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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
I'm going with the lead of Reality Platform just admitted they have only ever done ~3 meetings in VR.
And OT what's with kids like this being so unprofessional on Twitter? The only imaginative thing the Facebook lead of AR can mention on Twitter is their politics, in a pretty unimaginative retweet way. No wonder software is doomed.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is only true under the assumption that you can analyse the video and extract the movement/features as quickly as you can stream video to the network. Given how optimised streaming of live video is and how hard video analysis can be, it's not at all a given.
I'm not sure I follow? When you use Workrooms you're not streaming video.
The application is taking the positional data of your headset/controllers and translating that into how your avatar moves around. There isn't any video analysis going on.
You said "the only visual data that needs to be sent across network is the positioning of facial features and hand movements". To extract facial features and hand movements is non-trivial and requires video analysis and may hence involve lag.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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!).
Humans are really skilled at making fast comparisons between things. Unfortunately, that means we tend to make superficial comparisons. We then over-generalize while ignoring most evidence we don't like.
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.
I don’t understand this argument. I was there in the 90s and I tried it and it was shit and I got one of the worst headache I ever got. I had the first Go and Quest and holy shit how can anyone compare that to 90s VR?
I tried it 5 years ago and it wasn't much different from the 90s. I mean i thought it was super cool already in the 90s and would love for it to take off, but my point is that if you haven't found a killer app for a technology in 30 years then it's not obvious that it will ever come.
It seems to me like the problem with VR isn't the lack of a killer app, its the lack of hardware enabling that app. Especially with the rise of remote work, I think this type of VR collaboration is the killer app. No one has successfully made it work yet though.
There’s lots of hardware, and it’s gotten very cheap. Much cheaper than early home computers. That’s not the problem. For some reason people don’t find it that compelling.
I don't get it. The technology doesn't have 30 years, it was non-existent until HTC Vive. There is no comparison, period. Now, a killer app? Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of people using VR right now. You don't need a killer app. The technology is already here, people are making use of it, finding new usecases or building new experiences every day, and the technology is improving every year. It makes no sense to be a doubter at this point, it's like saying "phones need a killer app".
I tried it in the 90s, it was awesome. The graphics were more than good enough for a really cool experience. Much better than the first smartphones, comparatively speaking.
Smartphones caught on like wildfire and were quickly used for loads of different things, by millions of people. Now after less than 20 years billions of people use them hours a day.
VR is only used by 100,000s according to you, after 30 years. And almost only for gaming. The thing is that it’s not even mainstream among gamers, which I don’t get. I don’t play games but it just seems strange, the VR experience is so much cooler.
The technology now is very advanced, and cheap, and you could imagine lots of use cases but almost nobody uses it.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadThis 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.
> 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.
I don't see what problem this is solving.
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.
The future is better remote working practices, not skeumorphic remote tools that recreate (poorly) an office environment.
And the lead of the Reality Platform team at Facebook said “I did ~3 meetings in VR” https://twitter.com/marklucovsky/status/1424050798342807554?...
That was an awful answer.
I'm going with the lead of Reality Platform just admitted they have only ever done ~3 meetings in VR.
And OT what's with kids like this being so unprofessional on Twitter? The only imaginative thing the Facebook lead of AR can mention on Twitter is their politics, in a pretty unimaginative retweet way. No wonder software is doomed.
- How was it?
- Underwhelming. Hot and sweaty face, battery nearly dead, impossible to drink coffee or water. So I guess there is only upside :)
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.
[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.
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.
Edit: Not necessarily latency since latency is not related to data size, but I mean the general performance should be better.
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.
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.)
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.
I have found most office meetings are unnessary.
I am for anything that prevents me from commuting to that office I don't like.
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.
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.
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.
The application is taking the positional data of your headset/controllers and translating that into how your avatar moves around. There isn't any video analysis going on.
https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression
https://facebook.com/communitystandards/inauthentic_behavior
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.
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
There's some irony in the many people saying this who have clearly not used it themselves.
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.
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...
Horizon's style is terrible and likely workshopped to be as bland and inoffensive as possible but it's not really Memphis style.
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.
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.)
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!).
It’s true without adding value.
Just because they doubted that and they doubt VR meetings doesn’t mean VR meetings will be a hit.
Humans are really skilled at making fast comparisons between things. Unfortunately, that means we tend to make superficial comparisons. We then over-generalize while ignoring most evidence we don't like.
Smartphones caught on like wildfire and were quickly used for loads of different things, by millions of people. Now after less than 20 years billions of people use them hours a day.
VR is only used by 100,000s according to you, after 30 years. And almost only for gaming. The thing is that it’s not even mainstream among gamers, which I don’t get. I don’t play games but it just seems strange, the VR experience is so much cooler.
The technology now is very advanced, and cheap, and you could imagine lots of use cases but almost nobody uses it.
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.
Also, VR makes me throw-up so probably not the best look in meetings!
My fun in such a meeting would be ridiculing the silly tech. I bet it'll be a hit, nonetheless.
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
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
It's coming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3XcQtoja_Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-gyxlGi5ao&t=3s
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.