that reality. I wouldn't be surprised if the Quest 2 is there already.

kyoob 5y ago

"It works" is not the same thing as "it's useful."

dijit 5y ago

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istorical 5y ago

Reading these comments is like the "640k ought to be enough [memory] for anybody" quote by Bill Gates or the "Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop." Time Magazine quote. Social presence is the best killer app of VR so far besides porn. edit: will admit to understanding the hate for the fb 'stench' altho at this point people are falling into a bit of a sports-team level of blind love and hate towards particular FAANG members, but people utterly failing to see the potential of virtual 3d/physical environments for communication/collaboration? c'mon, it's ok to hate oculus/fb but have some sense of the bigger picture as far as what this could turn into in 20 years.

blunte 5y ago
That may be true, but a bigger question is, "How much value does social presence provide?" No doubt there are people who really express a need to meet in the same room with others; but as this new remote reality we're currently in has shown, quite a lot of people can get quite a lot done with just audio or audio+video meetings. So is social presence valuable enough to outweigh the certain technical challenges, additional expenses and complexity, and other as yet unidentified challenges that would come with VR meetings? If I were betting, I would say no. (And I'm a fan of VR.)
- baby 5y ago
  I tend to agree here, while everybody put their camera on at the beginning of the covid, now I see much more people turning off their cameras during meetings. That being said, having an avatar is a much different feeling, and I could see how one could tune what degree of realism they want to expose to others. Perhaps some people could just look like robots, while others could show all of their facial expressions.
- istorical 5y ago
  I would say that for most meetings, the current state of VR is not worth it. So no to your question. But I would also disagree with "quite a lot of people can get quite a lot done with just audio or audio+video meetings" at least to the extent that I would say people who will enjoy this work culture long-term are in the minority. I truly don't believe most people are meant to work in a room alone for hours everyday (even though some thrive on it!).

avnigo 5y ago

I see a lot of negative sentiment in the comments, but looking forward to a real-life demo of this. Whether it's for work or not, pushing this kind of technology forward is the first step of the VR/AR future we've envisioned. I don't know if such kind of collaboration would work in actuality, but I'm rooting for it. Sometimes the applications for the technology are realized after that technology becomes more fully realized.

makerofthings 5y ago

If using this would require creating a facebook account then it's a non-starter for most of the engineers I work with. I just won't have a facebook account. Also, VR makes me throw-up so probably not the best look in meetings!

eplanit 5y ago
But, it would be funny cartoon vomit spewing out of a cute little avatar face. My fun in such a meeting would be ridiculing the silly tech. I bet it'll be a hit, nonetheless.

KaiserPro 5y ago

I have tried this, and despite my best efforts, its actually good. the premise: Wiimes sitting in a room talking. Expected outcome: utter shit show. Actual outcome: Surprisingly good Why is it good? 1) Audio. you can turn to the person next to you and talk privately without interrupting the main flow of the meeting. There is none of this "no.... you speak......no.... you". You can interact normally like they were just there. The spatial audio is top notch. 2) presentations presenting is really simple, and you can see the people who are asking you questions. Not only that but taking Q&As is much better and quicker than on VC. 3) drawings, you can have a white board thats persistent in that meeting series. yes, I know, yaaaa booo facebook sucks. But actually this is quite good, you should try it. What don't I like about it? I don't like using the controller as a pen, its clumsy and only works on a flat, clean surface. but, if that can be fixed, it'll be a brilliant addition

wantsanagent 5y ago
About the pen, can you tell us more about what you'd like to see there? How would you like to use it?
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  Thats a good question, I would love to be able to use just one finger and treat it like making marks in sand, however thats challenging as if you don't have a "touch" sensor to let you know when you're touching the paper. I would love to be able to use my wacom, but I suspect thats a long way down the list of feature requests that are important
  - josephg 5y ago
    A Wacom might be a reasonable option because those tablets can tell when you’re hovering over them. So long as the user can find the pen on their desk, you wouldn’t need to track the pen location just from the VR cameras. You could use the tablet data stream directly.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  I also don't like the pen. It's clever to turn the controller upsidedown, that at least makes it tolerable. The desk whiteboard works a lot better than drawing in space without tactile feedback as well. If this went mainstream, I would need a tracked pen that I could hold normally and see on the VR desk. The Quest seems to be able to track known objects like with a few keyboard models, so maybe load in the model of a standard dry erase marker.

apples_oranges 5y ago

I am worried about ruining my eyes by spending too much time in VR. Am I wrong?

emptysongglass 5y ago

Tangential but does anyone else know how it's legal for Facebook/Oculus to pop up a cookie notice that only offers, "I Accept" as an option? Even if I wanted to try it (and I had a Facebook login, which I do not) these are the kinds of things that make me run for the hills.

alphabetting 5y ago

Seems like a ripoff of spatial.io which I really enjoyed on Oculus at the onset of the pandemic. Should do well with FB's reach as Spatial never really gained traction.

astlouis44 5y ago
Yeah Spatial is totally screwed

brightstep 5y ago

This will be huge for remote team cohesion. It's really, really too bad that it's facebook. Not too jazzed to be tracked and datamined at home AND work.

vineyardmike 5y ago
> Not too jazzed to be tracked and datamined at home AND work. They promised they won't track you at work. Trust is hard earned, unfortunately.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

This is a dystopian nightmare, what the everloving fffff.

Kye 5y ago

As always, furries do it better (even when they're poking fun) https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1428445312511795201 https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1428445312511795201

bane 5y ago

I'm actually starting to evaluate some VR collaborative work/presentation tools and I'm very interested to try this. The problem these kinds of tools are trying to solve is the one thing video conferencing can't do, which is the ability to communicate using the semantics of 3d space. In a meeting room, I can direct an audience to different parts of a room for different conceptual "spaces". For example, I might use one part of a room to collect and display engineering drawing, another for prototypes, another for a Kanban, etc. After a solid year of literally thousands of teleconference calls, it's clear to me and my team at least that this spatial component is important in real-life meetings and is noticeable when it's not there. When we all come into the office and hit a meeting room together, the ad-hoc ability to use a whiteboard (often together and collaboratively), or sit together in groups around the conference table, it all has important value. So far I've messed with Spatial.io and a couple other remote training applications, and while they're "ok", they're fussy to use in practice. Most importantly they don't really have a smooth way of integrating work artifacts from your computer into the experience, and the whiteboarding frankly stinks. Lots of comments here also talk about how this kind of meeting eliminates subtle facial cues and can be kind of uncomfortable for the wearer. I also totally agree with this. But I'm also aware that this is a technology in its absolute infancy, and I'm expecting it to get better at some point.

astlouis44 5y ago
Try vrland.io/lobby instead. It's web-based and works across mobile, PC/Mac, as well as VR via WebXR. We have many template rooms you can access in addition to an office, like a gallery, concert venue, conference hall, and much more.

goodcjw2 5y ago

1/ There is definitely potential there. Spatial audio, shared white board, avatar in HD, etc. 2/ The biggest obstacle for now is still comfort. VR is now comfortable enough for 30-min sessions for lots of people, but still not for everyone. For those who complains about Zoom fatigue, VR as of today is just 10X more painful. We need better hardware. There are obviously lots of room to improve. 3/ Horizon Workrooms is not the first and spatial.io already moving towards that direction. After some 30-mins trial, I feel Horizon is more polished and feels better than spatial.io already.

astlouis44 5y ago
Try vrland.io/lobby, a WebXR alternative to Spatial and Horizon Workrooms. Even works on mobile web and computers too!

lucasgw 5y ago

We have done high-level client review and approval meetings in a Horizon-style interface (Venues), with a surprising level of success. We were hesitant at first because of our client-base and the significant dollars at stake in these reviews. Comments: 1. A surprising amount of emotional communication is possible with these avatars. The combination of arm/hand/finger articulation and movement + head nod/move/position + hearing someone's voice... that is synthesized at a much higher level than you might anticipate. I was truly surprised at the level of nuance we were all able to glean from fairly minor, almost involuntary movements people make, how that is represented through avatars, and then translates effectively to accurate social communication. 2. The physical representation of space and the avatars around that space carry the same "tribal" rules that exist in RealSpace. Certain groups tend to gravitate to each other. Side conversations can occur in a way that can actually be helpful to the overall gestalt. Leaders position as leaders, subordinates as subordinates. (Avatar group interaction is a fascinating, evolving sociology.) 3. Most importantly - all participants across multiple meetings and multiple clients agree it was far more effective then Zoom/Meet/Teams/etc. Latency is rarely perceived as an issue, the brain adapts and adjusts amazingly quickly to the new representation of space and human interaction, and decisions are made quickly because of the interactions, not in spite of them. Of course it is in its infancy. But once you have done real business and interaction in these environments, it's disappointing (and counter-productive) to return to the endless talking squares on a monitor. YMMV, but I doubt it. ;)

sneak 5y ago

Reminder: friends don't encourage or entice other friends to communicate via Facebook's spyware platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus.

stemlord 5y ago

I dont want to be in a facebook owned vr space in order to do my job. That plus these cartoons in a corporate context is so disgusting to me

ekianjo 5y ago

Not sure why we have to VR the despicable environment of meeting rooms where everyone is sitting looking at a screen that they cant read well. Meeting rooms have never been made for this kind of things.

Mizza 5y ago

A shocking indignity. Not only must we be relentlessly subjected to Corporate Memphis, soon we must embody it.