You're really leaning your entire arm on the scale here.
People have a visceral reaction to the implication that donning a computer on your head and interacting via Corporate Memphis styled cartoon avatars is any sort of future that we should seek. It's that simple.
That video of a woman sitting lifelessly at her table while her avatar engages in hearty expressive conversation puts a lump of discomfort in my throat. It's a repulsively dystopian outcome for social interaction, but Meta wants to sell it as a future we're missing out on.
People do not like that. I've followed VR since it's infancy, owned most of the major headsets, used it in an office environment, and I will say while VR is cool, the promise of the metaverse is deeply offensive to the senses of most people, myself included.
The worst moment for me was after working by myself in VR logging in to a shared workspace and having a dude, muted, sat on the couch next to me. It loaded me in unmuted by default and I was talking to myself about what was happening.
It wasn’t at all clear that he was muted and I was unmuted and his hands were moving disconcertingly near where his body should have been. I started describing him to someone irl and his weird avatar head turns slowly toward me, hands still pulsating.
I said something like “uh shit I think he can hear me…?” and his floating weird head glitchily nodded, fingers creeping across his torso the whole time.
I logged out. That was it. So many things wrong I’m not sure I could find any reason why I’d try that again.
So you had one bad experience in the immature stage of early development of a technology.
I don't understand how you extrapolate that to the entirety of every possibility it will ever have to offer. Yes Zuckerberg's metaverse vision is weird and creepy. But the underlying tech that is being developed to enable it to exist is transformational. The use cases will develop from what suceeds and people actually like. You could just as easily have painted a dystopian picture of people staring blankly at their iPhones walking down the street instead of talking to the person next to them.
Some people seem to be defending VR itself vs my comment on the metaverse. I use VR a fair bit. I’m not excited specifically about the co-working/social use cases.
Presentations can be really cool.
I won’t get into whether the current state of smartphone use is or isn’t dystopian, at least not on HN.
The previous comment reminds me of how older people used to describe the internet when it was slowly gaining traction. It’s obvious that there were a lot of rough edges, but it would be really short sighted not to see the future potential. The same thing happened to the first smart phones.
The www did things better than anything that already existed. Many things it offered were both massively useful and simply not exist before.
What exactly does "Metaverse" improve? What does it offer to the business world that cannot already be done?
And are these improvements worth a 1799$ Price-Point per employee, plus all the work & expenses imposed by integrating this into existing structures, and making sure its compliant to regulations and company rules?
And are these improvements worth enough to the employees themselves so they will be willing to wear a headset for 8h a day (Especially in labour markets that already face a supply problem)?
One of the many benefits that the metaverse introduces is immersion into virtual presences. You’d realize this if you ever tried anything more than Google cardboard. That’s not to say that VR doesn’t have many temporary downsides that will be addressed with tech improvements, but to not see its potential is the same way the internet was treated by older folks in the last century
> The www did things better than anything that already existed.
Older folks didn’t realize this since they waited a long time to actually try it, similar to how older folks treat VR today
Still, your statement on the internet was not true especially when it came to low res videos and many other flaws which we have since addressed over time. Back then surfing the internet also tied up a household’s main form of communication.
You seem to me to be conflating the metaverse, which is what I was talking about, with VR, which is how I got into it.
I didn’t come late to any of these parties. There are some cool experiences in VR, including what you mentioned.
The internet was immediately transformative, though. There was no video, never mind the resolution. There was no audio. You waited minutes if not an hour for an image-heavy page to load. I loved it immediately.
Syncing up with a headset on in a shared coffee shop with hands and fingers is not a technology problem. It is down to not understanding the medium. My reaction was to this shortcoming in the makers of the product (in this case Immersed) and by extension Facebook’s vision of social.
We have no shortage of ways to simultaneously edit things. The idea that collaborative work in VR, which is currently already hard to work in, is the driving use case of VR adoption, especially in a “social” way, does not seem likely to me.
What’s the term for needlessly carrying over phenomenological cruft from a previous technology experience? Like analog dials on a digital touchscreen. VR (and whatever the metaverse will be) are stuck in it. They can come into their own only when something truly better (and probably unique to the medium) appears.
Right now the most interesting thing from VR for me is the use of its immersivity in psychological research.
> You’d realize this if you ever tried anything more than Google cardboard.
I have a quest2, and I think its a fantastic piece of hardware. I am having tons of fun with it and use it every day.
For gaming.
Because in gaming, immersion into the world is something I cherish and want, and am willing to spend money on.
I am not looking for immersion into a spreadsheet, or my source code.
There, I look for information density, ease of navigation, searchability, tooling, interoperability, the ability to share and collaborate quickly and efficiently, and to make my intentions available for processing by machines.
My question is: Which of these priorities does VR enhance, in what way, over the existing technology?
I am not looking for "social immersion" when drawing a diagram. I am looking for getting information into and out of systems quickly and efficiently.
And I already have "infinite canvases" in drawing apps, at least until my systems 64GB of RAM are full. What I don't have, and also don't want (because I cannot see how this would increase my productivity), is the necessity to walk around my room or perform gestures with controllers to navigate said canvas (or desktop), when I can do the same with a quick and precise flick of my mouse or a keyboard-shortcut.
> am not looking for "social immersion" when drawing a diagram.
"social immersion" was quick wording to say “working on a viseo diagram with someone else in a shared semi-physical space”. This is better than a flat zoom session.
> And I already have "infinite canvases" in drawing apps
No, because it’s not the same. You can’t see as much of it as you can in VR. There’s a difference in having that workspace visible all around you vs having it trapped inside a small 28” monitor
It’s really hard to believe that you’ve even used VR for even gaming just based on your comments. You don’t seem to have experienced breaking out of a flat 2d screen. You really have to try it before making a lot of poor assumptions
Why? What specifically makes it better as in more efficient, faster, easier to use? I am not using Viseo specifically for making diagrams, but the applications we use allow for collaborative editing. If my colleague wants to show me something he just draws it on his screen and I see the edits in real time. I also see a location indicator of his mouse.
How does seeing his avatar in a virtual space improve upon this? Does it offer me more information density? Is the information easier to digest? Is it easier to edit the diagram?
> You can’t see as much of it as you can in VR.
I can see my entire workspace if I want, I just have to zoom out. Sure, I can't see details then. The same is true for seeing something in some distance in a virtual space. So what difference does it make in that regard?
It’s called “presence”. There are just some things where being in a shared space is better for than pancake Zoom calls. You would know this if you actually tried VR.
> I can see my entire workspace if I want, I just have to zoom out. Sure, I can't see details then
“Why do I want to use VOIP when I can make a telephone call?”
“What makes a word processor way better than a typewriter?”
“Why do I need a car when I can ride my horse?”
Yes but it’s not in six degrees of space, it’s flat unlike in VR, and it’s trapped inside a small rectangular flat screen
You claim that you have used VR extensively, but I highly doubt it based on your comments. I shouldn’t have to repeatedly explain concepts like presence or 3D space that should be basic knowledge for someone already familiar with VR.
This is a pointless conversation when you refuse to try modern VR. What really puzzles me is why you seem to need to lie about using VR.
> and it’s trapped inside a small rectangular flat screen
Why is that a problem when we are talking about flat diagrams, spreadsheets or text?
> You claim that you have used VR extensively, but I highly doubt it based on your comments.
It's precisely because I have used it extensively that I make these comments. Presence and the ability to project content into a virtual 3D space that is experienced by direct interaction is a great technology if it is presenting content that benefits from this representation.
Interactive movies benefit from this. Virtual Walks through great landscapes or museums do. Virtual Art exhibits do.
Games do, perhaps more than any other area. I have literally spent hours in "Tales from the galaxys edge" just walking around the Cantina playing repulsor-dart or sitting with friends around a fire in "A Townships Tale", exactly because this is an immersive experience where the presentation through this technology has tangible benefits over experiencing it, as you say, on "a small rectangular flat screen".
And I can absolutely see this technology have a great impact in non-entertainment areas; Controlling robots in dangerous work environments. Helping maintenance personal with difficult tasks through AR devices. Training of personnel. Architecture comes to mind, designing complex machinery, 3D design in general.
But spreadsheets? Flow diagrams? Source code editing? Wearing a headset to sit through meetings? How do these applications benefit from this mode of representation?
That sanitized corporate dystopia wants to have the same restrictions, scarcity and limitations as real life.
The theory: you could let you explore limitless worlds only bound by your imagination and current compute power.
Current meta vision: Horrible outdated corporate cartoon graphics so you can go to a bland sanitized online store to buy an NFT picture of some shoes, and look at a horrible cartoon representation of the Eiffel tower.
Putting on my VR headset to get in a meeting with the rest of my team does not sound nearly as unreasonable though. It could be the same as starting zoom.
Like, at this price point, and with these features that isn’t it, but I can see it in a non-dystopian way.
It’s just that it’s Facebook providing the hardware that scares me.
> "It’s just that it’s Facebook providing the hardware that scares me."
This is the key part. VR somehow skipped right into "walled garden" and "platfrom" territory right off the bat. It's not just hardware that is interchangeable and multi-use with pluggable things and apps. I think a lot of the people weary of Facebook's VR headset would be put at ease to a large degree if this was an 100% open ecosystem where just one of Facebook's entities is providing the hardware.
> VR somehow skipped right into "walled garden" and "platfrom" territory right off the bat
Thats not what happened. One of the biggest walled gardens spent a tiny portion of their massive wealth to move into another market by purchasing the market leader.
Its this behaviour that needs to stop. Corps should be restricted to a single trade category.
I dont need to come up with one - they already exist in the form of trademark (WIPO NCL) classification.
I suppose the hardware would be class 28, the app store would be class 35, there are other classes that would be applicable too given they also provide services, etc.
Preferably they would be even more granular than that - I believe the chinese system is a bit more detailed in that area.
> Putting on my VR headset to get in a meeting with the rest of my team does not sound nearly as unreasonable
... are a minority vastly overrepresented by the website we're on.
The company I worked at during the bulk of the pandemic let us all expense headsets to have meetings.
Getting into VR the first time is not a seamless experience in the slightest, so trying to get serious work done in meetings took weeks because of the mix of experience levels.
Then there was the fact that at the end of the day we live in a flat 2D world of software. Trying to hit touch targets meant for a mouse with a magic wand is maddening.
Then there's just the entire uncanniness of avatars that we're nowhere near solving. VR avatars are consistently forced to take on cartoonish proportions because we can't render convincing customizable human avatars on these headsets and won't be near that any time soon. Same goes with the backdrops, which end up being "infected" with the cartoonishness to avoid clashing.
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But you know what the death knell was for our VR use? At the end of the day, even at its best, it was the same as starting Zoom.
For non-enthusiasts it needs to be stomping Zoom.
They don't want to strap a screen to their face just to do the stuff that they were doing by sitting in front of a laptop. At the end of the day, it was "ok enough", and that was precisely why it fizzled out. General apathy at the fact that, this was not an improvement of exactly what we had been doing for months before, was enough to get people suggesting zoom the moment an issue cropped up, and eventually we all just dropped the headsets.
Re: usage for work. I wonder how using VR googles can actually work in any sort of public space (like an office). Since your vision is absolutely obscured, it basically requires absolute trust of the people around you. Other people can not only steal your wallet from your bag (that could still happen in a regular office, people leave private stuff unattended), but can for example come close to you and touch your hair or do other kinds of pervy things. I can't imagine women not being worried about this.
A solution would be to give each employee a tiny office with a door and a lock, which wouldn't be a bad outcome of VR to be honest...
The headsets have cameras on the outside your vision can "pass through" and you can see the world around you - just with virtual objects in it. This gives you a mixed reality experience rather than a virtual world. So for example you see the cafe around you but with you laptop screen hovering above the table and your australian friend bob sat on the other side.
One of the big feature improvements on this unit is that those cameras area lot better.
Another feature is that the headset uses some kind of lidar to map out the space around you, so that even if you are in an immersive experience objects and people coming into the real world area you marked out will get overlayed into your virtual world, so you can see bob sneaking up behind you.
These headsets are pretty cool and the consumer one is pretty cheap. Well worth getting one even if you are intending to sell it on after experimenting.
People have a visceral reaction to the implication that donning a computer on your head and interacting via Corporate Memphis styled cartoon avatars is any sort of future that we should seek. It's that simple.
That video of a woman sitting lifelessly at her table while her avatar engages in hearty expressive conversation puts a lump of discomfort in my throat. It's a repulsively dystopian outcome for social interaction, but Meta wants to sell it as a future we're missing out on.
People do not like that. I've followed VR since it's infancy, owned most of the major headsets, used it in an office environment, and I will say while VR is cool, the promise of the metaverse is deeply offensive to the senses of most people, myself included.