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> 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

> 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
      That’s a big thing that I find missing. In zoom meetings you can’t talk over each other. Like in a normal room of people there can be a bunch of conversations happening at once (like you can whisper to the person next to you if there’s a presentation, or even during a gathering you can walk around and say hi to different people)
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    It’s the immersion of “being there”. It’s the same reason why playing poker in VR is better than playing it on a flatscreen against your friends and family who are hundreds of miles away. Yes, visual fidelity isn’t the best when using something like a Quest, but there’s still something there just like when people first tried out YouTube. I’m sure there were people going, “why not watch cable Tv instead?” It’s hard to put into words. You have to try it. For some reason, that is not something a lot of HN users are willing to do with modern VR. Google Cardboard is not modern VR
    - kortilla 4y ago
      > like when people first tried out YouTube. I’m sure there were people going, “why not watch cable Tv instead?” But youtube obviously had something cable tv didn’t - user generated content. The Quest is the equivalent of youtube just being a crappy bootleg of cable TV. > It’s hard to put into words. You have to try it. For some reason, that is not something a lot of HN users are willing to do with modern VR. Because the current offer is “bad emulation of office meetings that weren’t great to begin with”. Would you be thrilled to use a Quest to wait your turn in a virtual lobby of a DMV to talk to a teller to pay for a license renewal? Or would you rather just pay it online with a credit card on a web page?
      - chaostheory 4y ago
        > But youtube obviously had something cable tv didn’t - user generated content. Yes, but armchair pundits couldn’t see any advantage similar to how older people view VR now. > Would you be thrilled to use a Quest to wait your turn in a virtual lobby of a DMV to talk to a teller to pay for a license renewal? This is a terrible analogy because the DMV is not a meeting. It’s a service and it’s already being automated. You have bad analogies because you haven’t used VR enough, if at all, to really have such a strong opinion. This is no different from senior citizens who used to constantly hurl insults at the internet, video games, comics, or any new trend
        seti0Cha 4y ago
        I think the point is that the goal of a meeting is not to have a meeting, so being more meeting-like is not necessarily a good thing.
xtracto 4y ago
I find VR remote work'emulations' of onsite work to be akin to vegan food "emulation" of the non-vegan stuff: trying to "emulate " a non-vegan dish using th HF e vegan "replacement" ingredients makes it gross for me. Instead, there are plenty of great "originally vegan" dishes. Coming back from the analogy, VR and specially AR should strive to use their advantages to create new intetaction experiences, instead of trying to mimic the onsite presence... I want a high def AR whiteboard that I can "move" independently to my wall, while other people also move position it any way they want in their local environment.
- avdempsey 4y ago
  The meat and meatspace “replacements” are bridge technologies that reduce the suffering of animals and people respectively. Sometimes a vegan just wants a burger. Sometimes an exec just needs a little help to let go. Sure these bridges have plenty of problems today, and maybe they’ll go to nowhere. But maybe in the far future they’ll lead us to cruelty free, healthy designer tissues that taste better than anything an animal makes, and Bret Victor’s dynamic medium.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    This is just like early smart phones, early PCs, and the internet before the 2000s. Yes, there are many flaws, but can’t people see the future potential?
    - ryan_lane 4y ago
      People can't see the future potential because the people actively working on it aren't showing us any future potential. Everything they're showing is worse versions of what we currently have, but "in VR!".
      - chaostheory 4y ago
        That’s not true. The main reason you’ve written this is simply because you have yet to try a VR system that wasn’t the equivalent to Google cardboard
rlt 4y ago
Perhaps emulating real life is a prerequisite to real innovations in VR. It may be hard to get mass adoption of more unfamiliar paradigms.
- seanhunter 4y ago
  And perhaps it's not. Perhaps the boundaries of the imagination of the product people are limiting what is being created here. "Wouldn't it be cool if you could travel in a virtual car and go to a virtual mall where there were virtual shops and you could walk around them and buy stuff?" Well no it wouldn't be cool. The internet is better than that already and most people who look at this think it's terrible because it is. If you produce something that is a facsimile of the real world it's always going to be a pale imitation. If you want people to adopt it, it has to be better in some important way that they care about.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    There's many VR headsets and even the Oculus store has tons of other productivity apps. The most popular one on Oculus isn't Horizon Workrooms, it's ImmersedVR. This is a Meta announcement so of course it's about Meta, but it's not like WWDC coverage means only Apple makes computers, phones, and OSes.
KaiserPro 4y ago
> 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. someone's not tried it. VR meetings are, for a very select type of interaction, awesome. Talking to someone over VC is shite. Its half duplex, emotionally and physically draining. That effect is magnified when you add more than one other person. VR meetings in a very supirsing way, feel more natural than VC. Its got 3d audio, which means low latency duplex talking can happen. You can have more than one conversation in the same VR "room" None of that is possible with Video conferencing (yet).
- kortilla 4y ago
  VR doesn’t solve low latency, which is what causes people to talk over each other. I assume you haven’t tried VR with one participant on a saturated coffee shop WiFi 2k miles away.
  - KaiserPro 4y ago
    > I assume you haven’t tried VR with one participant on a saturated coffee shop WiFi 2k miles away. Coffee shop, no 140ms ping time away, yes. But you are confusing latency with half duplex. VCs cut the sound to all other streams when someone is talking[1]. which causes huge stuttering. [1] mostly
nprateem 4y ago
Amen. I'm happy being able to join all-hands Teams meetings, mute them and do something I want to with my life. When I was in the office I had to sit there and waste my life. Now I don't have to keep up the pretense of caring. There's no way I'd want to have to strap a VR headset on to appear in a meeting I don't want to be in, and for it to be obvious when I'm ignoring it.
culturedsystems 4y ago
Emails still retain the structure of intra-office memos, something which hasn't existed for at least 20 years. We don't really notice with emails, because the initial real-world analogy became a minor detail of the more technologically evolved system. An optimistic view would be that VR will follow a similar trajectory, and attempts to recreate the real world will eventually give way to real innovations. The idea of the metaverse (and especially Meta's version), though, is so focussed on the real world analogy, I think it's more likely to be a barrier to this kind of innovation than an early version of it.

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
    That’s a big thing that I find missing. In zoom meetings you can’t talk over each other. Like in a normal room of people there can be a bunch of conversations happening at once (like you can whisper to the person next to you if there’s a presentation, or even during a gathering you can walk around and say hi to different people)
- chaostheory 4y ago
  It’s the immersion of “being there”. It’s the same reason why playing poker in VR is better than playing it on a flatscreen against your friends and family who are hundreds of miles away. Yes, visual fidelity isn’t the best when using something like a Quest, but there’s still something there just like when people first tried out YouTube. I’m sure there were people going, “why not watch cable Tv instead?” It’s hard to put into words. You have to try it. For some reason, that is not something a lot of HN users are willing to do with modern VR. Google Cardboard is not modern VR
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > like when people first tried out YouTube. I’m sure there were people going, “why not watch cable Tv instead?” But youtube obviously had something cable tv didn’t - user generated content. The Quest is the equivalent of youtube just being a crappy bootleg of cable TV. > It’s hard to put into words. You have to try it. For some reason, that is not something a lot of HN users are willing to do with modern VR. Because the current offer is “bad emulation of office meetings that weren’t great to begin with”. Would you be thrilled to use a Quest to wait your turn in a virtual lobby of a DMV to talk to a teller to pay for a license renewal? Or would you rather just pay it online with a credit card on a web page?
    - chaostheory 4y ago
      > But youtube obviously had something cable tv didn’t - user generated content. Yes, but armchair pundits couldn’t see any advantage similar to how older people view VR now. > Would you be thrilled to use a Quest to wait your turn in a virtual lobby of a DMV to talk to a teller to pay for a license renewal? This is a terrible analogy because the DMV is not a meeting. It’s a service and it’s already being automated. You have bad analogies because you haven’t used VR enough, if at all, to really have such a strong opinion. This is no different from senior citizens who used to constantly hurl insults at the internet, video games, comics, or any new trend
      - seti0Cha 4y ago
        I think the point is that the goal of a meeting is not to have a meeting, so being more meeting-like is not necessarily a good thing.

xtracto 4y ago

I find VR remote work'emulations' of onsite work to be akin to vegan food "emulation" of the non-vegan stuff: trying to "emulate " a non-vegan dish using th HF e vegan "replacement" ingredients makes it gross for me. Instead, there are plenty of great "originally vegan" dishes. Coming back from the analogy, VR and specially AR should strive to use their advantages to create new intetaction experiences, instead of trying to mimic the onsite presence... I want a high def AR whiteboard that I can "move" independently to my wall, while other people also move position it any way they want in their local environment.

avdempsey 4y ago
The meat and meatspace “replacements” are bridge technologies that reduce the suffering of animals and people respectively. Sometimes a vegan just wants a burger. Sometimes an exec just needs a little help to let go. Sure these bridges have plenty of problems today, and maybe they’ll go to nowhere. But maybe in the far future they’ll lead us to cruelty free, healthy designer tissues that taste better than anything an animal makes, and Bret Victor’s dynamic medium.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  This is just like early smart phones, early PCs, and the internet before the 2000s. Yes, there are many flaws, but can’t people see the future potential?
  - ryan_lane 4y ago
    People can't see the future potential because the people actively working on it aren't showing us any future potential. Everything they're showing is worse versions of what we currently have, but "in VR!".
    - chaostheory 4y ago
      That’s not true. The main reason you’ve written this is simply because you have yet to try a VR system that wasn’t the equivalent to Google cardboard

rlt 4y ago

Perhaps emulating real life is a prerequisite to real innovations in VR. It may be hard to get mass adoption of more unfamiliar paradigms.

seanhunter 4y ago
And perhaps it's not. Perhaps the boundaries of the imagination of the product people are limiting what is being created here. "Wouldn't it be cool if you could travel in a virtual car and go to a virtual mall where there were virtual shops and you could walk around them and buy stuff?" Well no it wouldn't be cool. The internet is better than that already and most people who look at this think it's terrible because it is. If you produce something that is a facsimile of the real world it's always going to be a pale imitation. If you want people to adopt it, it has to be better in some important way that they care about.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  There's many VR headsets and even the Oculus store has tons of other productivity apps. The most popular one on Oculus isn't Horizon Workrooms, it's ImmersedVR. This is a Meta announcement so of course it's about Meta, but it's not like WWDC coverage means only Apple makes computers, phones, and OSes.

KaiserPro 4y ago

> 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. someone's not tried it. VR meetings are, for a very select type of interaction, awesome. Talking to someone over VC is shite. Its half duplex, emotionally and physically draining. That effect is magnified when you add more than one other person. VR meetings in a very supirsing way, feel more natural than VC. Its got 3d audio, which means low latency duplex talking can happen. You can have more than one conversation in the same VR "room" None of that is possible with Video conferencing (yet).

kortilla 4y ago
VR doesn’t solve low latency, which is what causes people to talk over each other. I assume you haven’t tried VR with one participant on a saturated coffee shop WiFi 2k miles away.
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  > I assume you haven’t tried VR with one participant on a saturated coffee shop WiFi 2k miles away. Coffee shop, no 140ms ping time away, yes. But you are confusing latency with half duplex. VCs cut the sound to all other streams when someone is talking[1]. which causes huge stuttering. [1] mostly

nprateem 4y ago

Amen. I'm happy being able to join all-hands Teams meetings, mute them and do something I want to with my life. When I was in the office I had to sit there and waste my life. Now I don't have to keep up the pretense of caring. There's no way I'd want to have to strap a VR headset on to appear in a meeting I don't want to be in, and for it to be obvious when I'm ignoring it.

culturedsystems 4y ago

Emails still retain the structure of intra-office memos, something which hasn't existed for at least 20 years. We don't really notice with emails, because the initial real-world analogy became a minor detail of the more technologically evolved system. An optimistic view would be that VR will follow a similar trajectory, and attempts to recreate the real world will eventually give way to real innovations. The idea of the metaverse (and especially Meta's version), though, is so focussed on the real world analogy, I think it's more likely to be a barrier to this kind of innovation than an early version of it.