25 ms·

It’s simple really, and most commenters don’t “get” what is going on with all this. Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what aca

by gfodor 5y ago

It’s simple really, and most commenters don’t “get” what is going on with all this. Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication. VR and AR have the necessary capabilities to do so, and deliver social presence on par with face to face. With a fully immersive experience, you can feel like you are standing next to a person talking to them, regardless of their physical location. Body language, eye contact, etc all come through. That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if. The current hardware clearly is not hitting the mark for sudden mass adoption. The hardware will eventually, even if we have to wait until it becomes something like sunglasses or even contact lenses. From first principles, having computers override what photons you see will have huge effects, but don’t focus so much on the shiny video game world aspects: it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence. This is why Zuck bought Oculus, and why he has pivoted his company around the entire thing. It’s not because of “Ready Player One”, but because he feels that hardware/software will modulate most person to person communication soon, and he wants it to be his stack.

msoad 5y ago
The hardware is so behind this kind of application that Facebook’s pitch sounds like selling billboard ads on future Mars highways!
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  It’s surprisingly not that far behind. We’re already close to having commercial headsets with full-body tracking, eye tracking and facial tracking. Even without those technologies current VR is quite different in terms of social presence to interacting on a flat screen. A lot of body language comes through even just tracking the head and hands. I think we’re quite a bit away from having mass adoption of VR though. But that’s more form factor and comfort.
- gfodor 5y ago
  No, there is a study that was done on PC rift hardware that showed it was already competitive with f2f on most measures of social presence except for facial expressions (which makes sense, given the lack of facial tracking.) The bottleneck for adoption is probably mostly about UX, comfort, norms, marketing, etc. Not raw capabilities.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Laughable - that's like saying "this cake has 80% of the required ingredients, we're almost there with the exception of flour and sugar". The uncanny valley on the raw capabilities of these current products is a grand canyon. Holodeck it ain't.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Not really, I’d imagine if you ran the same trial today with face and eye tracking HMDs you would match f2f social presence scores. Wouldn’t surprise me if the study has already been done. You’re confusing graphics quality and realism with just the subset of what is needed to hit face to face social presence. That bar is much lower: high resolution, low latency, good tracking. The actual GPU power beyond that doesn’t put a ceiling since conveying non verbal communication doesn’t require expensive rasterization.
      - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
        It feels like you're just moving goalposts by defining some arbitrary metric of "f2f social presence scores". It doesn't really matter how much any individual test does against these "scores" if your average person walks away feeling "That felt nothing like a face to face meeting I'm used to having with actual, live humans."
        gfodor 5y ago
        You’re just arguing at this point. The scores I’m talking about are not arbitrary, there are a few standardized measures used in social presence research to attempt to make apples to apples comparisons between communications tools attempting to compete with f2f. The point is that the scores people give are literally asking users to convey their feeling that the experience met the baseline of face to face, or not, along various dimensions. You sound like you have an axe to grind, and aren’t actually looking to understand anything new here.
psychlops 5y ago
I have a feeling that part of social presence will require absolute privacy among participants. Once we see permanently recorded leaks of these social conversations, there will be a halt of adoption.
- gfodor 5y ago
  Yep this is part of the goals of one of the projects I worked on, Mozilla Hubs: ensuring that there is always a self hosted privacy preserving open source option for this basic use case of VR avatar based communication.
przeor 5y ago
Based on your comment, the biggest difference then ( second life ) and now is tokenisation and non fingible stuff monetization at scale, you can check it here https://experty.io/web-3-0-vs-metaverse-similarities-and-differences https://experty.io/web-3-0-vs-metaverse-similarities-and-dif... to read more
charlesju 5y ago
I agree this is one facet, but other is we now have a trustless ownership protocol (ie. cryto + NFTs) that will lay the foundation for people "caring" about the stuff and status you have in the metaverse.
- delecti 5y ago
  The virtual stuff you "own" in virtual environments are going to be siloed in individual companies' ecosystems. Just like GTA Online is never going to give me any sort of benefit from the fancy sword I have in World of Warcraft, neither is Facebook/Meta going give me any benefit from the couch I have in whatever system Microsoft or Valve puts out. NFTs are never going to materialize into that sort of cross-ecosystem unified ownership because no large company benefits from honoring assets obtained in another company's ecosystem.
  - nkingsy 5y ago
    Never say never. A “stuff” import seems like the kind of feature that would have to be copied by other platforms as soon as one does it, but there’s a chicken and egg aspect. I disagree with the whole “value of ownership” thing. Making knock off nfts is trivial, so this relies on people caring enough about provenance to police this and shame people that have knock offs in their virtual environment. Digital goods can be copied for free. It’s the killer feature of digital. No more scarcity!! Any system that fails to embrace this will be outcompeted long term. See the music industry.
    - tehbeard 5y ago
      > shame people that have knock offs in their virtual environment Because the bullying at school for having non-brand clothing or things wasn't enough. You'll need Supreme(TM) nfts, or become a digital pariah?
      - charlesju 5y ago
        NFTs are country club memberships.
Havoc 5y ago
Pretty clear explanation. Thanks for posting
tomp 5y ago
Just because "remote social presence / coworking" is the future, doesn't mean that Facebook is on track to capitalize on it. For example, I'd much prefer a "mirror-sized realtime video" (i.e. a "window into the other office") kind of experience, where I don't actually need to wear a helmet. And there aren't even that many technological obstacles to that; just good TVs, with good software, and fast enough internet connection. Add a bit of eye/head tracking (to approximate 3D from different viewpoints) and it'll be very real-like.
somewhereoutth 5y ago
Until we can see each other's faces in VR, this won't work for social presence. Shrinking everything down to contact lenses (even sunglasses get in the way of social contact) is likely to be beyond us for quite some while if ever. I'd rather not put something in my eye anyway. Further, VR does not work well for switching - you can't be in VR and scribble notes at the same time. AR might be an improvement, but not by much. Video conferencing does not suffer from any of these problems, and works pretty well for collaboration. 'Zoom fatigue' is definitely a thing though - it's unclear whether VR fatigue would be better or worse. VR/AR will see limited adoption for certain specialised use cases only.
- mettamage 5y ago
  You don't need to shrink down, you might be able to scan faces in vr glasses and put them in the vr world
  - runnerup 5y ago
    The HP Omnicept, based on the Reverb G2, adds a camera that points at the lower half of the face and a Tobii eye tracker looking at the eyes. You could do a LOT of avatar face reconstruction with that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    Meta is of course working on exactly this.
- footlose_3815 5y ago
  We all just need our own Council of Thirteen (From the Venture Bros) https://i.cdn.turner.com/adultswim/big/image-upload/thumbnails/thumb-2_image-15368496160109.jpg https://i.cdn.turner.com/adultswim/big/image-upload/thumbnai...
- charlesju 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1442201621266534402 https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1442201621266534402 Please read this, and then read up on why everyone is talking about web 3.0. This isn't a phase of the metaverse that is going to be different because of screen and control technology, it's an ownership and control shift.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shafyy 5y ago
I agree that social presence is the most underrated aspect of VR, especially from people who have never tried it. Of course, it's not there yet, but if you experience it today you can see glimpses of how it will be in the future. However, that has nothing to do with the "metaverse". Metaverse is just a fancy word Facebook is trying to establish to somehow rebrand their walled-off social media platforms.
- gfodor 5y ago
  I agree Facebook is kinda taking their eye off the prize by focusing on the metaverse concepts. But they’re not dumb, they understand what I wrote above, so there might be a reason this is being done towards that end.
  - shafyy 5y ago
    No, they are not dumb at all. That's why they are rebranding "social media" as "metaverse" and trying to own the whole stack (hardware + software) this time around. They are not taking their eye off the prize. The VR tech they build is objectively amazing, and if they continue like this they will own the biggest VR social network, at least initially. Edit: All I'm saying is that the metaverse is not some new concept. It's bascially social media enabled by the internet, but for some reason we start calling it metaverse when access through the medium of VR.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  > ... social presence is the most underrated aspect of VR ... Of course, it's not there yet, ... All this "body language" talk neglects that vr tracks at most your head and hands. Not how people are stood, or even facial expressions. "Body language" indeed. Too day nothing of the whirly Hurley motion sickness from it. Maybe one day, but I put it in the same bucket as fusion.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    No, we were doing full body tracking with perception neuron inertial sensors tracking 7 years ago in AltspaceVR. My guess is the zero cost option is going to be using a home mirror, as recently demoed. It can also be done with outside in cameras, was done with Kinect literally almost a decade ago or with lighthouse pucks from valve 4-5 years ago. Facial and eye tracking will almost certainly be in the next meta headset. Motion sickness goes down with each generation and is also largely a function of software design anyway. You’re very behind the curve.
twobitshifter 5y ago
If that’s the plan, Google is well ahead of Facebook for recreating presence with their starline demo. That gives you body language eye contact etc without the big headset and paddles - and you’re still able to interact with your real world environment.
- dbbk 5y ago
  Yes! I can't wait for this to go mainstream. Seems like the perfect solution. I love their description of it as a "magic window".
- gfodor 5y ago
  I agree I’ve been working in and out of VR for the last 8 years or so and it was the first thing I saw that made me question the assumption that VR was the only possible solution to this problem.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    As someone who spends way too much time on video--including meetings I should be in in case something directly relevant to me comes up but mostly can pay partial attention to while I do stuff on another computer--I would mostly hate the idea of wearing a headset. Heck, at in person meetings for better or worse, a lot of people do the same thing. High-fidelity, lifesize, no stuttering, etc. plus collaborative docs and I'm pretty sure you may have a better experience than VR.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Yeah the headsets are a distraction, the way to think about this is there are three distinct tech tracks: - full photonic override (HMDs -> passthrough visors (lynx-r is a half step) -> passthrough swim goggles -> contact lenses) - partial photonic override (HoloLens -> AR glasses -> contact lenses) - magic windows (google’s thing) They all have trade offs but the first track in particular it is an error to look at current form factors as a fixed condition. They will be changing rapidly insofar as traction and/or investment continues.
dathinab 5y ago
> fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication Do they fail? I don't thinks so, when I e.g. play D&D like games over voice only chat + a shared map it totally convoys the "felling of being together" (just one of many examples). On the other side when in-person sitting in a conference room where a person takes 30min to convey some (for me) mostly irrelevant facts which could have been summarized in a single slide there isn't really any "feeling together" and weather I'm sitting there or at home or use a headset on a train station makes literally no difference. What makes people "feel together" is interaction and being focused together on a specific think. This doesn't need VR or AR at all. Also what people totally forget is that moving company meetings and similar into VR has a number of problems: - everyone needs to have a VR headset with them and a reasonable good internet connection - everyone needs to be able to use a VR headset, but even with the best headset there are tons of people out there which get motion sickness from it (or from many things which convey 3D weather it's in VR or in a PC game) this people are much less rare then many thing. - the platform needs to convey the feeling, as I mentioned above "just putting it in VR" doesn't mean it works. Also more important the "virtual venue" you meet has no reason to be anything like the real world, like at all. So there is no reason to replicate all the limitations from the real world. But Facebook seems to be exactly trying to do this. Facebook positioned themself well by owning one of the most affordable VR headsets. But the meta-verse thing isn't looking too good IMHO. What companies want isn't a virtual world, but a virtual meeting room. What people want is being whatever they want to be in VR, and potentially have different identities for different social cycles (mainly work, friends, family). So not quite what Facebook is building, to some degree even the opposite thing.
- gfodor 5y ago
  You quoted half of my definition. Google it.
littlestymaar 5y ago
I see this conflation happening all the time from metaverse enthusiasts, but the metaverse != VR. Would a high quality VR version of Zoom/Teams be awesome? Of course it would, it would be freaking amazing! But the “metaverse” ain't that, it's supposed to be a virtual universe (hence the name), where everything happens, including games, watching movies, etc. A gigantic MMORPG, containing every possible kind of online interaction and games. And this part is complete bullshit. Which user story seems the most likely: - the user open the app, select their contact or group, puts the VR headset on, join the chat room. - the user puts the VR headset on, login in in “virtual flat”, go out, jump in his virtual (flying, as a DLC) car, and go to a virtual bar where your friends are waiting. Only the second one is worth the “metaverse” name (the first one being just a “virtual chat over the internet”®), and even if it could be really fun in the beginning, and could even have a decent success as an MMO, it won't be the mainsteam way of communication.
- gfodor 5y ago
  Frankly there are like 50 working definitions for “metaverse” at this point so it’s not really worth the energy of trying to unpack it as a way to ground an argument.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    The relevant definition in this discussion is the one described by Zuckerberg in the Meta presentation video.[1] Have a look a the 4' mark, the only missing part from my comment is the virtual car travel. (But there's “chose your virtual outfit” instead). [1]: https://fb.watch/98Vt421zcF/ https://fb.watch/98Vt421zcF/
umvi 5y ago
I'll believe it when I see it. I think most people will find the cost of strapping on headsets to be greater than benefits of the social presence it provides
- gfodor 5y ago
  For a given headset there is an activation cost and presumed benefit that gets someone to use it. The activation costs will continue to trend downward as passthrough AR gets deployed and size/weight goes down, among other things, and the presumed benefits will go up as cultural norms start to interface with this technology and more and more applications come online.
indymike 5y ago
> Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence When we have Star Trek's transporters, we can achieve "social presence". Until then, you can have "this is cool". There is a real problem with VR: it requires way more focus and attention that being live, in person. Where VR does shine is shared experiences you can't have in real life. Those shared experiences are really cool, but are not such that people want to have them whenever they want to interact with grandma or Bob in accounting. > it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence. We already have technology that may be "good enough". The issue with VR is that it requires so much cognitive effort to work... so you really are dealing with something that is cool. Cool to the level that it seems magical, but not cool enough to beat the ease we can communicate via other channels. Playing a flight sim with VR? actually great. Trying to have a conversation with my kids via VR? Not so great.
- gfodor 5y ago
  No, you don’t need transporters to archive social presence, this is a specific measure that is quantifiable to a large degree via standardized surveys and measurements. Doesn’t require transporters, just the ability to deliver the feeling of unmediated communication. VR gets closer than any other tool I know of on this specific measure, though the recent google work on their magic light field window may also be able to compete with face to face. Note this has nothing to do with photo realism, seeing the physical form of people, or cool immersive environments. It’s the feeling of unmediated communication. I suspect you haven’t actually tried hanging out with your kids in VR on a reasonable setup when they are physically far away from you. I’d suggest trying it to get a more concrete view on what is probably going to happen with regards to physical co-locality and it’s value prop.
mbesto 5y ago
> It’s simple really, and most commenters don’t “get” what is going on with all this. > That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if. Sure, but the "when" is trying to be forced down our throats. The media is perplexed by it in the same way they are about autonomous vehicles. We know its the future but tech oligarchs are trying to slam something down our throat with marketing/pr BS because they're scared shitless they'll lose their position on top of the throne. Most revolutionary tech has come from underdogs (Apple's iPod and iPhone come to mind, Zoom for video conferencing) and not from already established firms saying "this is the future, take this now".

by gfodor 5y ago

msoad 5y ago

The hardware is so behind this kind of application that Facebook’s pitch sounds like selling billboard ads on future Mars highways!

meheleventyone 5y ago
It’s surprisingly not that far behind. We’re already close to having commercial headsets with full-body tracking, eye tracking and facial tracking. Even without those technologies current VR is quite different in terms of social presence to interacting on a flat screen. A lot of body language comes through even just tracking the head and hands. I think we’re quite a bit away from having mass adoption of VR though. But that’s more form factor and comfort.
gfodor 5y ago
No, there is a study that was done on PC rift hardware that showed it was already competitive with f2f on most measures of social presence except for facial expressions (which makes sense, given the lack of facial tracking.) The bottleneck for adoption is probably mostly about UX, comfort, norms, marketing, etc. Not raw capabilities.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Laughable - that's like saying "this cake has 80% of the required ingredients, we're almost there with the exception of flour and sugar". The uncanny valley on the raw capabilities of these current products is a grand canyon. Holodeck it ain't.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Not really, I’d imagine if you ran the same trial today with face and eye tracking HMDs you would match f2f social presence scores. Wouldn’t surprise me if the study has already been done. You’re confusing graphics quality and realism with just the subset of what is needed to hit face to face social presence. That bar is much lower: high resolution, low latency, good tracking. The actual GPU power beyond that doesn’t put a ceiling since conveying non verbal communication doesn’t require expensive rasterization.
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      It feels like you're just moving goalposts by defining some arbitrary metric of "f2f social presence scores". It doesn't really matter how much any individual test does against these "scores" if your average person walks away feeling "That felt nothing like a face to face meeting I'm used to having with actual, live humans."
      - gfodor 5y ago
        You’re just arguing at this point. The scores I’m talking about are not arbitrary, there are a few standardized measures used in social presence research to attempt to make apples to apples comparisons between communications tools attempting to compete with f2f. The point is that the scores people give are literally asking users to convey their feeling that the experience met the baseline of face to face, or not, along various dimensions. You sound like you have an axe to grind, and aren’t actually looking to understand anything new here.

psychlops 5y ago

I have a feeling that part of social presence will require absolute privacy among participants. Once we see permanently recorded leaks of these social conversations, there will be a halt of adoption.

gfodor 5y ago
Yep this is part of the goals of one of the projects I worked on, Mozilla Hubs: ensuring that there is always a self hosted privacy preserving open source option for this basic use case of VR avatar based communication.

przeor 5y ago

Based on your comment, the biggest difference then ( second life ) and now is tokenisation and non fingible stuff monetization at scale, you can check it here https://experty.io/web-3-0-vs-metaverse-similarities-and-differences https://experty.io/web-3-0-vs-metaverse-similarities-and-dif... to read more

charlesju 5y ago

I agree this is one facet, but other is we now have a trustless ownership protocol (ie. cryto + NFTs) that will lay the foundation for people "caring" about the stuff and status you have in the metaverse.

delecti 5y ago
The virtual stuff you "own" in virtual environments are going to be siloed in individual companies' ecosystems. Just like GTA Online is never going to give me any sort of benefit from the fancy sword I have in World of Warcraft, neither is Facebook/Meta going give me any benefit from the couch I have in whatever system Microsoft or Valve puts out. NFTs are never going to materialize into that sort of cross-ecosystem unified ownership because no large company benefits from honoring assets obtained in another company's ecosystem.
- nkingsy 5y ago
  Never say never. A “stuff” import seems like the kind of feature that would have to be copied by other platforms as soon as one does it, but there’s a chicken and egg aspect. I disagree with the whole “value of ownership” thing. Making knock off nfts is trivial, so this relies on people caring enough about provenance to police this and shame people that have knock offs in their virtual environment. Digital goods can be copied for free. It’s the killer feature of digital. No more scarcity!! Any system that fails to embrace this will be outcompeted long term. See the music industry.
  - tehbeard 5y ago
    > shame people that have knock offs in their virtual environment Because the bullying at school for having non-brand clothing or things wasn't enough. You'll need Supreme(TM) nfts, or become a digital pariah?
    - charlesju 5y ago
      NFTs are country club memberships.

Havoc 5y ago

Pretty clear explanation. Thanks for posting

tomp 5y ago

Just because "remote social presence / coworking" is the future, doesn't mean that Facebook is on track to capitalize on it. For example, I'd much prefer a "mirror-sized realtime video" (i.e. a "window into the other office") kind of experience, where I don't actually need to wear a helmet. And there aren't even that many technological obstacles to that; just good TVs, with good software, and fast enough internet connection. Add a bit of eye/head tracking (to approximate 3D from different viewpoints) and it'll be very real-like.

somewhereoutth 5y ago

Until we can see each other's faces in VR, this won't work for social presence. Shrinking everything down to contact lenses (even sunglasses get in the way of social contact) is likely to be beyond us for quite some while if ever. I'd rather not put something in my eye anyway. Further, VR does not work well for switching - you can't be in VR and scribble notes at the same time. AR might be an improvement, but not by much. Video conferencing does not suffer from any of these problems, and works pretty well for collaboration. 'Zoom fatigue' is definitely a thing though - it's unclear whether VR fatigue would be better or worse. VR/AR will see limited adoption for certain specialised use cases only.

mettamage 5y ago
You don't need to shrink down, you might be able to scan faces in vr glasses and put them in the vr world
- runnerup 5y ago
  The HP Omnicept, based on the Reverb G2, adds a camera that points at the lower half of the face and a Tobii eye tracker looking at the eyes. You could do a LOT of avatar face reconstruction with that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  Meta is of course working on exactly this.
footlose_3815 5y ago
We all just need our own Council of Thirteen (From the Venture Bros) https://i.cdn.turner.com/adultswim/big/image-upload/thumbnails/thumb-2_image-15368496160109.jpg https://i.cdn.turner.com/adultswim/big/image-upload/thumbnai...
charlesju 5y ago
https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1442201621266534402 https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1442201621266534402 Please read this, and then read up on why everyone is talking about web 3.0. This isn't a phase of the metaverse that is going to be different because of screen and control technology, it's an ownership and control shift.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shafyy 5y ago

I agree that social presence is the most underrated aspect of VR, especially from people who have never tried it. Of course, it's not there yet, but if you experience it today you can see glimpses of how it will be in the future. However, that has nothing to do with the "metaverse". Metaverse is just a fancy word Facebook is trying to establish to somehow rebrand their walled-off social media platforms.

gfodor 5y ago
I agree Facebook is kinda taking their eye off the prize by focusing on the metaverse concepts. But they’re not dumb, they understand what I wrote above, so there might be a reason this is being done towards that end.
- shafyy 5y ago
  No, they are not dumb at all. That's why they are rebranding "social media" as "metaverse" and trying to own the whole stack (hardware + software) this time around. They are not taking their eye off the prize. The VR tech they build is objectively amazing, and if they continue like this they will own the biggest VR social network, at least initially. Edit: All I'm saying is that the metaverse is not some new concept. It's bascially social media enabled by the internet, but for some reason we start calling it metaverse when access through the medium of VR.
tehbeard 5y ago
> ... social presence is the most underrated aspect of VR ... Of course, it's not there yet, ... All this "body language" talk neglects that vr tracks at most your head and hands. Not how people are stood, or even facial expressions. "Body language" indeed. Too day nothing of the whirly Hurley motion sickness from it. Maybe one day, but I put it in the same bucket as fusion.
- gfodor 5y ago
  No, we were doing full body tracking with perception neuron inertial sensors tracking 7 years ago in AltspaceVR. My guess is the zero cost option is going to be using a home mirror, as recently demoed. It can also be done with outside in cameras, was done with Kinect literally almost a decade ago or with lighthouse pucks from valve 4-5 years ago. Facial and eye tracking will almost certainly be in the next meta headset. Motion sickness goes down with each generation and is also largely a function of software design anyway. You’re very behind the curve.

twobitshifter 5y ago

If that’s the plan, Google is well ahead of Facebook for recreating presence with their starline demo. That gives you body language eye contact etc without the big headset and paddles - and you’re still able to interact with your real world environment.

dbbk 5y ago
Yes! I can't wait for this to go mainstream. Seems like the perfect solution. I love their description of it as a "magic window".
gfodor 5y ago
I agree I’ve been working in and out of VR for the last 8 years or so and it was the first thing I saw that made me question the assumption that VR was the only possible solution to this problem.
- ghaff 5y ago
  As someone who spends way too much time on video--including meetings I should be in in case something directly relevant to me comes up but mostly can pay partial attention to while I do stuff on another computer--I would mostly hate the idea of wearing a headset. Heck, at in person meetings for better or worse, a lot of people do the same thing. High-fidelity, lifesize, no stuttering, etc. plus collaborative docs and I'm pretty sure you may have a better experience than VR.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Yeah the headsets are a distraction, the way to think about this is there are three distinct tech tracks: - full photonic override (HMDs -> passthrough visors (lynx-r is a half step) -> passthrough swim goggles -> contact lenses) - partial photonic override (HoloLens -> AR glasses -> contact lenses) - magic windows (google’s thing) They all have trade offs but the first track in particular it is an error to look at current form factors as a fixed condition. They will be changing rapidly insofar as traction and/or investment continues.

dathinab 5y ago

> fail to deliver what academics call “social presence”, which is the feeling of being together in unmediated communication Do they fail? I don't thinks so, when I e.g. play D&D like games over voice only chat + a shared map it totally convoys the "felling of being together" (just one of many examples). On the other side when in-person sitting in a conference room where a person takes 30min to convey some (for me) mostly irrelevant facts which could have been summarized in a single slide there isn't really any "feeling together" and weather I'm sitting there or at home or use a headset on a train station makes literally no difference. What makes people "feel together" is interaction and being focused together on a specific think. This doesn't need VR or AR at all. Also what people totally forget is that moving company meetings and similar into VR has a number of problems: - everyone needs to have a VR headset with them and a reasonable good internet connection - everyone needs to be able to use a VR headset, but even with the best headset there are tons of people out there which get motion sickness from it (or from many things which convey 3D weather it's in VR or in a PC game) this people are much less rare then many thing. - the platform needs to convey the feeling, as I mentioned above "just putting it in VR" doesn't mean it works. Also more important the "virtual venue" you meet has no reason to be anything like the real world, like at all. So there is no reason to replicate all the limitations from the real world. But Facebook seems to be exactly trying to do this. Facebook positioned themself well by owning one of the most affordable VR headsets. But the meta-verse thing isn't looking too good IMHO. What companies want isn't a virtual world, but a virtual meeting room. What people want is being whatever they want to be in VR, and potentially have different identities for different social cycles (mainly work, friends, family). So not quite what Facebook is building, to some degree even the opposite thing.

gfodor 5y ago
You quoted half of my definition. Google it.

littlestymaar 5y ago

I see this conflation happening all the time from metaverse enthusiasts, but the metaverse != VR. Would a high quality VR version of Zoom/Teams be awesome? Of course it would, it would be freaking amazing! But the “metaverse” ain't that, it's supposed to be a virtual universe (hence the name), where everything happens, including games, watching movies, etc. A gigantic MMORPG, containing every possible kind of online interaction and games. And this part is complete bullshit. Which user story seems the most likely: - the user open the app, select their contact or group, puts the VR headset on, join the chat room. - the user puts the VR headset on, login in in “virtual flat”, go out, jump in his virtual (flying, as a DLC) car, and go to a virtual bar where your friends are waiting. Only the second one is worth the “metaverse” name (the first one being just a “virtual chat over the internet”®), and even if it could be really fun in the beginning, and could even have a decent success as an MMO, it won't be the mainsteam way of communication.

gfodor 5y ago
Frankly there are like 50 working definitions for “metaverse” at this point so it’s not really worth the energy of trying to unpack it as a way to ground an argument.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  The relevant definition in this discussion is the one described by Zuckerberg in the Meta presentation video.[1] Have a look a the 4' mark, the only missing part from my comment is the virtual car travel. (But there's “chose your virtual outfit” instead). [1]: https://fb.watch/98Vt421zcF/ https://fb.watch/98Vt421zcF/

umvi 5y ago

I'll believe it when I see it. I think most people will find the cost of strapping on headsets to be greater than benefits of the social presence it provides

gfodor 5y ago
For a given headset there is an activation cost and presumed benefit that gets someone to use it. The activation costs will continue to trend downward as passthrough AR gets deployed and size/weight goes down, among other things, and the presumed benefits will go up as cultural norms start to interface with this technology and more and more applications come online.

indymike 5y ago

> Remote communication tools like video conferencing fail to deliver what academics call “social presence When we have Star Trek's transporters, we can achieve "social presence". Until then, you can have "this is cool". There is a real problem with VR: it requires way more focus and attention that being live, in person. Where VR does shine is shared experiences you can't have in real life. Those shared experiences are really cool, but are not such that people want to have them whenever they want to interact with grandma or Bob in accounting. > it’s all about removing the need for physical co-location to communicate, work, and spend time together with full social presence. We already have technology that may be "good enough". The issue with VR is that it requires so much cognitive effort to work... so you really are dealing with something that is cool. Cool to the level that it seems magical, but not cool enough to beat the ease we can communicate via other channels. Playing a flight sim with VR? actually great. Trying to have a conversation with my kids via VR? Not so great.

gfodor 5y ago
No, you don’t need transporters to archive social presence, this is a specific measure that is quantifiable to a large degree via standardized surveys and measurements. Doesn’t require transporters, just the ability to deliver the feeling of unmediated communication. VR gets closer than any other tool I know of on this specific measure, though the recent google work on their magic light field window may also be able to compete with face to face. Note this has nothing to do with photo realism, seeing the physical form of people, or cool immersive environments. It’s the feeling of unmediated communication. I suspect you haven’t actually tried hanging out with your kids in VR on a reasonable setup when they are physically far away from you. I’d suggest trying it to get a more concrete view on what is probably going to happen with regards to physical co-locality and it’s value prop.

mbesto 5y ago

> It’s simple really, and most commenters don’t “get” what is going on with all this. > That is the core capability that will disrupt all industry, it is more a matter of when not if. Sure, but the "when" is trying to be forced down our throats. The media is perplexed by it in the same way they are about autonomous vehicles. We know its the future but tech oligarchs are trying to slam something down our throat with marketing/pr BS because they're scared shitless they'll lose their position on top of the throne. Most revolutionary tech has come from underdogs (Apple's iPod and iPhone come to mind, Zoom for video conferencing) and not from already established firms saying "this is the future, take this now".