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I know that VR is compelling, and FB's VR headsets succeed in providing some level of immersion, but I don't think people will go from remote-working-with-Zoom
by muglug 4y ago
I know that VR is compelling, and FB's VR headsets succeed in providing some level of immersion, but I don't think people will go from remote-working-with-Zoom to remote-working-with-headset, because it's a trade the most aren't willing to make.
If I'm on a Zoom call with 8 other people and the conversation shifts to something that doesn't concern me, I can bring up a code editor and continue hacking away at something without advertising that to my colleagues. But if I started in VR, I'm basically stuck there.
The whole thing still feels like "we built this great piece of technology but we're struggling to find its killer app". It feels very Segway-ish.
- Robotbeat 4y agoYou wouldn’t have to be stuck there if coding in VR was feasible. …but actually, the fact that people can and do just check out of online meetings while pretending to still be present is kind of a drawback of online meeting Vs in-person meetings. Lack of focus is a killer for productivity. And if people are doing that, they should be allowed to leave the meeting anyway.
- bamboozled 4y agoHonestly, you’ve never hacked during a real life meeting ? I used to bring my laptop into the board room all the time.
- jetbalsa 4y agoJokes on you, I check out in meetings in-person as well. Just hacking away on my laptop in a corner without a care in the world.
- dougmwne 4y agoIt very much depends on your meeting culture. I suppose in the ideal world, everyone should be intently paying attention because the meeting was relevant and focused. In my world, meetings go on for hours, everyone invites the kitchen sink, and long egotistical monologues are the norm. Trapping me in VR for all that would be unpleasant to say the least.
- Robotbeat 4y agoI agree, which is why I think we should normalize leaving meetings.
- robertlagrant 4y agoIronically, VR might help with this, because you can leave your VR avatar listening for you :)
- dylan604 4y agoyeah, but if you leave your avatar, it just goes limp and is obvious you're not there. or, it just stands there doing that NPC awkward flailing of the arms/sighing/whatever when not doing something specific which is just as obvious. it would be my preference where you could just make it super obvious the meeting is boring AF and do a magician smoke burst when you exit the meeting. make your avatar hold up a sign that says "Why Am I Here?". maybe have your avatar start throwing money at the presenter so they can buy a clue? like, if we're going to use VR and live in the metaverse, let's do things there that we can't do IRL.
- chihuahua 4y agoMaybe Meta's monetization strategy is that for $1/minute, you can put your avatar on autopilot so it moves as if you were there, while you're in the kitchen tempering chocolate. For $2/minute, it responds to questions addressed to it with GPL3 generated speech. (Zuck_make_it_rain.gif)
- dylan604 4y agoI kind of want to do something similar but without meta. If it weren't for morals/ethics/whatever about sending company data to 3rd parties, I would love to have GPL3 respond to a subset of my emails for a few weeks just to see if anyone would notice.
- danwee 4y ago
- eptcyka 4y agoThere's nothing stopping me from checking out in real world meetings too. But in a remote meeting, when I check out, I can at least be productive.
- croes 4y agoLack of necessity of a meeting is the real killer of productivity.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago> Lack of focus is a killer for productivity. Killer new feature: virtual monitors are anchored to your head. You cannot look away!
- chihuahua 4y agoPlus eye-tracking can detect when you're not looking at the right thing, and deliver electric shocks to your temples.
- anothernewdude 4y agoActually, the fact that people can check out of online meetings has improved productivity vs in-person meetings.
- triceratops 4y agoI work in a company where I'm allowed to leave meetings that aren't interesting to me. The problem is with "status update" or "brainstorming" meetings where I'm expected to contribute but only fleetingly, or intermittently. I know I'll be needed for about 2 minutes at some point, but it's not clear when.
- picsao 4y ago
- sottol 4y agoA problem with online meetings? Any meeting I've been to with more than about 4 participants had most attendants present but checked out. Maybe the point is that participants should just be able to leave but that seldom happens imo for various reasons.
- time_to_smile 4y ago> Lack of focus is a killer for productivity. You're implying that the "lack of focus" is in the people attending the meeting not paying attention. The real place focus is lacking is in the things the meeting, which is not engaging to its attendees, is taking away from. Good meetings, whether remote or in person, have everyone engaged because the content is immediately relevant and pressing to all attendees. Personally I've found that short, small, highly focused meeting are easier to have than in person. In an online environment it's not too bad if you invite more people than really need to be at the meeting precisely because if you need to be there "just in case", you can keep the tab open while you work on other stuff. The equivalent of this in-person is just more painful, not more productive. It's the meeting where you consciously struggle to pay attention to something that doesn't really concern you because it would be rude to just walk out.
- Robotbeat 4y agoThe solution is to fix the fake culture where people pretend it’s more rude to walk out than mentally check out.
- kortilla 4y ago> while pretending to still be present is kind of a drawback of online meeting Vs in-person meetings. Lack of focus is a killer for productivity. Have you been in meetings before online? People were on their phones and laptops all of the time then too. If strapping horse blinders to your employees’ heads during all meetings is the solution to keep their attention, you have bigger cultural issues at hand.
- nitwit005 4y agoI was on the laptop doing stuff in plenty of in person meetings as well.
- picsao 4y ago
- insane_dreamer 4y agoOn the other hand sometimes people need to be in the meeting but for the next 15 min the conversation might be about something unrelated to them; I’m happy they can multitask during that time without distrActing the rest of the team. That would not be possible in VR
- bamboozled 4y agoFor some if my super early morning meetings, I’m in bed with headphones on listening. Don’t want this to go away :)
- intrasight 4y ago> I'm basically stuck there Right. So the first extension to this platform will be avatar automation - to make it look like your are "engaged" while you in fact are doing something else.
- KineticLensman 4y agoYes, the VR equivalent of mouse nudging that maintains a green 'active' dot in corporate collaborative environments.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoPut it on a lazy large dog or cow, if available, as they don’t have issues with VR apparently.
- TurkishPoptart 4y agoThis sounds very over-engineered. We should just go back to Skype conference calls.
- mhb 4y agoSure. It's the same situation of a solution in search of a problem as video in phone calls before that capability existed. "In the future, we'll be able to see people instead of just talk to them on the phone!" It turns out that that's not always/often so desirable.
- muglug 4y agoYeah that's a really great comparison! Video calls are great for transatlantic calls with family and friends I haven't seen in ages, and a good VR version of that might be even better, but I likely wouldn't use it more than a few times a month.
- gausswho 4y agoFor me video calls add negative value even in this situation. I have a hard time accommodating the compromise in fidelity and latency and resent the miracle. I'd rather use textual mediums and wait (even a long time) to get the full experience in person. Current technology for videoconferencing reduces my relationship with people rather than grows it. Pretty sure I'm a minority here.
- helen___keller 4y ago> If I'm on a Zoom call with 8 other people and the conversation shifts to something that doesn't concern me, I can bring up a code editor and continue hacking away at something without advertising that to my colleagues. But if I started in VR, I'm basically stuck there. This is simultaneously a criticism and a big selling point
- fortuna86 4y agoNot for employees. In fact, I can't see a single reason why workers will want VR environments for remote work.
- headsupftw 4y agoThey can easily provide a feature where the employee could flip a switch and temporarily (semi?) hide herself, signaling that she is currently occupied with something else. Yes, in a Zoom setting, she doesn't have to broadcast that. But that's just cheating.
- fortuna86 4y ago> They can easily provide a feature where the employee could flip a switch and temporarily (semi?) hide herself, signaling that she is currently occupied with something else. That's like saying "you could just start doing something else" during an in-person meeting. We all decided that's not ok, so why would we be granted an exception in a VR setting ?
- headsupftw 4y ago"We all decided that's not ok". And we also all decided it's ok to start doing something else in a Zoom meeting, because nobody will notice anyway?
- fortuna86 4y agoYes the whole point of VR is to command your entire attention the same way as if you were physically in a room. The pro-VR crowd (basically limited to anyone getting paid to work on it for Meta) thinks this will replicate the benefits of in-person work. Everyone else sees it as replicating the drawbacks of in-person work.
- swalsh 4y agoSo your main issue with VR meetings is you can't sit there and ignore the meeting? You can say "Hey, it sounds like i'm no longer needed here, do you mind if I leave?".
- croes 4y agoAnswer: "the meeting is mandatory, so you can't leave"
- ianbutler 4y agodont ask, leave and see if anyone cares, that's what I do
- Firmwarrior 4y agoJust say you have to go to another meeting Bonus points, you can schedule a bunch of long meetings on your calendar that are actually just time to work
- kortilla 4y agoThat’s a good way to get left out of the occasional actual important meeting.
- seydor 4y agoThat's a meetings problem, not FB's problem. Well tbh , work from home can be lonely and this virtual meeting does make the meeting slighty more exciting, and considering that it has very good pass-through, it would work OK in teams as well https://twitter.com/ImmersedVR/status/1579925595441762305 https://twitter.com/ImmersedVR/status/1579925595441762305
- franciscop 4y agoWait but we have found a killer app for it, 3D videogames, isn't it? It's just not a market big enough for Meta since they want everyone to be using it so they are looking for bigger markets? But it seems to me there is a very clear and pocket-deep sector there.
- muglug 4y ago3rd-person video games can be fun — I really enjoyed playing Lucky's tale back in the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLantPfNRIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLantPfNRIY, but first-person games don't map half as well.
- nomel 4y agoThe HL 1/2 and Doom 1/2 ports severely disagree.
- blobbers 4y agoThey haven’t really started trying. Half Life Alyx is still on the top of everyone’s list, but mac/quest2 users can’t play it. Most quest 2 games feel like phone games. Super shallow, and not amazing. Meta should bid for world of Warcraft. MMORPGs are the most successful form of metaverse to date.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoI don't know if the smoldering wreckage of Activision-Blizzard could make the next WoW..
- f1refly 4y agoI highly doubt that the average mac can play half life alyx at acceptable performance levels. Aren't most of them laptops with integrated gpu?
- blobbers 4y agoIf you’re a designer you used to get the Intel with Radeon cards. I thought the M1 and M2 has reasonable graphics capabilities. https://www.techradar.com/news/apples-m1-chip-can-apparently-outperform-some-amd-and-nvidia-graphics-cards#:~:text=M1%20chip%20benchmark%20results&text=The%20GFXBench%205.0%20(opens%20in,to%202.6%20TFLOPS%20of%20throughput https://www.techradar.com/news/apples-m1-chip-can-apparently....
- philjohn 4y agoInstall Oculus Virtual Desktop - gives you access to your computer, on compatible keyboards is able to bring it virtually onto your desktop in front of you, and mute your mic.
- blobbers 4y agoSegway! Yes! Great analogy!!!
- MSFT_Edging 4y agoThis whole thing screams "What problem does this solve?" It doesn't solve the lack of real face-to-face communication from remote work, I'd argue it's way worse because now you're face-to-face with a bad simulation of a face. Are displays particularly bad for zoom meetings? Is having something hanging off your face, hurting your neck better? Probably not. Tech has moved way past actually solving problems and this is the best screaming example.
- randoglando 4y ago> It doesn't solve the lack of real face-to-face communication from remote work, I'd argue it's way worse because now you're face-to-face with a bad simulation of a face. For now, it's a bad simulation. But, this needs to be thought of on a 5-10 year scale. Might still be useless, but can't judge it on a 1 year scale.
- muglug 4y ago> can’t judge it on a 1 year scale. Facebook wants us to, though. This isn’t a lab demo that they’re showing us — it’s meant to be a product you can use today.
- randoglando 4y agoGood point, that's where I think they are screwing up. Making this their centre of attention.
- Minor49er 4y agoWhy not? Previous attempts at VR have not kept up their momentum for that long
- randoglando 4y agoThis is the most money & investment that has ever been put into VR by a single company by far.
- 4y ago
- andreilys 4y agoUnless you use gpt-3 and a text-to-voice synthesizer to automate your attendance of unimportant meetings in VR.
- anonred 4y agoSurprise: you can already do this in Meta’s Workrooms. Opening a private interactive window to your computer while in a VR meeting works as expected, although it’s just as obvious as when you do it in a video call…
- cush 4y agoWhy would being in VR make you stuck? You can still miltitask
- rwmj 4y agoOne problem seems to be that either everyone on your call has VR headsets, or you can't use VR at all. A huge outlay in hardware, or nothing. Is there a way for people to join a VR meeting without hardware and still have a decent experience?
- charcircuit 4y agoIt's not that much different of a problem compared to real life hybrid calls between conference rooms and other conference rooms / remote workers.
- doophus 4y agoYeah. In workrooms non-VR people can still join in. They appear as a video feed in the environment, and they see a rendering of the meeting from that perspective. It's still quite rich for everyone, eg you can tell when VR people are listening to you because they instinctively all turn their heads to look at your video.
- randoglando 4y ago> But if I started in VR, I'm basically stuck there. That's not entirely true. You can still pull up screens and hack away in Workrooms. However, I don't think they let you hide your screens from others yet. I presume that feature will soon come.
- fortuna86 4y ago> If I'm on a Zoom call with 8 other people and the conversation shifts to something that doesn't concern me, I can bring up a code editor and continue hacking away at something without advertising that to my colleagues. But if I started in VR, I'm basically stuck there. This is exactly why in person meetings are awful, and VR is trying to recreate those conditions.
- alkonaut 4y ago> If I'm on a Zoom call with 8 other people and the conversation shifts to something that doesn't concern me, I can bring up a code editor and continue hacking away at something without advertising that to my colleagues. Isn’t this one of the reasons face to face meetings are more effective? Your colleagues in a physical meeting can see and react to expressions of others, which makes the conversation more likely to stay on track. If VR meetings don’t solve the “disconnected feeling” problem of talking-video-heads meetings then it’s just a worse form of talking -video-heads meetings. Just being an avatar in 3D doesn’t significantly improve anything, something else must also fundamentally improve. It has to feel like “being there” to improve the quality of meetings. I’m not saying I think VR will solve that problem, but who knows.
- bombcar 4y agoMeetings that need to be done are more effective face to face. But something like 80-90% of meetings don't qualify, and in those cases zoom is a godsend.
- imiric 4y agoThe tech is still too young. I imagine future headsets will be able to stream a face capture and map it onto the VR avatar in real time. Eye tracking is already becoming mainstream, so face tracking is the next logical step. Google's Project Starline is really impressive and seems to be progressing. If that could be made to fit on a headset, using perspective distortion like on the new iPhones, then you could presumably capture expressions. Or just by using an external camera, and overlaying the eye tracking feed to remove the headset. It doesn't sound so far fetched.
- jayd16 4y agoIf jumping in and out of VR is the desired business case, apps would just let you switch to audio only mode, when you pull off the headset or alt-tab or if you disable body language sharing. Why are we expecting these tools to be built as painful as possible when there's plenty of work arounds?
- boh 4y agoVR is going to be a niche product even for gaming. It's fun and definitely a novel experience, but onerous for extensive use. It's way easier to sit in a comfortable chair and play on a traditional machine--particularly for any lengthy game (it's also cheaper and has more to offer). The myth of the "killer app" just assumes progress is inevitable regardless of practical utility. No one needs "immersion" for a zoom call. The awkward, and not completely comfortable, VR sets are acceptable when you're doing something fun but--and I can't stress this enough--completely demoralizing when you need to put it on to "immerse" yourself in the banal confines of a business meeting. Investors pretty uniformly don't have high hopes for what seems to be a desperate Hail Mary for a company that's no longer capable of organic growth. Meta just doesn't have enough time to cultivate a Meta-verse with enough adopters to stall its decline. I'm sure there will be benefits to this research but the level of optimism we're getting from Meta is more hopeful than reasonable.
- tenpies 4y agoI agree, although I'm really curious about what the post-Zoomer generation does with VR. Our media and how we interact with it has only ever trended in one direction: higher bandwidth. The generation that grew up with oral tradition loved the written word. The generation that grew up with the written word loved the printing press. The generation that grew up with the printing press loved photos. The generation that grew up with photos, loved videos. What will the generation that grew up with video love? It certainly seems limiting if they settle for merely a higher resolution, FPS, or better sound quality.
- _Algernon_ 4y agoEven blockchain has more purpose than the "Metaverse". At least Blockchain serves as a speculative asset for gambling addicts.
- cheriot 4y agoDoes going to the office feel Segway-ish? This is the same problem as an in person meeting.
- outworlder 4y ago> If I'm on a Zoom call with 8 other people and the conversation shifts to something that doesn't concern me, I can bring up a code editor and continue hacking away at something without advertising that to my colleagues. I think in-person meetings are compelling, but it's a trade that most aren't willing to make. Snark aside, VR meetings have similar benefits and similar drawbacks to in-person meetings. Besides, this is covering for the uselessness of many meetings. If you are not contributing to the point that you are actually working on something else, you shouldn't have been there (or the meeting doesn't have an agenda, or invited too many people, etc). No tech can fix dysfunctional companies.
- idontpost 4y ago
- smoldesu 4y agoSegways sold a total of ~140,000 units across nearly 20 years of production[0]. The original Quest sold more than twice that in the first 6 months of it's release[1], and Quest 2 sales have well exceeded 10 million units. While I agree that VR is still a nebulous proposition from a software perspective, the hardware is apparently ready and the demand is there. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/90517971/exclusive-segway-the-most-hyped-invention-since-the-macintosh-to-end-production https://www.fastcompany.com/90517971/exclusive-segway-the-mo... [1] https://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/superdata-xr-update https://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/superdata-xr-update
- muglug 4y agoFWIW the original Segway cost 10x more than the Quest, but the important figure (from an ecosystem perspective) in both cases is their actual usage numbers. Most Quest headsets get used a bunch in the first month, but their owners lose interest pretty quickly.
- GordonAShumway 4y agoAbsolutely. Perhaps someone can chime in, but how does one take notes in VR. I know it’s terrifically old school, but I routinely jot down notes and reminders for myself in meetings. Do I take the googles off? Are do I use the VR pen and VR paper? I guess I could use the keyboard?
- novok 4y agoThe main problem with zoom and others is that echo cancellation prevents people from speaking simultaneously, while VR essentially forces people to all wear a headset and turn off the echo cancellation and allow people to speak simultaneously.