4 ms·

> enough better for me to choose it over Zoom in everyday use It doesn’t have to be better than Zoom. It has to be $1500 better than Zoom. Per employee. I’m i

> enough better for me to choose it over Zoom in everyday use It doesn’t have to be better than Zoom. It has to be $1500 better than Zoom. Per employee. I’m in agreement with you — I like Immersed and I like the idea of VR meetings. But will people/employers opt for this over a hybrid on-site/remote system? How do VR meetings work when half the team is onsite in a conference zoom? I don’t want to put on a VR a headset to talk to the coworker sitting physically next to me in a conference room. Sadly, I see this as useful only for remote-only teams. As one of a handful of remote people on my team, it doesn’t seem like a workable option, even if I already like/use VR.

zachthewf 4y ago
$1500 is nothing if it makes remote collaboration competitive with IRL collaboration.
- mbreese 4y ago
  But how often do you have exclusively remote collaboration? I’m sure for many people that is common. It’s not for me. Normally I’m talking with a few people remote in zoom and the rest of the team on site in a conference room. For remote exclusive groups, this makes sense. But does it make sense for businesses to buy this for all of their employees — if they have a hybrid workforce? I would expect most employers will or are shifting towards a hybrid setup. How many remote-only employers are there? Is it enough of a market to make this more than a gimmick? I get VR for personal use. I get it for one-to-one communication. But I’m skeptical for business communication.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - girvo 4y ago
    I work at a place that technically has an office, but 99% of the time only a single person is in it during the week, and 80% of my team now lives across the world (they started here in Aus but moved) -- we're as close to "remote only" as you can get, but my boss and I had a laugh at the Quest Pro (despite us both being VR users!) today when it was announced. Even for remote-only work, it's just not there yet, and not at $2500 AUD per device. Maybe if the next version has a much higher resolution for better text rendering on N virtual screens, so they can have dual-purpose.
    - zmmmmm 4y ago
      The resolution is a real disappointment. Having experimented with a regular quest for virtual monitors its clear that insufficient resolution is one of the biggest problems currently. They have made some other improvements that in theory improve the effective resolution. I will watch the reviews to see how much that actually helps but its hard to imagine it making the kind of difference I think is necessary.
  - zmmmmm 4y ago
    i have no idea how well it addresses it but Zuckerberg did specifically acknowledge this in his keynote. He talked specifically about ensuring seamless experience for people using flat screens with Zoom and Teams mixed with those in VR. I don't think your assumption that it's only for pure remote is valid, at least certainly in terms of what Meta is working on.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
listless 4y ago
My team has been using Quest 2 for meetings for the past 4 months. My verdict is that it is highly preferable to video calls IFF you didn’t have to wear that terribly uncomfortable device with laggy external cameras. We’re knocking at the door of the future here but the tech is still way behind where it needs to be for widespread adoption. Is this headset that leap forward?
- crooked-v 4y ago
  I'm waiting to see what the rumored Apple headset is like. It seems like minimizing the size and weight of actual electronics in the headset is the missing part of the current round of competition, and Apple is very good at that.
  - imdsm 4y ago
    I think there needs to be a few things solved: 1. The lenses. Fresnel lens are a pain, if you aren't dead centre of the headset slips because of sweat, you get blurriness. 2. The weight. I have a Quest 2, and while light, it's still noticeable, and I definitely wouldn't want to work on it. 3. Resolution. You're trying to replace IRL UHD Human Vision, a resolution of 1920 x 1832 isn't going to cut it. I enjoyed the stuff I tried in VR when it was novel, but mostly now it sits on the side, doing nothing. It just didn't hold my attention for long enough.
    - modeless 4y ago
      Good thing Quest Pro improves on all of those things. (Technically not weight, but weight distribution which is huge).
strix_varius 4y ago
> It doesn’t have to be better than Zoom. It has to be $1500 better than Zoom. Per employee. Is this sarcasm? That's less than 2/3rds of the entry-level price of a 16" MacBook Pro. If whatever your (remote) business makes isn't valuable enough to spend $125 / month per employee on (assuming you buy a new system every year!), then the future is bleak...
- mbreese 4y ago
  I think you’re doing the math wrong. The question isn’t if your business can afford to spend $125/mo on VR headset for every employee (I’d even amortize that over 2-3 years to $42-62/mo). The question is — does the employer get more than $125/mo of benefit out of the VR solution — for every employee that needs to attend meetings. Because this only works if everyone in a meeting has a headset. And you’re only going to see $CORP buying these headsets if they get more benefit out of them than they cost. Buying a ten seat license for Zoom Pro is an easy thing to approve. The laptop/computer required for a zoom meeting (as you pointed out) is already a sunk cost. Buying $15k of VR gear to have that same 10-person meeting is a much tougher pill to swallow. For some small teams, I could see this absolutely making sense. But Facebook needs to sell this to large enterprises to have the transformational impact they are looking for.
  - guhidalg 4y ago
    It’s just as difficult to swallow a $15K cloud bill and companies do that every month. They will have money to buy employees VR equipment to improve productivity with the money they saved on real estate.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lvturner 4y ago
    There is zero chance my enterprise would go for this - besides which taking on and off VR headsets during the day vs opening Microsoft Teams just doesn't currently seem that practical. I'm sure the day will come where this is more normal, but there are still a few more cultural and technical hurdles to overcome. During the last lockdown here, I took a few meetings in VR with a digital avatar (using teams) and it was a pretty good experience and broke up the monotony of working from home, but I haven't done it again since being back in hybrid mode... All that being said, I desperately want one of these to try out as essentially a 'replacement' for my monitor at home.
bushbaba 4y ago
1500$/employee is cheaper than flying them to an offsite. Heck you could buy 100 of these and ship them to employees temporarily for their offsite.
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  Why bother with offsites when video conferencing is ubiquitous? After working in an extremely remote friendly workplace prior to the pandemic, and then with everyone working remotely for two years, I think the results of the natural experiment is in. There's zero benefit to being physically together in the 2020s. Even when I've been offsite before, it's just a waste money. Sit in a room with my laptop? Uh... I was already doing that. Look at this person's screen? Already can did that. Go out and get Thai food and cocktails on corporate account? Well, I couldn't do that.
  - justapassenger 4y ago
    > There's zero benefit to being physically together in the 2020s. Correction - 0 benefit for you. And that’s fine. For many others not getting together in person severely impacts productivity.
    - jonathankoren 4y ago
      You’re going to have to do better than simply stating that somewhere someone might possibly benefit and therefore everyone has to change their life to accommodate.
      - justapassenger 4y ago
        Me and most of coworkers in my org of 50 people fully voluntary come to the office, as being together in person increases our productivity, that was down during COVID. Meanwhile you claim that because it works for you, it becomes a dogma that people shouldn't work together in person? Sorry, it hard to take your arguments seriously.
  - 4y ago
hegelstoleit 4y ago
The point of mixed reality is that you can beam people into the space. So the people in the room could watch on a TV and be there in person if they wanted, while everyone else was there in VR.

zachthewf 4y ago

$1500 is nothing if it makes remote collaboration competitive with IRL collaboration.

mbreese 4y ago
But how often do you have exclusively remote collaboration? I’m sure for many people that is common. It’s not for me. Normally I’m talking with a few people remote in zoom and the rest of the team on site in a conference room. For remote exclusive groups, this makes sense. But does it make sense for businesses to buy this for all of their employees — if they have a hybrid workforce? I would expect most employers will or are shifting towards a hybrid setup. How many remote-only employers are there? Is it enough of a market to make this more than a gimmick? I get VR for personal use. I get it for one-to-one communication. But I’m skeptical for business communication.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- girvo 4y ago
  I work at a place that technically has an office, but 99% of the time only a single person is in it during the week, and 80% of my team now lives across the world (they started here in Aus but moved) -- we're as close to "remote only" as you can get, but my boss and I had a laugh at the Quest Pro (despite us both being VR users!) today when it was announced. Even for remote-only work, it's just not there yet, and not at $2500 AUD per device. Maybe if the next version has a much higher resolution for better text rendering on N virtual screens, so they can have dual-purpose.
  - zmmmmm 4y ago
    The resolution is a real disappointment. Having experimented with a regular quest for virtual monitors its clear that insufficient resolution is one of the biggest problems currently. They have made some other improvements that in theory improve the effective resolution. I will watch the reviews to see how much that actually helps but its hard to imagine it making the kind of difference I think is necessary.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  i have no idea how well it addresses it but Zuckerberg did specifically acknowledge this in his keynote. He talked specifically about ensuring seamless experience for people using flat screens with Zoom and Teams mixed with those in VR. I don't think your assumption that it's only for pure remote is valid, at least certainly in terms of what Meta is working on.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

listless 4y ago

My team has been using Quest 2 for meetings for the past 4 months. My verdict is that it is highly preferable to video calls IFF you didn’t have to wear that terribly uncomfortable device with laggy external cameras. We’re knocking at the door of the future here but the tech is still way behind where it needs to be for widespread adoption. Is this headset that leap forward?

crooked-v 4y ago
I'm waiting to see what the rumored Apple headset is like. It seems like minimizing the size and weight of actual electronics in the headset is the missing part of the current round of competition, and Apple is very good at that.
- imdsm 4y ago
  I think there needs to be a few things solved: 1. The lenses. Fresnel lens are a pain, if you aren't dead centre of the headset slips because of sweat, you get blurriness. 2. The weight. I have a Quest 2, and while light, it's still noticeable, and I definitely wouldn't want to work on it. 3. Resolution. You're trying to replace IRL UHD Human Vision, a resolution of 1920 x 1832 isn't going to cut it. I enjoyed the stuff I tried in VR when it was novel, but mostly now it sits on the side, doing nothing. It just didn't hold my attention for long enough.
  - modeless 4y ago
    Good thing Quest Pro improves on all of those things. (Technically not weight, but weight distribution which is huge).

strix_varius 4y ago

> It doesn’t have to be better than Zoom. It has to be $1500 better than Zoom. Per employee. Is this sarcasm? That's less than 2/3rds of the entry-level price of a 16" MacBook Pro. If whatever your (remote) business makes isn't valuable enough to spend $125 / month per employee on (assuming you buy a new system every year!), then the future is bleak...

mbreese 4y ago
I think you’re doing the math wrong. The question isn’t if your business can afford to spend $125/mo on VR headset for every employee (I’d even amortize that over 2-3 years to $42-62/mo). The question is — does the employer get more than $125/mo of benefit out of the VR solution — for every employee that needs to attend meetings. Because this only works if everyone in a meeting has a headset. And you’re only going to see $CORP buying these headsets if they get more benefit out of them than they cost. Buying a ten seat license for Zoom Pro is an easy thing to approve. The laptop/computer required for a zoom meeting (as you pointed out) is already a sunk cost. Buying $15k of VR gear to have that same 10-person meeting is a much tougher pill to swallow. For some small teams, I could see this absolutely making sense. But Facebook needs to sell this to large enterprises to have the transformational impact they are looking for.
- guhidalg 4y ago
  It’s just as difficult to swallow a $15K cloud bill and companies do that every month. They will have money to buy employees VR equipment to improve productivity with the money they saved on real estate.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lvturner 4y ago
  There is zero chance my enterprise would go for this - besides which taking on and off VR headsets during the day vs opening Microsoft Teams just doesn't currently seem that practical. I'm sure the day will come where this is more normal, but there are still a few more cultural and technical hurdles to overcome. During the last lockdown here, I took a few meetings in VR with a digital avatar (using teams) and it was a pretty good experience and broke up the monotony of working from home, but I haven't done it again since being back in hybrid mode... All that being said, I desperately want one of these to try out as essentially a 'replacement' for my monitor at home.

bushbaba 4y ago

1500$/employee is cheaper than flying them to an offsite. Heck you could buy 100 of these and ship them to employees temporarily for their offsite.

jonathankoren 4y ago
Why bother with offsites when video conferencing is ubiquitous? After working in an extremely remote friendly workplace prior to the pandemic, and then with everyone working remotely for two years, I think the results of the natural experiment is in. There's zero benefit to being physically together in the 2020s. Even when I've been offsite before, it's just a waste money. Sit in a room with my laptop? Uh... I was already doing that. Look at this person's screen? Already can did that. Go out and get Thai food and cocktails on corporate account? Well, I couldn't do that.
- justapassenger 4y ago
  > There's zero benefit to being physically together in the 2020s. Correction - 0 benefit for you. And that’s fine. For many others not getting together in person severely impacts productivity.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    You’re going to have to do better than simply stating that somewhere someone might possibly benefit and therefore everyone has to change their life to accommodate.
    - justapassenger 4y ago
      Me and most of coworkers in my org of 50 people fully voluntary come to the office, as being together in person increases our productivity, that was down during COVID. Meanwhile you claim that because it works for you, it becomes a dogma that people shouldn't work together in person? Sorry, it hard to take your arguments seriously.
- 4y ago

hegelstoleit 4y ago

The point of mixed reality is that you can beam people into the space. So the people in the room could watch on a TV and be there in person if they wanted, while everyone else was there in VR.