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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

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.
    - chaostheory 4y ago
      My point is that a lot of the people complaining about VR haven’t even tried it to experience its immersion. Until you understand that, you won’t understand what VR brings to meetings. It doesn’t demo well on a flat screen.
      - rurp 4y ago
        These comments are extremely unconvincing. If the best sales pitch for VR is that you need to invest a bunch of time and money in order to see why it's worth investing a bunch of time and money into, that makes me even more skeptical about it's future. VR will never grow beyond a niche of technical fans until less interested users can see the value.
        chaostheory 4y ago
        No, the point we’re making is that you need to just try it instead of making lots of terrible and wrong assumptions about a subject matter that you’re not very familiar with Today you don’t need to invest a lot of time or money in order to be familiar with VR. A meta quest is an affordable console, and so are many older gen PCVR headsets. You can also rent the meta quest or borrow it from certain libraries.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    I have used VR a lot. What Quest is chasing is the old person’s vision of what VR should be - a bad mirror of reality. All of the good VR innovation I’ve seen has been in games. All of my analogies are exactly the same. It’s using technology to try to poorly replicate what already exists rather than using technology to enable a bunch of new things possible without the bounds of the physical world. > This is a terrible analogy because the DMV is not a meeting. It’s a service and it’s already being automated. You’re missing the point. Renewing a license over the Internet removed an instance of one of the worst facets of the DMV. Quest isn’t working on getting rid of the worst parts of meetings, it’s working on copying (poorly) the whole experience as-is. The quest version of the DMV if the website didn’t already exist would be to sit in a waiting room. Innovation would be to get rid of it.

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.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    My point is that a lot of the people complaining about VR haven’t even tried it to experience its immersion. Until you understand that, you won’t understand what VR brings to meetings. It doesn’t demo well on a flat screen.
    - rurp 4y ago
      These comments are extremely unconvincing. If the best sales pitch for VR is that you need to invest a bunch of time and money in order to see why it's worth investing a bunch of time and money into, that makes me even more skeptical about it's future. VR will never grow beyond a niche of technical fans until less interested users can see the value.
      - chaostheory 4y ago
        No, the point we’re making is that you need to just try it instead of making lots of terrible and wrong assumptions about a subject matter that you’re not very familiar with Today you don’t need to invest a lot of time or money in order to be familiar with VR. A meta quest is an affordable console, and so are many older gen PCVR headsets. You can also rent the meta quest or borrow it from certain libraries.
- kortilla 4y ago
  I have used VR a lot. What Quest is chasing is the old person’s vision of what VR should be - a bad mirror of reality. All of the good VR innovation I’ve seen has been in games. All of my analogies are exactly the same. It’s using technology to try to poorly replicate what already exists rather than using technology to enable a bunch of new things possible without the bounds of the physical world. > This is a terrible analogy because the DMV is not a meeting. It’s a service and it’s already being automated. You’re missing the point. Renewing a license over the Internet removed an instance of one of the worst facets of the DMV. Quest isn’t working on getting rid of the worst parts of meetings, it’s working on copying (poorly) the whole experience as-is. The quest version of the DMV if the website didn’t already exist would be to sit in a waiting room. Innovation would be to get rid of it.