There are a lot of people pooh-poohing this who haven't tried a meeting in Workrooms. I was skeptical going in, even as a VR early adopter, and it exceeded my expectations by a long way. It feels a whole lot more like a real meeting than a Zoom call does.
I don't know if it's enough better for me to choose it over Zoom in everyday use, but this was on Quest 2. A meeting where everyone is wearing Quest Pro will be significantly better. I expect that the combination of the better screen/lenses, better comfort, much better AR passthrough, and of course the new eye/face tracking will make for a very compelling experience.
> enough better for me to choose it over Zoom in everyday use
It doesn’t have to be better than Zoom. It has to be $1500 better than Zoom. Per employee.
I’m in agreement with you — I like Immersed and I like the idea of VR meetings. But will people/employers opt for this over a hybrid on-site/remote system? How do VR meetings work when half the team is onsite in a conference zoom? I don’t want to put on a VR a headset to talk to the coworker sitting physically next to me in a conference room.
Sadly, I see this as useful only for remote-only teams. As one of a handful of remote people on my team, it doesn’t seem like a workable option, even if I already like/use VR.
My team has been using Quest 2 for meetings for the past 4 months. My verdict is that it is highly preferable to video calls IFF you didn’t have to wear that terribly uncomfortable device with laggy external cameras. We’re knocking at the door of the future here but the tech is still way behind where it needs to be for widespread adoption. Is this headset that leap forward?
I'm waiting to see what the rumored Apple headset is like. It seems like minimizing the size and weight of actual electronics in the headset is the missing part of the current round of competition, and Apple is very good at that.
1. The lenses. Fresnel lens are a pain, if you aren't dead centre of the headset slips because of sweat, you get blurriness.
2. The weight. I have a Quest 2, and while light, it's still noticeable, and I definitely wouldn't want to work on it.
3. Resolution. You're trying to replace IRL UHD Human Vision, a resolution of 1920 x 1832 isn't going to cut it.
I enjoyed the stuff I tried in VR when it was novel, but mostly now it sits on the side, doing nothing. It just didn't hold my attention for long enough.
> It doesn’t have to be better than Zoom. It has to be $1500 better than Zoom. Per employee.
Is this sarcasm? That's less than 2/3rds of the entry-level price of a 16" MacBook Pro.
If whatever your (remote) business makes isn't valuable enough to spend $125 / month per employee on (assuming you buy a new system every year!), then the future is bleak...
The question isn’t if your business can afford to spend $125/mo on VR headset for every employee (I’d even amortize that over 2-3 years to $42-62/mo).
The question is — does the employer get more than $125/mo of benefit out of the VR solution — for every employee that needs to attend meetings. Because this only works if everyone in a meeting has a headset. And you’re only going to see $CORP buying these headsets if they get more benefit out of them than they cost.
Buying a ten seat license for Zoom Pro is an easy thing to approve. The laptop/computer required for a zoom meeting (as you pointed out) is already a sunk cost. Buying $15k of VR gear to have that same 10-person meeting is a much tougher pill to swallow.
For some small teams, I could see this absolutely making sense. But Facebook needs to sell this to large enterprises to have the transformational impact they are looking for.
There is zero chance my enterprise would go for this - besides which taking on and off VR headsets during the day vs opening Microsoft Teams just doesn't currently seem that practical.
I'm sure the day will come where this is more normal, but there are still a few more cultural and technical hurdles to overcome.
During the last lockdown here, I took a few meetings in VR with a digital avatar (using teams) and it was a pretty good experience and broke up the monotony of working from home, but I haven't done it again since being back in hybrid mode...
All that being said, I desperately want one of these to try out as essentially a 'replacement' for my monitor at home.
> All that being said, I desperately want one of these to try out as essentially a 'replacement' for my monitor at home.
I’m very much in the same situation. I have a Quest 1 and 2. And they were great during lock down to have something for my kids to do to be active indoors. I had a few meetings that way too and liked Immersed the few times I used it.
But, this has me excited. (But not for meetings)
I’m very interested to see how this new headset will work as a monitor replacement. Especially if I can take my “work” environment home with me, or when I’m working in the car while waiting for my kid’s $SPORT practice.
It’s just as difficult to swallow a $15K cloud bill and companies do that every month. They will have money to buy employees VR equipment to improve productivity with the money they saved on real estate.
My company profits millions a year and I can barely get a new keyboard as a top SW developer :)
While working for a small startup of 5, I had very nice equipment.
But how often do you have exclusively remote collaboration?
I’m sure for many people that is common. It’s not for me. Normally I’m talking with a few people remote in zoom and the rest of the team on site in a conference room.
For remote exclusive groups, this makes sense.
But does it make sense for businesses to buy this for all of their employees — if they have a hybrid workforce? I would expect most employers will or are shifting towards a hybrid setup.
How many remote-only employers are there? Is it enough of a market to make this more than a gimmick?
I get VR for personal use. I get it for one-to-one communication. But I’m skeptical for business communication.
I work at a place that technically has an office, but 99% of the time only a single person is in it during the week, and 80% of my team now lives across the world (they started here in Aus but moved) -- we're as close to "remote only" as you can get, but my boss and I had a laugh at the Quest Pro (despite us both being VR users!) today when it was announced. Even for remote-only work, it's just not there yet, and not at $2500 AUD per device. Maybe if the next version has a much higher resolution for better text rendering on N virtual screens, so they can have dual-purpose.
The resolution is a real disappointment. Having experimented with a regular quest for virtual monitors its clear that insufficient resolution is one of the biggest problems currently. They have made some other improvements that in theory improve the effective resolution. I will watch the reviews to see how much that actually helps but its hard to imagine it making the kind of difference I think is necessary.
i have no idea how well it addresses it but Zuckerberg did specifically acknowledge this in his keynote. He talked specifically about ensuring seamless experience for people using flat screens with Zoom and Teams mixed with those in VR. I don't think your assumption that it's only for pure remote is valid, at least certainly in terms of what Meta is working on.
Why bother with offsites when video conferencing is ubiquitous?
After working in an extremely remote friendly workplace prior to the pandemic, and then with everyone working remotely for two years, I think the results of the natural experiment is in. There's zero benefit to being physically together in the 2020s.
Even when I've been offsite before, it's just a waste money. Sit in a room with my laptop? Uh... I was already doing that. Look at this person's screen? Already can did that. Go out and get Thai food and cocktails on corporate account? Well, I couldn't do that.
I joined a company and worked remotely for about a year before meeting anyone I worked with (in person). We eventually did all meet up and it was great.
There is just enough latency in video conferencing that people start talking at the same time a lot. This is fine in short meetings. But when we wanted to discuss larger structural changes for longer periods of time, it was exhausting. It worked much better in person.
> Go out and get Thai food and cocktails on corporate account? Well, I couldn't do that.
That also provides lots of value in my book. People talk about random shit and sometimes that creates good ideas. Also it's just nice to actually meet the people you work with.
I'm not saying you need constant off-sites, but meeting up sometimes is great.
You’re going to have to do better than simply stating that somewhere someone might possibly benefit and therefore everyone has to change their life to accommodate.
Me and most of coworkers in my org of 50 people fully voluntary come to the office, as being together in person increases our productivity, that was down during COVID.
Meanwhile you claim that because it works for you, it becomes a dogma that people shouldn't work together in person?
The point of mixed reality is that you can beam people into the space. So the people in the room could watch on a TV and be there in person if they wanted, while everyone else was there in VR.
The main reason I don't see it working for meetings is because it's relatively a hassle to put it on and going into meetings I want everything to happen fast and painless. Every delay or extra step is to be avoided. Sometimes you have a series of back to back meetings where things really need to work fast.
Besides, haven't tried the Pro but everything else I did try isn't there in terms of comfort. A lot of people wear glasses and it's just a bad experience for them.
The last point that seems to be unaccounted for is the flexibility of current voice meetings. You can connect from almost any device anywhere. You can join a meeting from your car. I somehow sense that's going to be a tad problematic with a VR headset.
Quest Pro actually addresses those concerns. The head mount style is miles easier than the Quest 2 strap; it looks much more like PSVR if you've tried that. Putting on PSVR feels more like putting on a hat. It rests more on top of your head and doesn't smash your face. In fact, unlike other VR headsets it looks like Quest Pro doesn't contact your face at all, and leaves plenty of room for glasses. There's no charging cable to plug/unplug, no external tracker, and you don't need the controllers for meetings, so the headset is entirely self-contained. It could literally be as simple as five seconds to pick the headset up off your desk and put it on like a hat and it turns on automatically and you're in.
Of course the ultimate idea is you'll be doing your regular work on virtual screens in VR, so you won't even need to don/doff the headset. But I think comfort and battery life and screen resolution will need to improve further for that to be realistic for most people.
As for flexibility, Workrooms supports standard video calling just fine. You can join from your laptop or phone and still participate. To the VR participants you appear on a large projection screen, and you see the VR participants using a virtual meeting room camera. So you lose nothing in terms of flexibility.
Exactly, people show up 5-10 minutes late to meetings where they have to click a single button to join, and we expect them to hook in to a VR setup before joining?
Not to mention that "too many meetings" is a thing many of us complain about. Just because they might be "VR meetings" doesn't take away the feeling that you're having too many meetings.
I tried out Horizon Worlds recently and I was honestly amazed by how immersive it was. I genuinely felt like I was out socialising with people while sat at home.
I can definitely see the use cases, especially as the technology improves. If there were live VR music events that me and my friends in different cities and countries could all attend to feel together I imagine I'd use it quite often.
How does that work? Do you mean the band members are avatars too? Or are you talking about a DJ pressing play, and you're in VR space with your friends basically listening to a playlist?
Or are you in a VR cinema with your friends, watching a live stream of a real band?
It's done a few different ways, I don't think the perfect solution has been found yet. DJs or bands have performed as avatars by using full body tracking. More commonly, the performer will have a camera on them and the video is displayed on a screen in the VR event. They can also see what's happening in the event so it's possible for them to interact with the crowd. As headsets become lighter and more comfortable and FBT gets easier with inside out camera tracking or better trackers; performing as an avatar will become more common. The events are usually in environments that look like clubs or concert halls.
The Facebook login requirement is gone. If you are banned from Facebook you can use Quest, no problem. Yes, you can create a separate work account. In fact, Workplace accounts are separate already.
This is what kept me from trying Quest despite being a VR superfan. Once they finally announced the account change I took the plunge and picked one up
I just didn't want to risk losing hundreds of dollars' worth of games because Facebook's retarded algorithms decided they don't like some meme I posted years ago.
(Actually, Facebook's moderation has kept me from using it for anything other than posting family photos and clicking the "like" button on others' photos.. it's just too risky that I'll cross a line and get deleted)
> Email: You can only create one Meta account per email address. First and last name: We recommend using your real name in case you need to recover your account or manage your store purchases, but it is not required.
Yes it is a general change. A Facebook account is no longer needed to use VR. You can link a Facebook account if you so choose, but even then a ban on Facebook has no effect on your access to VR.
If you have an old Oculus account, it can be converted directly into a Meta account.
I've been reluctant to try getting my coworkers into VR because they'd probably just laugh at me, but a couple of friends and I met up in VR (we're all fully-grown professionals) and it was great. Meetings in VR would be a lot more productive, IMO.
The idea of being painted as a literal second class citizen if you have lower end hardware is gross, but it's also the natural destination of progressive enhancement if e.g. facial expressions only work with the expensive thing.
Snow Crash is getting closer and closer it seems, the distinction between the rich folks with their outrageous avatars in the inner city and the plebeians who access the 'net through some public terminal which provides them with a nondescript black-and-white avatar - which is not allowed to enter the inner city - is a clear feature of its world.
Many if not most things in life can be improved by spending more money, in ways that give you practical and social advantages. It's not as if VR is unique in that respect.
On the Internet, by default, I have no idea how nice your car, house, computer, or food is. We're talking on a website that would comfortably load on 1990s hardware.
Meta is just one small corner of this and as such doesn't perhaps deserve particular blame, but it's sad to think about how we've slowly eroded the Internet's fundamentally democratic, equalizing nature.
The lowest common denominator poses heavy limitations of what can be done. I agree with you but also sympathize with those who want to go beyond text and still images.
I agree! The Internet can be way more than a text forum like this. My point was merely that we don't have to build an online world that reflects our real world's democratic leakages. We can simply choose to do better, so long as we're willing to say no to some (but not all!) forms of profit.
There's a big difference between driving a lowend car and literally not being able to express yourself.
I am well aware that status and appearance are already things in real life, but it becomes a whole different thing when it gets intermixed with your identity. Your actual person is worse because you didn't buy the upgrade. That's way different than not having a cool shirt or whatever.
This is something to worry about when we're at the level of VR adoption where people are conducting their daily business in the metaverse. At that point, camera based face and body tracking will likely be dirt cheap and included with even the most basic headset. Having a good network connection will be a bigger divider since that technology is improving much more slowly and unevenly.
If we weren't already talking about a luxury item such as a VR headset, I might agree. But I can't feel sorry for someone who buys a non-essential item and then feels hard done by because they didn't buy a better non-essential item to be honest.
> It feels a whole lot more like a real meeting than a Zoom call does.
I haven't had the chance to try it myself, so can you explain how it's better?
I feel like the main problem with remote meetings is the audio latency. You cannot speak as you would naturally, you'd speak in turn instead. I'm guessing VR allows you to give and receive visual cues about this so it might be better, is this what you had in mind?
The audio latency is better. You're not sending or receiving HD video so your connection is less loaded and the audio doesn't ever have to be delayed to synchronize with video. And VR devices are better optimized for low latency than your average system. Visual cues for turn taking while speaking work better, as you mentioned. Spatial audio is awesome for locating speakers and differentiating multiple speakers at once. Hand gestures work better; you can actually point at things in a shared 3D space.
And they weren’t as popular then. They also were unobtrusive in the ways that matter - you could walk around and talk while doing other things. David Foster Wallace has a whole thing on this in IJ that really captures it well, where even corded phones are really better than we give credit because they give you freedom and privacy. You can do chores, look in the mirror, and signal to people in the room all while talking.
If anything I think things move more towards Slack Huddle where you retain your freedom of movement in favor of just voice + screen. It’s an anachronistic pov to try and force real world into virtual so literally.
It’s just a very SV thing to ignore all the social and emotional needs and just look at “oh it’s higher fidelity” or whatever. If it was all about immersion people would carry iPads around, but they don’t.
The difference in asking someone to give 10% of their vision to a TV or phone screen that can be turned away from with 0 effort, vs giving 100% of their vision, with considerable effort to enter and leave, is so under appreciated.
I don't think you've spent enough time learning about the technology or the goals of its proponents to argue against it. You're starting to veer off into strawman territory. Most VR proponents see two big use cases: immersive entertainment and augmented reality.
Immersive entertainment will demand 100% of your attention but you will want to give it 100% because there is no other way to have such a deep experience otherwise. Watching a movie or playing a game on a screen is fine but it doesn't give you the same visceral reactions that you have with even the simplest VR experiences like standing on a ledge 10 stories up or killing an NPC in melee combat. Both feel real and the second one can be quite disturbing the first time you do it even though the graphics are still low res. I've never experienced anything that even came close through a normal screen
Augmented reality will be unobtrusive and only demand part of your attention. It will be additive to the world around you and it will replace the phone in your pocket along with thousands of other things. This technology is still a long ways off but we're already building the bridge to it with mixed reality and high-res passthrough.
I don’t think you have the capability to understand this thread.
I’m talking about virtual meetings specifically, and then adding a note about why it’ll never be generally popular like we see smartphones only because someone replied with that.
I’ve used VR and whatever joke AR exists (the MS headset) extensively and I don’t need to be familiar with “proponents” to make any argument whatsoever.
VR will be cool for sunset of gaming, some may like it for work. Meetings not so much. AR doesn’t even really exist and no passthrough doesn’t count at least not this decade.
Hey man, I wasn't trying to start a fight so reel it in a bit. If you don't like VR personally, that's fine but I don't think your personal experience generalizes to everyone.
I'm perfectly happy admitting that VR will remain niche for quite some time, just like cellphones did and pretty much for the same reasons: size, cost, battery life, cold start of a tech that requires network effects to grow, and social acceptability of use in public spaces. Similar cycles played a factor in the adoption of home computers and the internet, it takes a while for new technology to get off the ground and the initial versions of it are always clunky and unergonomic compared to later revisions that take into account knowledge gained by building and deploying the naive and constrained design.
VR headsets won't always look like they do now, that can be guaranteed as long as technological progress continues. We can argue about the timeline but I admit that no one can predict the future so what's the point. I do think VR will matter for meetings and social activities, there's a huge market consisting of people who live far away from their loved ones or who lose touch with friends after a move. As the technology and UX improve it will become more common to visit someone in VR instead of calling them occasionally. I did say AR doesn't exist and that what we have right now is MR (Mixed Reality) which involves passthrough. I don't even know what sunset of gaming means, it sounds as non-sensical as sunset of movies or sunset of radio to me.
> People just won’t put on world-occluding headsets to talk to cartoons
People already do with VRChat (current average about 19,000 users/day on Steam, likely much more on the standalone app on the Quest 2), and it frankly sucks in a ton of ways. Take an app that captures the same user interest, fix all the shitty parts, and put it on better hardware and I would expect user numbers to explode.
The audio latency problem is solved with spatial audio. In VRChat you can easily follow a conversation with 10 people talking over each other, because the audio comes from the direction of their avatars and you can tune it in and out naturally like you do in real life.
$1800 to ram the concept of physical meetings remotely instead of adapting to the benefits of remote work is a comically steep price that only SV tech bros will consider.
Even the NYC finance people blowing that weekly on cocaïne will laugh their asses off at the idea.
I don't know if it's enough better for me to choose it over Zoom in everyday use, but this was on Quest 2. A meeting where everyone is wearing Quest Pro will be significantly better. I expect that the combination of the better screen/lenses, better comfort, much better AR passthrough, and of course the new eye/face tracking will make for a very compelling experience.