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It'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

It'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 ago
Because 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 ago
  Why 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 ago
    Because I don’t want to wear a giant computer on my head.
a257 4y ago
Theres 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.
- nomel 4y ago
  You only need the clarity the eyes can actually perceive. What physics do you think prevents this? There are already headsets with 70ppd [1], which is the same as a 27 inch 4k display, 23 inches away. That’s now. 1. https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/ https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/
  - a257 4y ago
    Sorry, I was referring to the parent comment's notion that the headsets would be as "easy as wearing glasses" and have high quality (especially color fidelity), not that you can't have high quality VR overall.
    - nomel 4y ago
      Why can’t they be as easy as wearing glasses [1]? Do you think direct retina projection (also available now) is somehow limited? I agree waveguides might be. 1. https://www.nreal.ai/ https://www.nreal.ai/
kortilla 4y ago
> It's funny that HN is pro-remote work but anti-innovations for making the remote more efficient This isn’t more than efficient. Emulating real life is worse here. I want to see innovations that take advantage of not being bounded by fucking office spaces. It’s like writing an email client that forces you to hand write all of the emails and fill out the to field on a little envelope.
- b33j0r 4y ago
  That email client analogy is brilliant. I hope meta also emulates how choosing a seat around a conference table is important. Including because of power plugs, blinding or overheating sun from windows, and being closer to the boss makes you louder.
- justapassenger 4y ago
  Have you tried meeting in VR on quest compared to zoom? While not great, waaay better. Same as email isn’t great, but way better than mail.
  - prng2021 4y ago
    I haven’t but am curious what you thought were the biggest improvements over a standard meeting. Did you try virtual sticky notes/whiteboarding or any other collaborative tasks?
    - beeandapenguin 4y ago
      VR adds a third dimension compared to a typical remote meeting. For me, this gives a sense of locality, as if you’re sitting next to a specific person (not a bunch of tiles) and can communicate with them naturally. Features like breakout rooms are not required. Any other remote meeting features like virtual whiteboards are usually the same level of convenience, or more so. It’s almost like progressive enhancement when the meeting has both VR and non-VR attendees.
      - antoniuschan99 4y ago
JohnBooty 4y ago
for making the remote more efficient It's because nobody sees the VR nonsense as actually making anything more efficient - quite the opposite really Literally the worst of all worlds. Looks like you get the inefficiency of in person meetings... along with all of the tech headaches plus nausea... count me out
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
Show me some evidence, or even some compelling reasoning, for how something can make remote work more efficient, and I'll be all over it. If Meta's got some sort of doodad that will make it so that I can get all the benefits of in-person meetings from home, great, let's go, I'll pay to upgrade my team at work out of pocket. But I don't see any sign of that here. You're saying that, if the headsets were easy to wear, everyone would use them, but I can't imagine why. How's this better than a laptop with a camera? I can read text more easily on the laptop. I can share documents more easily on the camera. I can see people's faces and emotions more clearly with the camera. This gets me nothing, and it does so at significant cost. This appears to be a solution desperately searching for a problem, and remote meetings certainly have problems, but this doesn't seem to be able to solve any of them. Sure, I'll be excited about this if I really need to collaboratively design the frame of a car with a team that's all working remotely. It'll work great for that. But you know how often my meetings would be greatly eased with a collaborative 3D space? Not often.
- exodust 4y ago
  > But you know how often my meetings would be greatly eased with a collaborative 3D space? Not often. Yep, agreed. I keep seeing glossy promos with people standing around collaborating on a design. But honestly how common is that? In my experience the collaborative moments are much fewer than the one person design marathons between meetings. There seems to be a misplaced idea that everyone wants collaborative design. The Figma founder guy said something like "multiplayer design is the future". Really? I don't think so. The process of focused expertise in design is often driven by the designer, who then meets with colleagues or stakeholders to review and MAYBE try a few things in real time. Collaborative real time design of course happens, but not as much as they're trying to express. Too many cooks being the basis of avoiding over-collaborative design!
jimbob45 4y ago
It's funny that HN is pro-remote work but anti-innovations for making the remote more efficient. Whoa there - you’re speaking only for yourself! There’s a minority of us that abhor Teams and wish daily for another company to come up with something better. Of course, that doesn’t mean (badly) reinventing the wheel like this. Really, I’m just hoping for a snappier and more ergonomic Teams but I welcome any and all innovation in the space.
_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago
People like remote work because they don’t have to be in an office. Meta’s vision is to make an immersive office video game. Sorry, I hate it, that sounds like the worst of both worlds.
xwolfi 4y ago
Come on, a multi screen setup at home is better than some half asses 3D VR attempt: at BEST we ll have multi screens inside the 3D world because we need flat surfaces with tons of written stuff on them...
subpixel 4y ago
I have never seen anything more efficient at making group decisions than a pull request. If your team is getting on a call to present things or to talk things through, you’re very likely on a train to nowhere. In a remote setting, every ounce of effort spent toward emulating “meat space” distracts from the artifact, the work product, and the result. I am on a team now who records meetings so they can re-watch them. Let that productivity drain set in.
- barnabee 4y ago
  Not all work is coding, or can be reduced to text editing and discussions about diffs.
  - subpixel 4y ago
    That's not the point. The point is that meetings themselves are not work, and that in most cases they make the work more difficult. If no meeting happened, but all the artifacts required to guide work exist and are accessible and understood, you come out ahead. A pull request doesn't replace a meeting, but it can obviate the need for a meeting. Information sharing, done. Feedback and suggestions, captured. Goal and metrics, visible. In my experience (working on both coding and non-coding initiatives) the most effective meetings are the ones teams ask for in addition to a thorough, async, text-driven collaborative process.
usrbinbash 4y ago
What exactly about this makes remote work more efficient? Can I type faster while wearing a headset and holding controllers? Can I navigate source code better than on my three 4k screens and ergonomic keyboard? Does it somehow improve my deployment workflow?
parkingrift 4y ago
> Irrespective of it, in case the headsets can become as easy as wearing glasses, I doubt why anyone wouldn't use it. There is nothing in the world that could convince me to bring a Meta VR headset into my home. May as well just install surveillance cameras and pipe the feed directly to Meta.

jakelazaroff 4y ago

Because 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 ago
Why 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 ago
  Because I don’t want to wear a giant computer on my head.

a257 4y ago

Theres 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.

nomel 4y ago
You only need the clarity the eyes can actually perceive. What physics do you think prevents this? There are already headsets with 70ppd [1], which is the same as a 27 inch 4k display, 23 inches away. That’s now. 1. https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/ https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/
- a257 4y ago
  Sorry, I was referring to the parent comment's notion that the headsets would be as "easy as wearing glasses" and have high quality (especially color fidelity), not that you can't have high quality VR overall.
  - nomel 4y ago
    Why can’t they be as easy as wearing glasses [1]? Do you think direct retina projection (also available now) is somehow limited? I agree waveguides might be. 1. https://www.nreal.ai/ https://www.nreal.ai/

kortilla 4y ago

> It's funny that HN is pro-remote work but anti-innovations for making the remote more efficient This isn’t more than efficient. Emulating real life is worse here. I want to see innovations that take advantage of not being bounded by fucking office spaces. It’s like writing an email client that forces you to hand write all of the emails and fill out the to field on a little envelope.

b33j0r 4y ago
That email client analogy is brilliant. I hope meta also emulates how choosing a seat around a conference table is important. Including because of power plugs, blinding or overheating sun from windows, and being closer to the boss makes you louder.
justapassenger 4y ago
Have you tried meeting in VR on quest compared to zoom? While not great, waaay better. Same as email isn’t great, but way better than mail.
- prng2021 4y ago
  I haven’t but am curious what you thought were the biggest improvements over a standard meeting. Did you try virtual sticky notes/whiteboarding or any other collaborative tasks?
  - beeandapenguin 4y ago
    VR adds a third dimension compared to a typical remote meeting. For me, this gives a sense of locality, as if you’re sitting next to a specific person (not a bunch of tiles) and can communicate with them naturally. Features like breakout rooms are not required. Any other remote meeting features like virtual whiteboards are usually the same level of convenience, or more so. It’s almost like progressive enhancement when the meeting has both VR and non-VR attendees.
    - antoniuschan99 4y ago

JohnBooty 4y ago

for making the remote more efficient It's because nobody sees the VR nonsense as actually making anything more efficient - quite the opposite really Literally the worst of all worlds. Looks like you get the inefficiency of in person meetings... along with all of the tech headaches plus nausea... count me out

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

Show me some evidence, or even some compelling reasoning, for how something can make remote work more efficient, and I'll be all over it. If Meta's got some sort of doodad that will make it so that I can get all the benefits of in-person meetings from home, great, let's go, I'll pay to upgrade my team at work out of pocket. But I don't see any sign of that here. You're saying that, if the headsets were easy to wear, everyone would use them, but I can't imagine why. How's this better than a laptop with a camera? I can read text more easily on the laptop. I can share documents more easily on the camera. I can see people's faces and emotions more clearly with the camera. This gets me nothing, and it does so at significant cost. This appears to be a solution desperately searching for a problem, and remote meetings certainly have problems, but this doesn't seem to be able to solve any of them. Sure, I'll be excited about this if I really need to collaboratively design the frame of a car with a team that's all working remotely. It'll work great for that. But you know how often my meetings would be greatly eased with a collaborative 3D space? Not often.

exodust 4y ago
> But you know how often my meetings would be greatly eased with a collaborative 3D space? Not often. Yep, agreed. I keep seeing glossy promos with people standing around collaborating on a design. But honestly how common is that? In my experience the collaborative moments are much fewer than the one person design marathons between meetings. There seems to be a misplaced idea that everyone wants collaborative design. The Figma founder guy said something like "multiplayer design is the future". Really? I don't think so. The process of focused expertise in design is often driven by the designer, who then meets with colleagues or stakeholders to review and MAYBE try a few things in real time. Collaborative real time design of course happens, but not as much as they're trying to express. Too many cooks being the basis of avoiding over-collaborative design!

jimbob45 4y ago

It's funny that HN is pro-remote work but anti-innovations for making the remote more efficient. Whoa there - you’re speaking only for yourself! There’s a minority of us that abhor Teams and wish daily for another company to come up with something better. Of course, that doesn’t mean (badly) reinventing the wheel like this. Really, I’m just hoping for a snappier and more ergonomic Teams but I welcome any and all innovation in the space.

_fizz_buzz_ 4y ago

People like remote work because they don’t have to be in an office. Meta’s vision is to make an immersive office video game. Sorry, I hate it, that sounds like the worst of both worlds.

xwolfi 4y ago

Come on, a multi screen setup at home is better than some half asses 3D VR attempt: at BEST we ll have multi screens inside the 3D world because we need flat surfaces with tons of written stuff on them...

subpixel 4y ago

I have never seen anything more efficient at making group decisions than a pull request. If your team is getting on a call to present things or to talk things through, you’re very likely on a train to nowhere. In a remote setting, every ounce of effort spent toward emulating “meat space” distracts from the artifact, the work product, and the result. I am on a team now who records meetings so they can re-watch them. Let that productivity drain set in.

barnabee 4y ago
Not all work is coding, or can be reduced to text editing and discussions about diffs.
- subpixel 4y ago
  That's not the point. The point is that meetings themselves are not work, and that in most cases they make the work more difficult. If no meeting happened, but all the artifacts required to guide work exist and are accessible and understood, you come out ahead. A pull request doesn't replace a meeting, but it can obviate the need for a meeting. Information sharing, done. Feedback and suggestions, captured. Goal and metrics, visible. In my experience (working on both coding and non-coding initiatives) the most effective meetings are the ones teams ask for in addition to a thorough, async, text-driven collaborative process.

usrbinbash 4y ago

What exactly about this makes remote work more efficient? Can I type faster while wearing a headset and holding controllers? Can I navigate source code better than on my three 4k screens and ergonomic keyboard? Does it somehow improve my deployment workflow?

parkingrift 4y ago

> Irrespective of it, in case the headsets can become as easy as wearing glasses, I doubt why anyone wouldn't use it. There is nothing in the world that could convince me to bring a Meta VR headset into my home. May as well just install surveillance cameras and pipe the feed directly to Meta.