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I really can’t understand why there’s so much time and resources being put into re-inventing virtual meetings. This is supposed to capture subtle facial expres
by prng2021 4y ago
I really can’t understand why there’s so much time and resources being put into re-inventing virtual meetings.
This is supposed to capture subtle facial expressions. I’m sure every generation will capture more subtleties and have increasingly realistic avatars. So why not just see real faces then?
I always see mentions of virtual sticky notes on a whiteboard. That sounds awful. Do you need to squint to view them from your virtual seat at the table? Do you need to walk your avatar to the board and avoid bumping into others who might be posting their own? We don’t have those issues today with sites like Miro. If the metaverse will somehow avoid these annoyances then how would it be any different from the non-metaverse experience?
- cush 4y agoAll those annoyances and complaints will be forgotten if it's possible to give people the feeling like they're actually together
- humanistbot 4y agoWhich it won't.
- celestialcheese 4y agoWhy not? Seriously - I play ping-pong (Eleven on Quest 2) with my Dad across the country in VR weekly. It's a fun, decent pingpong sim that is remarkably good, but extremely low fidelity graphics. Even though there's just a head and the paddle for the avatars, I can tell it's him playing because of subtle head and hands movements he does when he loses a point. It's this slumping thing with the shoulders that he does, hard to describe. But it's wild how much presence that little gesture gives.
- ab-dm 4y ago100%. Playing games in VR is on a whole other level when it comes to virtual presence, and it really is something that needs to be experienced rather than told. I sunk ~ 600 hours into population one since its launch. The gameplay is ok, but the experience of playing WITH people in VR is something I’ve never come close to in 25 years of gaming, and many of the people I played with regularly had never done much gaming before they picked up their quest. I 100% get why they’re pushing this.
- prng2021 4y agoI completely agree VR games are awesome, but thats because the goal of video games is to be as immersive as possible and get you lost in it. That’s the perfect use case of VR and companies like Nintendo and Sony have been trying to perfect it for decades. Work and work meetings is a completely different use case. We don’t need nor want to feel like we’re taken out of our comfortable home and stuck in a real conference room, really manipulating sticky notes with virtual hands, turning our head up to 180 degrees as people speak, etc to be working remotely.
- ItsMonkk 4y agoSure, but this is an opt-in versus opt-out process. If you are with your friends or family, you will opt-in and share that stuff. If you are with your co-workers? Just as right now they don't get a webcam view on Teams(for my team at least), they are getting audio. There are great experiences to be had within VR worlds, but I can't yet see the transition to any working environment that can't be done without VR.
- celestialcheese 4y agoI don't know what team your on, but I've been WFH for nearly a decade, and for important meetings, it's always camera on. Even then it's a challenge. There's nothing more frustrating than a colleague obviously not paying attention, or grocery shopping with video off, on a call where they're essential. And then you have to repeat.. etc. I'm all for VR meetings if they can nail things like eye-contact, accurate mapping to mount movements and body indicators that show attention and focus. Because right now, too often zoom calls are a dumpster fire distraction, which is exhausting for all involved.
- piyh 4y agoI have never felt like I was physically with someone in another country like i have in horizons and bigscreen
- cush 4y agoMaybe not by Meta, but it's an inevitability, as consumers want it and are willing to pay for it.
- magic_hamster 4y ago> I really can’t understand why there’s so much time and resources being put into re-inventing virtual meetings. Because Meta needs to find new revenue streams.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoWhy?
- fnordpiglet 4y agoAxioms don’t need a why
- jjtheblunt 4y ago:)
- ulfw 4y agoWhy not find one that's closer to their core competence?
- dmitrygr 4y agoWhat are those?
- crooked-v 4y agoVirtual meetings, but with people shouting at each other about whatever in the news has made them angry lately.
- loeg 4y agoPutting ads on surfaces that people look at
- guestbest 4y agoHonestly, Facebook is a good CRM with unlimited storage at no cost. There is no privacy on private forums with regards to the web administer so Facebook continues that tradition of a host knowing what their users are uploading and privately messaging.
- throwaway290 4y agoIs it a sign of neuroatypicality if I find faces just generally distracting and useless in meetings? IMO there are more than enough non-verbal cues in voice and real-time conversation flow like response speed. (Plus people have way too much control over body language and facial expression for it to be useful in work setting)
- prng2021 4y agoIf you find faces to be useless, you can hide them on your computer monitor while in a meeting and no one would know. In the metaverse the avatars will not be faceless and you won’t be able to hide them from view
- crooked-v 4y agoIn Facebook's metaverse you can't, but in VRChat (that is, the app people actually use), disabling others' avatars (which sets them to a generic default 'robot') is default functionality.
- zwkrt 4y agoI don’t personally think that meetings would be the same without any smiles.
- rjzzleep 4y agoYou're not the only one. It's just that there is a massive industry teaching people that effective communication and active listening involves staring into peoples eyes and giving constant affirmation with noise that they are being listened to. Something that in other cultures can be considered highly offensive and rude by the way. So no, you're not the only one, but unfortunately, you, just like me, are a silent minority. Although in some of my previous engagements building efficient highly distributed teams have spent a lot of time teaching people to work asynchronously. Which made the few time limited calls extremely effective.
- elmomle 4y agoYou raise some interesting points; I just want to point out that it's extremely difficult to maintain complete, continuous control over body language and facial expression--consider how significant the concept of a "tell" is even at the highest levels of poker play.
- fastball 4y agoYou seriously don't have any issues with virtual meetings that you generally don't have with real meetings?
- wombat-man 4y agoThey're trying to get in on some of that sweet, sweet, B2B enterprise contract money.
- saddist0 4y agoIt's funny that HN is pro-remote work but anti-innovations for making the remote more efficient. While I agree virtual meeting may not be the answer, BUT it is important step in figuring out the balance. I think it's good that Meta is burning $$$ and advancing in figuring out the optimal solution on our behalf (consider it as RnD cost). Irrespective of it, in case the headsets can become as easy as wearing glasses, I doubt why anyone wouldn't use it.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoBecause people don't think this is an innovation that will make remote work more efficient.
- phillipcarter 4y ago> but anti-innovations for making the remote more efficient. I don't personally want to wear a giant computer on my head all day.
- throwaway920102 4y agoWhy respond to a comment that literally contains the text "in case the headsets can become as easy as wearing glasses" with a reply about wearing "a giant computer on [your] head". You could have made your VR-skeptic response to someone who was hyping up the headsets of today, not the headsets of tomorrow.
- phillipcarter 4y agoBecause I don’t want to wear a giant computer on my head.
- a257 4y agoTheres also the fact that the headsets doesn't nearly present digital content with enough quality to rival traditional 2D interfaces. There does not seem to be a simple way to fix this problem, the laws of physics is a cruel mistress. EDIT: I had the image of a "glasses" like VR form from the parent comment when making this comment. It is not talking about Meta's product.
- VikingCoder 4y agoIt's so that I can play a game with you, and you can look like an orc - with your facial expressions, and I can look like an elf - with my facial expressions. Except, they want it to be like a giant MMO. ...where I am happy to pay real money to buy virtual clothing for my elf. Which is a thing people do, when they really care about the game.
- MartinMcGirk 4y agoI'll take the other, more optimistic side of this. The reason they're spending so much time on reinventing meetings is because they see that the killer use case for VR/AR headsets is to replace your laptop with a device that shows you a screen, or multiple screens, wherever you go, whenever you want it there. If you start from the premise that eventually people won't huddle over their 16" laptop screens to make calls, but will instead be wearing a headset that shows them as many giant monitors as they like, then everything else flows from that. How do you handle calls in a world where every user is essentially wearing a visor? How do you collaborate? These aren't solved problems yet, but I'm a firm believer that the headset will replace the laptop, and if that happens I'll be glad somebody has put the effort in to make everything else around that as seamless as it can be.
- nomel 4y agoThis all reminds me of the tech communities reaction to the first iPod and iPhone.
- ryan_lane 4y agoThe reaction to the iPhone was incredibly positive, when comparing it to the closest competitor. It was obviously, immediately, that it was a revolutionary change in UI for phones. Yes, the reaction to the iPod was negative, but honestly, at the time, the iPod wasn't dramatically and obviously better than the competition. It took a couple generations to show that it was not only better, but it was getting better considerably faster than the competition.
- ohgodplsno 4y agoOf course. Pop your VR headset on at a café, I'm sure it'll work out great. Bash people with your wide arm movements at Starbucks and look like a clown. Those meetings that could have been an email? Now they're the worst of both worlds, remote but still forced to have this meeting in VR. Instead of having a screen (or multiple screens), force people in a shitty virtual reality where you have to walk around still, but this time it's either by teleporting with joysticks or making you puke with smooth movement.
- emadabdulrahim 4y agoBecause Meta wants to find that hardware product that people would give a shit about. This way they own the software & the hardware. Meta wants to be Apple.
- anm89 4y agoFacebook needs to create a new con to justify their valuation now that the charade is being exposed. That's literally it.