[HN Gopher] 'Horizon Workrooms': remote collaboration reimagined
___________________________________________________________________
'Horizon Workrooms': remote collaboration reimagined
Author : bemmu
Score : 73 points
Date : 2021-08-19 11:45 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.oculus.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.oculus.com)
| lucasgw wrote:
| We have done high-level client review and approval meetings in a
| Horizon-style interface (Venues), with a surprising level of
| success. We were hesitant at first because of our client-base and
| the significant dollars at stake in these reviews. Comments:
|
| 1. A surprising amount of emotional communication is possible
| with these avatars. The combination of arm/hand/finger
| articulation and movement + head nod/move/position + hearing
| someone's voice... that is synthesized at a much higher level
| than you might anticipate. I was truly surprised at the level of
| nuance we were all able to glean from fairly minor, almost
| involuntary movements people make, how that is represented
| through avatars, and then translates effectively to accurate
| social communication.
|
| 2. The physical representation of space and the avatars around
| that space carry the same "tribal" rules that exist in RealSpace.
| Certain groups tend to gravitate to each other. Side
| conversations can occur in a way that can actually be helpful to
| the overall gestalt. Leaders position as leaders, subordinates as
| subordinates. (Avatar group interaction is a fascinating,
| evolving sociology.)
|
| 3. Most importantly - all participants across multiple meetings
| and multiple clients agree it was _far_ more effective then Zoom
| /Meet/Teams/etc. Latency is rarely perceived as an issue, the
| brain adapts and adjusts amazingly quickly to the new
| representation of space and human interaction, and decisions are
| made quickly because of the interactions, not in spite of them.
|
| Of course it is in its infancy. But once you have done real
| business and interaction in these environments, it's
| disappointing (and counter-productive) to return to the endless
| talking squares on a monitor.
|
| YMMV, but I doubt it. ;)
| sithadmin wrote:
| Pitching this as a remote collaboration tool for business seems
| dangerously close to infringing on VMware's Horizon trademark
| (for VDI/app streaming).
| bostonsre wrote:
| It's pretty hilarious to think of Zuckerberg and his upper level
| colleagues all sitting in their offices dog fooding it for a
| meeting with all of them virtually nodding their avatar heads and
| telling him it's amazing.
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| My first thought was what it would be like to get fired by a
| wide-eyed, partially smiling cartoon character. Half hilarious,
| half dystopian.
| bostonsre wrote:
| If you join a virtual meeting with intervention like seating
| with a bunch of bobbleheads surrounding you with the angry
| inward sloping eye brows, you know you're in trouble. I
| wonder if you are able to make hand gestures in the meetings
| to flip off the other bobbleheads...
| dougmwne wrote:
| There is indeed hand tracking so you can make some obscene
| hand gestures if you need to.
| baby wrote:
| You just gave a movie idea to someone in hollywood reading
| your comment.
| goodcjw2 wrote:
| 1/ There is definitely potential there. Spatial audio, shared
| white board, avatar in HD, etc.
|
| 2/ The biggest obstacle for now is still comfort. VR is now
| comfortable enough for 30-min sessions for lots of people, but
| still not for everyone. For those who complains about Zoom
| fatigue, VR as of today is just 10X more painful. We need better
| hardware. There are obviously lots of room to improve.
|
| 3/ Horizon Workrooms is not the first and spatial.io already
| moving towards that direction. After some 30-mins trial, I feel
| Horizon is more polished and feels better than spatial.io
| already.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Try vrland.io/lobby, a WebXR alternative to Spatial and Horizon
| Workrooms. Even works on mobile web and computers too!
| phpnode wrote:
| Latency is the biggest problem with video meetings and I can only
| imagine it's worse with this.
|
| In normal human interaction you can see people's reactions to
| what you're saying and doing within microseconds of taking an
| action, you can subtly and automatically adjust your
| presentation, your pace and your expressions to build greater
| rapport. Over video calls you need to introduce artificial pauses
| to make sure that everyone has caught up, and it's really jarring
| compared to being face to face.
| filereaper wrote:
| I agree with this. There's work done by NVidia on AI Video
| Compression around facial ticks and reducing latency and
| bandwidth. Maybe these two approaches can be combined for a
| best-of-both worlds result.
|
| https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression
| KaiserPro wrote:
| In a previous role we did some light research into this, you
| tend to notice latency in movement at around 40-80ms, but thats
| from your own movement vs avatar.
|
| However, you don't notice it in other people's movements until
| there is a mismatch between social clues, Even then you have up
| to 250 ms (sometimes more, depending on the pace of the
| conversation)
|
| In practice that means you can do an atlantic call without
| really noticing it.
|
| the problem with VC calls is that because video needs to be
| matched to audio, the audio is buffered to make sure its lined
| up, this means that you have a 250ms+ delay plus any time to
| switch presenters.
| crakhamster01 wrote:
| The latency on this should actually be better than video calls.
|
| Since all the character assets are downloaded locally, the only
| visual data that needs to be sent across network is the
| positioning of facial features and hand movements - which is a
| much smaller payload than streaming video. More akin to the
| latency you'd see playing Call of Duty or something.
|
| I could see this experience being higher fidelity than video
| calls, especially in poor network conditions.
| keiferski wrote:
| I spent about a decade playing MMOs as a kid and would love a
| properly-implemented remote 3D meeting system. Not sure it needs
| to be VR, but it seems likely that we'll eventually move away
| from headsets to walls/projections anyway. [1]
|
| But please, someone, anyone, make a system that doesn't use the
| Corporate Memphis style. [2] Hire a team of real artists and make
| it beautiful. The avatars in the link are so aesthetically
| unappealing.
|
| 1. https://www.engadget.com/google-project-
| starline-191228699.h...
|
| 2. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-
| tec...
| Miraste wrote:
| VR is a lot cheaper and more scalable than those walls. I think
| we'll eventually land on AR glasses that do this but without
| blocking out your own environment.
|
| Horizon's style is terrible and likely workshopped to be as
| bland and inoffensive as possible but it's not really Memphis
| style.
| avnigo wrote:
| I see a lot of negative sentiment in the comments, but looking
| forward to a real-life demo of this. Whether it's for work or
| not, pushing this kind of technology forward is the first step of
| the VR/AR future we've envisioned.
|
| I don't know if such kind of collaboration would work in
| actuality, but I'm rooting for it. Sometimes the applications for
| the technology are realized after that technology becomes more
| fully realized.
| nomoreplease wrote:
| The classroom setting is something I might use this for (ship it
| to my colleagues) but the identity & access mess is a
| dealbreaker. Requires two different identities, and one of them
| is Facebook? No enterprise federation?
|
| > Using Workrooms requires a Workrooms account, which is separate
| from your Oculus or Facebook accounts, although your Oculus
| username may be visible to other users in some cases......And to
| experience Workrooms in VR, you'll need to access the app on
| Quest 2, which requires a Facebook login.
| dougmwne wrote:
| There's a corporate version of the Quest 2 that doesn't have
| the FB account requirement, that's probably how this will go
| for enterprise.
| baby wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if this is paired with Workplace (if
| there's demand)
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Jeez, those avatars are nightmare fuel, truly the Comic Sans of
| 3D character design, or in the Snow Crash universe "Brandies" and
| "Clints". Imagine being fired by one of those.
| baby wrote:
| They look like miis, which everybody finds cute.
| makerofthings wrote:
| If using this would require creating a facebook account then it's
| a non-starter for most of the engineers I work with. I just won't
| have a facebook account.
|
| Also, VR makes me throw-up so probably not the best look in
| meetings!
| eplanit wrote:
| But, it would be funny cartoon vomit spewing out of a cute
| little avatar face.
|
| My fun in such a meeting would be ridiculing the silly tech. I
| bet it'll be a hit, nonetheless.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Tangential but does anyone else know how it's legal for
| Facebook/Oculus to pop up a cookie notice that only offers, "I
| Accept" as an option? Even if I wanted to try it (and I had a
| Facebook login, which I do not) these are the kinds of things
| that make me run for the hills.
| camillomiller wrote:
| I would love not to, but I just can't think positively about
| anything Oculus does. In this case, applying VR to the most
| boring and misused of all corporate tools: the meeting.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Have you tried any of its games? There are a few that are
| different and fun.
|
| This meeting stuff sounds like it is incredibly gimmicky with
| not much, if any, upside. Zoom calls are already a pita, can't
| imagine what a waste of time starting vr meetings would be.
| rebuilder wrote:
| I wonder if it tracks whether or not participants have their
| headsets on. Talk about golden fetters!
| mehphp wrote:
| This just doesn't strike me as "professional" whatever that
| means. I'm supposed to talk to an avatar of my co-worker when I
| can already just have a video call with them?
|
| I don't see what problem this is solving.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I think positional audio is a big one, so is the sense of
| presence and shared space VR brings. I don't think this has any
| chance of taking off before these headset include eye and face
| tracking so those cartoon avatars can have realistic human
| expressions.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not only they need to be realistic, they need to be accurate
| and real-time.
|
| If I see a colleague confused during a presentation, I can
| adjust my delivery. I can't do the same unless the avatar
| communicates that to me in no uncertain terms.
| dougmwne wrote:
| A potential advantage for latency is having every
| participant on the same known set of hardware that can be
| optimized for low latency. Though the Quest 2 has high
| latency, it would be plausible to make a low latency
| headset and have every participant on that hardware for the
| best experience.
| baby wrote:
| whiteboarding!
| doctoboggan wrote:
| Unlike many of the other commenters here I am really excited for
| this sort of experience. I just wish it wasn't Facebook bringing
| this to market.
| klyrs wrote:
| Gonna be real awkward for employers adopting this if their non-
| fb-using employees get permabanned from Oculus for using
| Oculus...
| brightstep wrote:
| This will be huge for remote team cohesion. It's really, _really_
| too bad that it 's facebook. Not too jazzed to be tracked and
| datamined at home AND work.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Not too jazzed to be tracked and datamined at home AND work.
|
| They promised they won't track you at work.
|
| Trust is hard earned, unfortunately.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I can't imagine having meetings feeling I have a scuba helmet on.
|
| Like someone pointed out, it's pretty obvious they never used it
| themselves. Or, if they did, they are lying to the product
| managers and telling them it's awesome.
|
| Because I would never even think of releasing something like this
| as an actual product. Not even a preview.
| MikusR wrote:
| Have you actually used Quest?
| blensor wrote:
| There is a weekly XR developers meetup int SpatialApe [1] each
| Thursday and I have been attending it every week since back in
| September.
|
| I have never met a single one of them in person and almost no
| one in a video call and yet their avatars feel like a person I
| know to me.
|
| The technology has a lot of limitations, no questions about
| that, and with Covid as an accelerator none of those virtual
| meeting spaces would have had the growth they had, but the
| technology is moving fast and even the - admittedly - limited
| experience we have now does bring a lot of value to my and
| probably my colleagues as well.
|
| [1] spatialape.com
| bane wrote:
| I'm actually starting to evaluate some VR collaborative
| work/presentation tools and I'm very interested to try this.
|
| The problem these kinds of tools are trying to solve is the one
| thing video conferencing can't do, which is the ability to
| communicate using the semantics of 3d space. In a meeting room, I
| can direct an audience to different parts of a room for different
| conceptual "spaces". For example, I might use one part of a room
| to collect and display engineering drawing, another for
| prototypes, another for a Kanban, etc.
|
| After a solid year of literally thousands of teleconference
| calls, it's clear to me and my team at least that this spatial
| component is important in real-life meetings and is noticeable
| when it's not there. When we all come into the office and hit a
| meeting room together, the ad-hoc ability to use a whiteboard
| (often together and collaboratively), or sit together in groups
| around the conference table, it all has important value.
|
| So far I've messed with Spatial.io and a couple other remote
| training applications, and while they're "ok", they're fussy to
| use in practice. Most importantly they don't really have a smooth
| way of integrating work artifacts from your computer into the
| experience, and the whiteboarding frankly stinks. Lots of
| comments here also talk about how this kind of meeting eliminates
| subtle facial cues and can be kind of uncomfortable for the
| wearer. I also totally agree with this.
|
| But I'm also aware that this is a technology in its absolute
| infancy, and I'm expecting it to get better at some point.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Try vrland.io/lobby instead. It's web-based and works across
| mobile, PC/Mac, as well as VR via WebXR. We have many template
| rooms you can access in addition to an office, like a gallery,
| concert venue, conference hall, and much more.
| mchusma wrote:
| This is awesome, I am very excited for vr for work purposes. Glad
| to see they are making progress on the software side.
|
| I have been tentatively thinking that once resolution is high
| enough to really do work (probably Quest 3 will be there), buying
| a headset for our full remote team.
|
| Great work by the Oculus team working on this, for me the most
| important VR feature to figure out.
| alphabetting wrote:
| Seems like a ripoff of spatial.io which I really enjoyed on
| Oculus at the onset of the pandemic. Should do well with FB's
| reach as Spatial never really gained traction.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Yeah Spatial is totally screwed
| [deleted]
| maxehmookau wrote:
| Clever. I'll never actually use it though.
|
| The future is better remote working practices, not skeumorphic
| remote tools that recreate (poorly) an office environment.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Current VR tech will never cut it for productivity use. They are
| simply too bulky and low res/low FOV to be useful. It won't be
| until we have it perfected in the form factor of a pair of
| glasses that VR goes mainstream.
| baby wrote:
| I haven't tried the Quest 2, but the first Quest was really not
| too far from that reality. I wouldn't be surprised if the Quest
| 2 is there already.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I tried this app today on the Quest 2 and think it's pretty
| damn close. My virtual computer screen was easy to see with
| probably a 1080p equivalent resolution, the whiteboard was easy
| to see, as were PowerPoint slides. The FOV is not much of an
| issue for looking at virtual screens and avatars. The headset
| weight is fine for me for about an hour but would need to be
| way lighter for all day use.
| kyoob wrote:
| "It works" is not the same thing as "it's useful."
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| This is a dystopian nightmare, what the everloving fffff.
| dijit wrote:
| Cannot read the article without accepting the cookie banner.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I forget now if this is the 4th or 5th iteration of this kind of
| technology that I'm seeing. 1st time around was 1994. We used to
| schedule QoS on the ATM network between sites for each of our Sun
| workstations. I really feel like this kind of representation is a
| dead end. It's a failure of imagination, not of technology.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I have tried this, and despite my best efforts, its actually
| good.
|
| the premise: Wiimes sitting in a room talking.
|
| Expected outcome: utter shit show.
|
| Actual outcome: Surprisingly good
|
| Why is it good?
|
| 1) Audio.
|
| you can turn to the person next to you and talk privately without
| interrupting the main flow of the meeting. There is none of this
| "no.... you speak......no.... you". You can interact normally
| like they were just there.
|
| The spatial audio is top notch.
|
| 2) presentations
|
| presenting is really simple, and you can see the people who are
| asking you questions. Not only that but taking Q&As is much
| better and quicker than on VC.
|
| 3) drawings, you can have a white board thats persistent in that
| meeting series.
|
| yes, I know, yaaaa booo facebook sucks. But actually this is
| quite good, you should try it.
|
| _What don 't I like about it_?
|
| I don't like using the controller as a pen, its clumsy and only
| works on a flat, clean surface. but, if that can be fixed, it'll
| be a brilliant addition
| habosa wrote:
| Been saying it to anyone who would listen for the last 3 years:
| top notch spatial audio is the main thing our current online
| meeting platforms are missing. Nobody seems to care or get it.
| I wish someone other than Facebook had figured it out but I'm
| just glad someone did!
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Check out VRland.io/lobby, have had it for months already!
| dougmwne wrote:
| I have also tried this and I think it will be the eventual
| future of remote meetings. The avatars have some fake lip
| tracking they do based on your voice, but I think eye and face
| tracking will be essential for wider adoption. I would like to
| see improved remote desktop support, mine was pretty laggy.
| Would be nice to include a browser so you don't have to even
| bother with the remote desktop app. There should be powerpoint
| support too instead of only images. Would be nice if the
| meeting chat showed up on the desk as well instead of having to
| access through remote desktop. The account creation process and
| headset pairing was pretty painful, would like to see that
| streamlined. I am curious to try the tracked keyboard with my
| MacBook.
| baby wrote:
| > but I think eye and face tracking will be essential for
| wider adoption
|
| It's coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3XcQtoja_Y
| astlouis44 wrote:
| There's a future for this not only in VR, but 3D meeting
| apps as well.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-gyxlGi5ao&t=3s
| caslon wrote:
| There are already headsets with eye tracking on the market,
| like some of the new Pico models, for example.
| ghaff wrote:
| >I have also tried this and I think it will be the eventual
| future of remote meetings.
|
| There are really two types of meetings (at the extremes).
|
| Some (the minority) are where a small engaged group is
| actively collaborating. I can imagine more immersive tools
| are good for this sort of thing.
|
| But a lot of meetings are the sort you multitask in. You want
| the general update and you're paying enough attention so that
| you can participate if something relevant to you comes up.
| For that, I may turn my camera off and certainly don't want
| deep immersion.
| wantsanagent wrote:
| About the pen, can you tell us more about what you'd like to
| see there? How would you like to use it?
| dougmwne wrote:
| I also don't like the pen. It's clever to turn the controller
| upsidedown, that at least makes it tolerable. The desk
| whiteboard works a lot better than drawing in space without
| tactile feedback as well. If this went mainstream, I would
| need a tracked pen that I could hold normally and see on the
| VR desk. The Quest seems to be able to track known objects
| like with a few keyboard models, so maybe load in the model
| of a standard dry erase marker.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Thats a good question, I would love to be able to use just
| one finger and treat it like making marks in sand, however
| thats challenging as if you don't have a "touch" sensor to
| let you know when you're touching the paper.
|
| I would _love_ to be able to use my wacom, but I suspect
| thats a long way down the list of feature requests that are
| important
| josephg wrote:
| A Wacom might be a reasonable option because those tablets
| can tell when you're hovering over them. So long as the
| user can find the pen on their desk, you wouldn't need to
| track the pen location just from the VR cameras. You could
| use the tablet data stream directly.
| klyrs wrote:
| I don't have an Oculus, but I occasionally suffer days with 4+
| hours of meetings. How long will you be happy wearing that
| headset?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Are these workspaces limited to people who own the oculus
| headset?
| dougmwne wrote:
| No, you can also join as a video conference window instead
| of an avatar.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| I am worried about ruining my eyes by spending too much time in
| VR. Am I wrong?
| sytse wrote:
| Relevant to this I recently asked on Twitter: "I wonder if
| Facebook is dogfooding the metaverse. Are they holding many
| meetings in VR? The Oculus Quest is a great device but I want to
| use it about as much as I use rollercoasters, not as much as I
| use YouTube."
|
| And the lead of the Reality Platform team at Facebook said "I did
| ~3 meetings in VR"
| https://twitter.com/marklucovsky/status/1424050798342807554?...
| nazca wrote:
| This seems like the fundamentally don't understand the challenges
| of working remote & not being collocated with colleagues.
|
| I don't need to see a 3D avatar of colleagues. I don't need to
| see that avatar stand up and walk around.
|
| Mainly what I'm missing is being able to better see those subtle
| emotional cues & the ability to build deeper relationships. Both
| of which I think our brains & office norms are catching up to
| after 18 months of zoom meetings.
| js8 wrote:
| > Mainly what I'm missing is being able to better see those
| subtle emotional cues & the ability to build deeper
| relationships.
|
| I don't understand what do you need these for. In the 21st
| century, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly emotionless
| office worker. I just had my unconscious bias training, and I
| can assure you, my thoughts are now completely rational,
| without any hint of emotional judgment. Frankly, "having deeper
| relationships" sounds like a recipe for a potential conflict of
| interests. As Salaried Professionals, we find Other emotional
| Cues of any Kind to be deeply distracting from our mission.
| beecafe wrote:
| OTOH, one could argue that reducing the amount of emotional
| energy spent at work leaves you with more to give to your
| loved ones/spend as you please. I agree that all you
| mentioned doesn't actually achieve this though
| notacoward wrote:
| There are some problems it addresses and some it doesn't.
| Arranging people in a space, with audio to match, gives you
| some extra cues about who's looking where or interacting with
| whom. If the avatars reflect actual facial expressions that
| could be useful too (though also intrusive). Seems no worse
| than the "Brady Bunch" gallery view we're all used to, and
| quite possibly better.
|
| OTOH, it doesn't address bad remote-meeting etiquette like side
| conversations or eating next to the microphone. It doesn't
| address latency (might even make it worse), so a single remote
| might still find it impossible to break in when majority-site
| participants are interrupting and talking over each other so
| there are no gaps. These are limitations, but they don't
| totally negate the benefits of increasing visual/spatial
| awareness.
| shafyy wrote:
| I would expect latency to be better because you don't need to
| send video data around, just some data to synchronize the 3D
| scene which is run locally on everyone's headset.
|
| Edit: Not necessarily latency since latency is not related to
| data size, but I mean the general performance should be
| better.
| JshWright wrote:
| Latency can definitely be related to data size (even when
| not technically throughput constrained, thanks to "buffer
| bloat").
| weego wrote:
| It addresses no problems, other than the problem of them
| realising that gamers are a bad audience for data and ad
| capture.
| JshWright wrote:
| > OTOH, it doesn't address bad remote-meeting etiquette like
| side conversations
|
| Interestingly, my team has found that side conversations
| taking place in the meeting chat are extremely helpful (to
| the point that as some members of the team have been resuming
| in-person meetings, they have been bringing laptops and
| having a Slack thread running for the meeting).
|
| It's great for questions/comments that may not be worth
| interrupting the flow of the conversation for, but are
| important enough that they shouldn't get lost entirely.
| notacoward wrote:
| Side comments via chat are fantastic, for exactly the
| reason you mention. Vocal side comments, OTOH, tend to make
| the main conversation unintelligible for anyone already
| trying to follow without being able to direct their ears in
| a particular direction.
| okokwhatever wrote:
| Then your problem isn't the medium. Your problem is a lack of
| trust and to rely too much on facial signal that, in other
| scale of things, are a very bad way to measure your
| collaborators
| notacoward wrote:
| That's perhaps phrased a bit less charitably than necessary,
| but gets at an important truth. People who rely too much[1]
| on these non-verbal cues are, more often than not, doing so
| because they're not adept verbally. It's kind of like a
| fortune teller, who of course does not know you or your
| future but can put up a pretty convincing front by observing
| responses to their initial probes. I see it _a lot_ among
| people for whom English is not their first language, just as
| I see the same people make just about any excuse to get out
| of writing anything down permanently. Since effective remote
| work also has to be _asynchronous_ work as much as possible,
| I 'd say these people need to work on their own language
| skills instead of complaining about how the online experience
| doesn't perfectly support their coping strategies.
|
| [1] How much is "too much"? There's plenty of room for
| debate, but a decade of alone-remote and a year of all-remote
| made it pretty clear that it's a threshold many of my
| colleagues at multiple companies exceed.
| throwaways885 wrote:
| Last time I checked, I'm a human being who is hardwired to
| understand these social cues. They're essential for having a
| conversation in any way that isn't just exhausting for me.
| It's not a lack of trust. My monkey brain just struggles to
| parse remotely held conversations.
| notacoward wrote:
| Yes, they're useful, but I challenge the claim that they're
| _essential_. People have been communicating effectively
| over both time and distance for centuries, using media
| where these cues are absent. They 're nice to have, they
| can make things easier and improve comfort/trust levels,
| but whether you _rely_ on them is up to you. Lots of people
| at all levels of language competency and introversion etc.
| manage to collaborate just fine, even without any form of
| video at all.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Facial and body language is a HUGE part of in person
| communication. For better or for worse, that is just how the
| vast majority of humans are wired. If you willfully ignore
| these signals you WILL be misunderstood and you WILL
| misunderstand others. I hate that things are this way because
| of how much effort it takes for me to decipher these cues
| when a neurotypical person gets it from intuition, but it
| absolutely does exist and isn't going away any time soon.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| How can you see subtle emotional cues when your colleagues are
| masked?
|
| Heck, I just realized but I have a much harder time
| understanding accents when speakers are masked (before masking
| I considered myself great at understanding even the strongest
| accents.)
| baby wrote:
| I don't think they don't understand it, they understand
| incremental improvements. Whatever you're talking about is
| coming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3XcQtoja_Y
| istorical wrote:
| Reading these comments is like the "640k ought to be enough
| [memory] for anybody" quote by Bill Gates or the "Remote
| shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop." Time Magazine
| quote.
|
| Social presence is the best killer app of VR so far besides porn.
|
| edit: will admit to understanding the hate for the fb 'stench'
| altho at this point people are falling into a bit of a sports-
| team level of blind love and hate towards particular FAANG
| members, but people utterly failing to see the potential of
| virtual 3d/physical environments for communication/collaboration?
| c'mon, it's ok to hate oculus/fb but have some sense of the
| bigger picture as far as what this could turn into in 20 years.
| blunte wrote:
| That may be true, but a bigger question is, "How much value
| does social presence provide?"
|
| No doubt there are people who really express a need to meet in
| the same room with others; but as this new remote reality we're
| currently in has shown, quite a lot of people can get quite a
| lot done with just audio or audio+video meetings.
|
| So is social presence valuable enough to outweigh the certain
| technical challenges, additional expenses and complexity, and
| other as yet unidentified challenges that would come with VR
| meetings? If I were betting, I would say no. (And I'm a fan of
| VR.)
| baby wrote:
| I tend to agree here, while everybody put their camera on at
| the beginning of the covid, now I see much more people
| turning off their cameras during meetings. That being said,
| having an avatar is a much different feeling, and I could see
| how one could tune what degree of realism they want to expose
| to others. Perhaps some people could just look like robots,
| while others could show all of their facial expressions.
| istorical wrote:
| I would say that for most meetings, the current state of VR
| is not worth it. So no to your question.
|
| But I would also disagree with "quite a lot of people can get
| quite a lot done with just audio or audio+video meetings" at
| least to the extent that I would say people who will enjoy
| this work culture long-term are in the minority. I truly
| don't believe most people are meant to work in a room alone
| for hours everyday (even though some thrive on it!).
| Grustaf wrote:
| This comment is trotted out every time someone launches
| something that seems pointless. And yet, 90% of the time the
| doubters turn out to be right.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Right, but it's a bit like saying that on average, across all
| the football leagues, a teams record will be .500.
|
| It's true without adding value.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Saying that people doubted online shopping also doesn't add
| any value.
|
| Just because they doubted that and they doubt VR meetings
| doesn't mean VR meetings will be a hit.
| notacoward wrote:
| Most startups fail. Does that mean relentlessly dumping on
| founders and their ideas is appropriate? Same thing here. Try
| to at least _consider_ the potential, even if it seems
| unlikely to be realized.
| Grustaf wrote:
| It means that companies will not succeed just because
| people also doubted Amazon.
| baby wrote:
| This comment is trotted out every time someone launches
| something that will be a game changer.
| Kye wrote:
| As always, furries do it better (even when they're poking fun)
|
| https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1428445312511795201
| muglug wrote:
| This doesn't make sense to me, product-wise. Putting on a bulky
| headset with limited FOV to talk to my colleagues feels like the
| opposite of a natural experience.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Anything is better than commuting to a unnessary meeting.
|
| I have found most office meetings are unnessary.
|
| I am for anything that prevents me from commuting to that
| office I don't like.
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