Also what I really don't understand is how anyone can have anything against them spending $$$ on R&D? Worst case scenario: their whole productivity angle doesn't work out, they lose billions upon billions in the coming decade and eventually scrap the whole thing. Then they've still invented a lot of super interesting tech along the way. High resolution displays, low latency rendering pipelines, novel human interface technologies, high fidelity hand tracking, lightweight and sharp lenses, the list goes on and on. There's lots of applications for each of those things and almost nobody else is willing to spend this much cash for such an uncertain roi. I, for one, am super excited about what the future iterations of this will look like.

Look at the history of it’s core product to see where VR will go if it takes off:

Facebook was the cool place for college students to connect with friends. No ID requirements to sign up and no ads for years. Your feed was just your friends post. Things were great. Now there’s ads in your feed and you need to definitively prove your identity. Not to mention the history of scandals and privacy violations.

They’ll do whatever it takes to get those first 100 million users. Once they get them though all bets are off. Privacy will only get worse, they’ll give up on the initial power users because who cares about a couple million hard core gamers?

Only nobody cared because that was the time prior to the latest privacy awakening, and apparently we still have a hard time putting it in the right context. If the best thing you can say about a company is that it was not big and nobody cared about their (what are now considered) atrocities back when, then you should probably reconsider your evaluation.

How in the world did you come to that conclusion? Any Meta app you have on your smartphone is doing what they can to collect heuristics in order to identify you and serve you Ads. How is that any different? It's just not as obvious.

> Only nobody cared because that was the time prior to the latest privacy awakening [...]

You make it sound like it's a fad or the user simply didn't care in the 2000s. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. If a private company would park a van in front of your door to observe you 24/7 in order to sell mundane details about your daily life to advertisers you'd be up in arms. Yet in the digital space it's no big deal.

In the early days of Facebook there was a negative article about them in Harvard's student newspaper. Mark Zuckerberg looked for through the logs for login attempts from student journalists at the paper and used the passwords they entered to try to gain access to their email accounts.[0] I'd say that is significantly worse from a privacy perspective than using cookies to show you more relevant ads.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook

Privacy is not a set concept.

If you had told my parents in their youth, that their kids would have a high likelihood of happily divulging big chunks of their private life to the world at large, as a matter of routine, they would quite literally not even have understood the concept, no matter in how much detail you would have explained all the steps leading up to that. Why would anyone want any of that?

I am building a small business in the medical field right now. People are real sensitive about their data – right until the point where they happily waive all privacy rights to push you to use WhatsApp for all sensitive communication, because, OF COURSE they'd want to use WhatsApp, what else, it's real convenient after all.

Except that to some extent, similar things are happening here -- Putin was, from what I've read, using FB to do psyops, to prepare his 2014 takeover of parts of Ukraine: making up and spreading stories about Russians getting abducted etc, ... Which helped him with the 2014 annexations, and leading up to his invasion and war today. More people dead than in Myanmar.

A bit surprising that the current US gov doesn't seem to look at FB as a psyops threat against itself?

Apple is building its own VR headset and making money off VR hardware seems like a stretch.

I guess we have to wait for competition here before we see things move faster(particularly better human interfacing etc). All in all they shoot to the expectations of their users. (And the competition simply plays catch up)

Im waiting for the "total recall" (the new one) style hand/pane/internal projections but that might skip watches and go straight to a neuralink thing.

Why would anyone reply to a text from a watch, when their paired phone is in their pockets? Or listening to music from a watch with a 200mAh battery? Are we stupid?

And I'm not implying the screen only shows time, but it just shows the data in real time and let's you configure things, apps are limited and most things are white on black, again, battery is #1. My wristwatch lasts over a year and shows the time without having to flick or touch it.

You don’t listen through your watch but use it as a more convenient interface to change a song/playlist.

The test use case is while you are driving because you can talk to it and it will type out what you’re saying well. Rather than pulling out your phone and trying to text back.

It also monitors vitals and steps. It is also handy when I forget my phone in the car and I need to text or make a quick call.

I could go on but I’m done typing.

I think there's a world of difference between showing people ads for games when they visit a store page voluntarily, and showing people ads in their social media feed when what they want is to see their friends' updates.

I understand being anti-add, but we are talking about store here selling and distributing products. Which makes reasonable attempt to serve relevant suggestions to user. Of new games or games that are somewhat based on what users have already played or followed.

Now if Steam store was showing third-party advertisements I would be on barricades.

And no one actually forces you to use the Steam on Steam Deck it is linux box with root access in place...

Seriously though. Can we have some nuance in the debate about advertising? Surely the bit we object to is the invasive, privacy and democracy-eroding tracking - not the concept of advertising itself?

Dont both Android and iOS devices do this?

I get how someone who doesn't question it or doesn't object to it could be confused by the hate for facebook.

No company sliding down so much has received much love. Not sure what is there to not understand. Oh yes and owner is clearly an amoral person with strong sociopathic traits hellbent on making humanity worse off long term, not unique but the same applies and compounds.

No amount of self-serving VR progression or some open source libs can anyhow annulate that. Morals is something a lot of people value, and lack of it gets appropriate reactions.

EDIT: same pattern with "dystopian"

Now that the tech is actually nice enough that it is usable and sometimes even actually better for certain things folks are just jumping on the hate fb bandwagon.

You’re absolutely right that most people here haven’t even tried some of this stuff. Personally I never gave VR a thought myself but my brother wanted a quest so I bought one, now I have my own and am looking forward to trying what’s next.

On that note, I understand why people dislike meta even if they’re making really cool stuff, but people have to realize that Meta isn’t the only VR company. I have a feeling that only Apple can change the popular perception of VR

But the closed environments are just majorly repellant. I had an older headset (rift s) and suddenly needed to create a facebook account. Should have bought the more expensive Steam version. But I don't see how VR can really reach the masses. You need the extra funds and a decent system and 2D monitor is the more sensible investment.

I will never buy an Occulus device again of course. There were management decisions anyone who really likes technology and wants to dabble with it will very likely and understandably hate with a burning passion. A passion sourced in the love for technology and the ability to share it. And they knew that people would dislike it, just hoped they would comply in switching to their Facebook platform.

This is 100% on Facebook and to 0% on grumpy users. Not being grumpy is pretty naive in my opinion.

The same exact way every technology gets adopted by the masses: it gets cheaper, faster, and better. I really don’t understand why people are suddenly forgetting this tenet of technology. Oh and btw Meta isn’t the only VR company. Despite the name, meta cannot fully own the metaverse since it’s essentially VR over the internet. I still don’t understand how so many technical people can fall for the marketing

Because if you're predisposed to hating new technology or generally thinking technology causes more harm than good, then you'll look for the weakest interpretation of a new development and use that to get angry.

For all the angry ranters in this thread it's the idea that Meta will be the only company to do VR hardware and software ("I mean it's their name for god's sake!"). In reality Horizon Worlds is definitely the runner-up with stalwarts like VRChat and Second Life that actually have mindshare across multiple platforms and headsets. Immersed is the better app for productivity right now, Workrooms is pretty new. Horizon is playing catch-up. Companies like HP and Apple are making headsets. The market is just getting started. But the idea of a healthy, competitive, VR market with lots of choice doesn't fit the narrative around evil technology so nobody wants to make that point.

And bluntly, instead of talking about compelling, awesome use cases you appear to have nothing to say about that because you assert that HN users haven't tried VR headsets. In my case (and I believe for many readers), that is untrue.

But a lot of HN users are old enough to remember Meta's (Facebook) catastrophic privacy issues and know better than to let Meta into a huge portion of our life such as work infrastructure.

Meanwhile FB provides free services to two billion people and get to be the scapegoat for NYT and Apple. Yes, they sell adds--just like the entire media landscape going back hundreds of years.

20 years ago we called software designed to do this kind of thing "spyware". How did it get normalized to the point that people defend it?

And regarding the comparison to traditional media: if the NYT had a PI following me around every day, I wouldn't trust them either.

No, its purely FB, clearly long-term amoral company, that gets all the (well deserved) hate. I stand behind the statement that humankind is worse-off long-term with FB existing and trying to get into all aspects of our existence to sell more ads.

I wouldn't care about it at all if US had good regulators re privacy and other aspects of these sneaky corporations. But it clearly doesn't, cash flow is the king, hence one should be reasonably warry of such behavior, with company wielding so much power.

The above more or less applies also to ie Google and Apple, but based on behavior FB is in its own category.

I'd rather back another horse for $1500. And as a consumer base, none of us are obliged to be fangirls for Meta given their track record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO91n5phQQY

It's a pretty good title! It's a better VR game than most actual VR games. The control scheme has some interesting motion sword and gunplay. Plus you can turn and dash without getting motion sick because its on a tv. Look at the fighting gameplay. See how much better it is than Half Life Alyx and Boneworks?

But, the immersive quality of red steel 2 fades pretty quickly. As does Alyx and boneworks. Because... it sucks. VR asks you to believe you're in a world, like in ready player one. But you're not. None of the little things are there. It's just a camera on your face with better wii wands.

Having understood this, it's pretty clear that the best possible resolution headset will not fundamentally change the VR experience. Maybe text will be easily readable. That would be nice. But the experience Meta wants you to believe you'll have won't be coming any time soon.

There was still reason to be excited and hopeful about the future of VR.

I'll wait to get excited if the Index is updated. And until then I'll keep using my low res low FOV first gen Vive. Exclusively to hit boxes.

You make it sound like it is all gated behind an app store now somehow. Which is not the case at all.

On my quest 2 headset, I can play games from oculus store, I can also play any steamvr/pcvr games on quest 2 (connected to the desktop PC by a cable or in wireless mode), as well as any user-built application .apk files dowloaded to my headset directly (either from the headset's web browser or transferred from PC). All on the official firmware, no jailbreaking or any special steps needed to make this work.

Not sure how this is even remotely representative of some app store gating.

But you could always make a new account and play your steam games

1. I've been closely following VR for almost 10 years now

2. I've invested some money for the best VR hardware available (at the time).

My take on Facebook and why I am fully on board with the skepticism here:

- VR hardware, at least on the higher end, is pretty good. It has been "there" for many possible applications at least in terms of fidelity since ~2019. VR being so uninteresting is mostly a software problem in my opinion, not a hardware problem, even if the hardware development is important to make adoption more realistic without the need to invest a ton of money.

- The novelty of VR wears off rather quickly. I barely use my VR hardware nowadays, and right now I can't imagine a scenario in which VR makes anything in my everyday life easier and more efficient, quite the opposite. While I don't doubt that it will happen, I very much doubt that Facebook will be involved in the next important step forward. They are just too out of touch with reality (outside of the investor/silicon valley/zuckerberg bubble) for that.

- The software is just lacking, and everything Facebook is presenting when it comes to software is in many ways a step back compared to VR products from as early as 2014 (e.g. VR Chat)...Acting as if Facebook is pushing anything forward here is just naive following of buzzwords at best, dishonest parroting of marketing talk at worst.

- Anything a company like Facebook might plan with VR is just uninteresting, because it will ultimately have dark patterns, manipulation and monetization baked into its very core, be it directly or indirectly.

Rather than developing VR as a "next step" in personal computing, Facebook is just racing to build an ad infested dystopian walled garden as fast as they can, why would I get excited about that in the slightest?

I'm still generally very interested in VR, but the only thing I'll get excited about is VR device from a manufacturer that doesn't have backstabbing me as his ultimate goal and will base all his decisions on being Facebook.

And yes, I still remember "Oculus won't require a Facebook Sign-In", and while that has been reverted for now, I won't believe for a second that the people working at Facebook aren't eager to get something equivalent back as soon as enough users are on board.

We need more humanity, care for ourselves and others, more love and connection to humans and everything surrounding us, to experience what it means to be alive and being a part of the universe. This tech aims to isolate us even more than we already are, through its fundamental design. When you put human values above the maniacal quest of a boy billionaire for relevance and power, you come to the conclusion that this is the entirely wrong path.

The hardware is inconsequential.

The overall goal is the exact opposite of what you're saying here. Just about every single person I've ever talked to in this industry wants to build devices to bring human beings together across space + time. Allowing folks to see each other eye to eye and form real human connections where otherwise it would be impossible. XR is probably the least isolating technology in history if you consider what it can do in terms of breaking down boundaries of time, distance, ability, and appearance. It is the most humanistic of any technology I've ever used in my life, in the way that it's explicitly designed to bridge human, emotional connections where none could exist before. Just one of many perspectives...

This is admirable, but unless they also have some ideas about how to keep such a service running the funding model is going to default to advertising. And advertising has a corrosive impact on free-expression (can't allow anything untoward to happen next to an ad) and community (is this person being genuine or are they selling something?).

With internet revenue models being what they are, I don't see VR social experiences going in a good direction at the moment. Maybe if we had a good p2p technology for hosting/joining VR worlds so these things could be community-run there would be hope. But every popular VR application I know of is hopelessly centralized and subject to the same market forces that made social media such a mess.

I do see potential applications in fields like 3D-enhanced medical imaging, as highly specialized tools for professionals. But not as a general tool or device.

Long-term, I find it more likely that people who can escape into a convincing, curated reality, will do so with increasing frequency and in turn stop caring about their surroundings. Because we’re human primates and not responsible enough to deal with complex change like this yet.

You are working Ina capitalistic system, the only motive for your company is profit for shareholders. When you are small and inconsequential, other motives might rule. But the trajectory is clear. If you succeed, your company turn into a paper clip machine for which humans are just meat for the grinder. This is how it always plays out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)?

> 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.

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.

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?

You have to try the productivity apps before you pan it

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.

"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?

> 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.

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?

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.

Meta should be classed as an enemy of humanity.

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.

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.

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.

Can you come up with a definition of trade category that is legally useful and would prevent Meta from getting into VR hardware?

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.

The Quest officially allows sideloading apps and alternative app stores like SideQuest, which Google recently invested in.

> 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.

-

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.

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...

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.

But I'm all out when it comes to Meta and Facebook, who have repeatedly proven they are simply a bad actor. The gross privacy negligence, the disgusting mistreatment of their users and advertisers alike, and being a major factor in today's terrible social issues, Meta is a huge net negative for humanity.

They can hand those out for free, and I will still not take it. I am done feeding them data. I want no part of their ecosystem, even by proxy. It doesn't even matter what the product does - I will not take it from Meta.

I realize some people here work for Meta and it's not personal. But you must encounter this opinion from time to time. I have friends who work at Meta and it's incredible to see how they brace for impact every time they tell someone where they work. I feel bad for them, but Meta earned this notorious reputation with noticeable effort.

This was never true and perpetuating that myth contributes to the worst characteristic of HN.

This is Hacker News' reaction to almost every new thing that isn't already several years past the early adopter end of the curve (crypto, VR, a lot of bio). The community has become a bit stiff and conservative, for a tech community.

A natural reaction to decades of "overpromise, under deliver".

In aggregate, company's are pouring billions of dollars and who know how many person hours into VR meetings. Engineers are a limited resource. Investment is a limited resource. This could be going towards trying to solve many more useful problems.

I see people talking about the immersiveness being the biggest selling point. That's so true for video games but do people really think immersion is what's missing with remote work? I've been a fully remote employee for many years. It's the real time chat, drastically improved document collaboration, and video conferencing that has made the biggest impact. I've never yearned to be taken out of the coffee shop I'm working in or my home office and transported to a virtual conference room where I have to physically move my arms and head just like the real world.

Just because some tech works for one use case doesn't mean it does for another. Our touch screens are great on a phone. Terrible in a car where you need to be able to control things without focusing your eyes on it.

People look at this new tech and are flying to it because it's the new shiny thing. If you're in this group, think about what a marvel a screen, keyboard, and mouse are. You only twitch your eyes and barely move your hands and fingers at all. Yet, you can rapidly type, switch between totally different applications, scroll huge canvases of interfaces, etc all while barely expending any energy at all. That's that I call efficiency.

Err well people who own Meta, which is likely a lot of people here through shares, investment funds, pensions, probably don’t want that do they?

I doubt a wide adoption in the market. Just because something new has been created doesn't mean the market will adopt it. It has to have a tangible advantage. If it is meant to replace something, like existing workflows and methods it needs to have an advantage so massive, that it isn't just better than what exists already, but is worth the cost of any transitions as well.

And I just don't see that.

Why would I wear a device, that is still big even in its newest incarnation, on my head when I have 3 ultra-high-definition monitors? Why would I use controllers when I have a mouse, keyboard and a touch-sensitive screen? I already have video chat, speech recognition, chat, mail etc. at my disposal. I already have all these forms of communication on a device that fits in my pocket for when I'm out of office. I already have all these things, and they work, they are configured, they are integrated in my employers existing infrastructure, workflows, methods, they are compliant with whatever regulations apply, they are tried, tested and budgeted for.

I mean, how would I even make the case for this to my employer? "Hey, Mr. CEO sir, my team needs devices that we have never used before in this company, to do exactly what we do now, except you would be able to watch our avatars sitting in front of virtuals screens while we do it, that is, if you wear one as well. Btw. the thing costs 1799 $ per employee."

What Meta is doing, is creating themselves a platform where they can sell ads, because they've been hurt by recent privacy changes by Apple and fear the market share of Google Chrome.

I didn't see the thread until later but back then I thought the Dropbox was a sucker that I was taking advantage of because I could get extra 50 MB or whatever by just walking up to someone in my dorm and referring them to use Dropbox, even if they had no intention to continue using Dropbox...

I want to be less naive now. Facebook (it doesn't deserve the Meta name) will NEVER, EVER do anything for "good". I believe it simply is not capable of doing any "good". We cannot let Facebook be the gatekeepers of a pay toilet, much less the (purported) future of our communications.

Back to the topic though, I thought xbox kinect was trying to solve all of these problems a long time ago with just a couple of cameras. what happened?

Humans do not own VR anything.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Luckey: an evil alt-right-wing extremist pulling the wool over people’s eyes with his robotic right hand, artificial eyes, and steel teeth, who returned from an expedition to the Prox system in possession of a new alien hallucinogen Chew-Z to compete with Can-D, to perpetrate an uncanny creepy plot about adults on drugs playing together with physical miniaturized doll houses in order to escape their dystopian existence by retreating into to a mega-corporation controlled virtual reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E...

Silicon Valley Keenan Feldspar's VR (S4E8)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8MAV9jhf04

Silicon Valley (HBO) - HooliVR Goggles (Phone Exploding) S04E09

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUAnN-FXcdE

Damn it, someone made the joke.

Don't forget the promise Palmer Luc-- I mean Eldritch makes Mayerson: that Chew-Z offers incredible opportunity to allow formative experiences customized to the user, yet Lucke-- I mean Eldritch is so controlling of the shared hallucination that Mayerson surmises death is the correct course of action.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/matt-gaetzs-future-sister-in-l...

https://deadline.com/2022/10/dr-oz-adolf-hitler-senate-fundr...

Google has also developed a lot of interesting tech along the way. Most of it is junk you can buy for $5 at the Salvation Army now.

The problem with "Meta" is that it's pushing something without any buy-in from an audience that cares about it.

The actual audience for VR is almost completely at the early adopter, 1974 Altair stage. We're at the stage where the enthusiasts are figuring out what works and what doesn't. That's mostly what social interactions will work at first, and what hardware mods are most important to expand those.

As much crap as people give Ready Player One, there's an analogy in there. Facebook is the mega corp trying to take over. They're the "Innovative Online Industries (IOI)" from the novel, a "multinational corporation bent on a well-funded effort to find the Easter egg in order to take control of the OASIS and monetize it." (Direct quote from Wikipedia.)

As a counter example, let me tell you about an early experience I had in Second Life circa 2005 or so.

I got involved with SL for a few years back then. There was one singular critical moment I experienced that convinced me there was something very special happening back then which I really haven't experienced again yet.

In SL your avatar can fly around. Here I am on my low level 2005 pc and low res 2005 monitor with 2005 headphones. I'm cruising around a bit I fly over this hill into one of the weirdest things I had ever seen at that point in my life of 25 years.

I fly over the crest of this hill and run into an amphitheater with a stage. Same thing we've all seen dozens of times in real life. There are dozens of other avatars all in the crowd sitting in different areas of the amphitheater. Most of the audience was oddly wearing furry costumes.

On the stage is a band of other characters, all doing different animations of playing fake instruments.

So the way I'm describing this seems pretty normal these days and nothing impressive. But this was 2005.

What hit me really hard is that these are all real people experiencing the same event AT THE SAME TIME. That was the aha moment.

The band wasn't just npc characters. There was an actual band of 5 or so people together in the real world streaming their show into SL for a bunch of other people from all over the world to watch in real time. Sure, it's like 50 people dressed as sexy foxes and stuff, but they were all witnessing this musical performance in real time through this weird 3rd party virtual interface that very accurately replicated a real world experience in terms of spatial placement and audio (to some extent).

For me, it was this super weird magical moment that gave me a glimpse of what the future actually could be. Everything was built by the people from their avatars to the band people to the person that designed and built the stage and amphitheater. And it was in a shared virtual/physical space where I was able to randomly encounter it just by flying around and crossing a certain hill.

To this day I've probably had a similar AHA moment a handful of times.

Today you can watch bathtub fun time on Twitch, or people begging for subs on YouTube, or people spamming TikTok to promote their SoundCloud accounts.

But none of that comes close to the experience of discovery in 2005 of finding an impromptu rock show in Second Life with furry foxes watching in real-time.

In modern times, I haven't bought a VR headset yet. I've played with it when available, and I've seen a taste of VRChat and some other awesomely weird modern experiences.

I'm firmly convinced that whatever actually ends up becoming "the metaverse" isn't coming from an out of touch older millennial billionaire who took the wrong message from a particular book/movie or it's actual spiritual predecessor Snowcrash.

There's a last sentence here that I tried to write a few times and failed. Weirdos is wrong, so is "alternate thinkers". Young people? That's wrong too because since 2005 Second Life's population of users has been mostly flat but consistent, and they tend to be older tech savvy folks that have used these platforms for decades before they got "popular".

I don't have a label, and that's probably the point. There eventually may be lots of people who dive into "the metaverse", but those people are so diverse that IOI/Meta isn't going to be able to dictate whatever it becomes.

Super cool tech is not a free pass. The tech doesn't stand on it's own, the Quest Pro is an integral part of a dystopian world ruled by Meta.

It's not hate, I just don't want to support or enable Meta's dystopia.

What it really seems like they are doing is having a serious case of NIH syndrome and re-writing a bunch of stuff that already exists elsewhere.

People hate it because Facebook has not proven itself to be a good steward of technology, and I think people are more broadly questioning whether we should elevate these companies to stewards of our lives in the first place.

But as things stand, the more successful this thing is, the more Facebook thrives.

I really can’t cheer on anything that prolongs the life of Facebook.

So yes a tech forum is alight with negativity. We’re also one of the canaries in the mine that should be listened to in this.

He’s eroded freedoms (misinformation, rampant gaslighting, bullying, etc), invaded peoples privacy, and there’s no remedy but defection.

And neither video calls nor VR is proven to be more productive than emails.

I wanted QPro to be a success. I expected at least a reasonable bump in resolution. What was released is just disappointing and I can not justify paying that price point. I would go for Pico4 before of QPro.

Cute. Whenever someone wants to defend their dear little niche/dead end product they always make that reference on HN. Similarly on slashdot with the ipod comment. Yet there is a subtlety that every person who makes this broken analogy are missing (apart from the fact, that, well, if someone made a book that kept a record of all instances this analogy was made on HN, it would be hard to miss the fact that.. no, X pet product defended Y times on hn didn't become the next dropbox)

The criticisms against dropbox and the first ipod were nerds who thought there was already, -within the same product category- good enough things, underestimating the importance of things like UI, accessibility, portability (in the case of the ipod when people compared it to the gigantic creative jukeboxes and mp3 CD-R players).

They were criticism targeted at a single product, not an entire category, because no one sane would think there's no use for tools that remotely sync documents, or gives you the ability to listen to your entire music collection on the go. Dropbox and the ipod were great, refined products, but products that stood on the shoulders of giants and markets that were already plentiful by the time they came out. Keeping backups of documents is a need a great amount of people have. People were already listening to portable music when the ipod came out. They were product that did important things better than anyone else on the market, but products that entered markets that were already quite mature. Meanwhile VR as a whole is still a niche.

VR enthusiasts are more like the nerds of old who made fun of dropbox. They have very little understanding of the wants of the general public. Shut yourself in a closed uncanny valley virtual world wearing an uncomfortable headset for hours? This is more like the people who thought rolling your own was better than dropbox.

Zuckerberg is not the next Steve Jobs. If anything, he's the carbon copy of the typical slashdot reader. His mindset is thoroughly alien to the human mind.

https://qz.com/1331956/mark-zuckerberg-keeps-forgetting-abou...

>In the Recode interview, Zuckerberg falls back on the term “use case” to describe people using Facebook Live to stream their own suicides in real time. He repeats this characterization, going on to call suicide-streaming a “use” of Facebook Live: “There were a small number of uses of this, but people were using it to…show themselves self-harm or there were even a few cases of suicide.”

This is the sort of people who think the future of humanity is to enclose yourself harder in your little virtual bubble. The everyday man finds this sort repellent.

[1]https://uploadvr.com/quest-2-sold-almost-15-million-idc/

The Quest 2 might be a mainstream console, but it's not mainstream.

¹) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_Balance_Board#Reception

This is supposed to capture subtle facial expressions. I’m sure every generation will capture more subtleties and have increasingly realistic avatars. So why not just see real faces then?

I always see mentions of virtual sticky notes on a whiteboard. That sounds awful. Do you need to squint to view them from your virtual seat at the table? Do you need to walk your avatar to the board and avoid bumping into others who might be posting their own? We don’t have those issues today with sites like Miro. If the metaverse will somehow avoid these annoyances then how would it be any different from the non-metaverse experience?

While I agree virtual meeting may not be the answer, BUT it is important step in figuring out the balance. I think it's good that Meta is burning $$$ and advancing in figuring out the optimal solution on our behalf (consider it as RnD cost).

Irrespective of it, in case the headsets can become as easy as wearing glasses, I doubt why anyone wouldn't use it.

This isn’t more than efficient. Emulating real life is worse here.

I want to see innovations that take advantage of not being bounded by fucking office spaces.

It’s like writing an email client that forces you to hand write all of the emails and fill out the to field on a little envelope.

Coming back from the analogy, VR and specially AR should strive to use their advantages to create new intetaction experiences, instead of trying to mimic the onsite presence...

I want a high def AR whiteboard that I can "move" independently to my wall, while other people also move position it any way they want in their local environment.

Sure these bridges have plenty of problems today, and maybe they’ll go to nowhere. But maybe in the far future they’ll lead us to cruelty free, healthy designer tissues that taste better than anything an animal makes, and Bret Victor’s dynamic medium.

The discussion is in terms of using it for meetings and such, and in that case, there's nothing they've shown us that isn't "attend a meeting in person, remote", which I can do in zoom, without needing to wear a heavy, uncomfortable thing on my entire face, for most of a day. A number of things about it are actively worse. This is why I'm saying they're just showing us the same thing, in VR. There's nothing to be excited about.

That's too much effort to use.

Give me a minority report style interface, let me drag data and sites all around me in 360 degrees.

Take me on a walk through a 3d graph of your data as we discuss it.

Shrink me to the size of an ant, or explode me to the size of the sun in a model of the milky way to really understand scale.

But this... second life knockoff, "Hey lets have a meeting but we are on the beach" just feels so uninspired.

I hope meta also emulates how choosing a seat around a conference table is important.

Including because of power plugs, blinding or overheating sun from windows, and being closer to the boss makes you louder.

While not great, waaay better. Same as email isn’t great, but way better than mail.

It’s hard to put into words. You have to try it. For some reason, that is not something a lot of HN users are willing to do with modern VR. Google Cardboard is not modern VR

But youtube obviously had something cable tv didn’t - user generated content. The Quest is the equivalent of youtube just being a crappy bootleg of cable TV.

> It’s hard to put into words. You have to try it. For some reason, that is not something a lot of HN users are willing to do with modern VR.

Because the current offer is “bad emulation of office meetings that weren’t great to begin with”.

Would you be thrilled to use a Quest to wait your turn in a virtual lobby of a DMV to talk to a teller to pay for a license renewal? Or would you rather just pay it online with a credit card on a web page?

Yes, but armchair pundits couldn’t see any advantage similar to how older people view VR now.

> Would you be thrilled to use a Quest to wait your turn in a virtual lobby of a DMV to talk to a teller to pay for a license renewal?

This is a terrible analogy because the DMV is not a meeting. It’s a service and it’s already being automated.

You have bad analogies because you haven’t used VR enough, if at all, to really have such a strong opinion. This is no different from senior citizens who used to constantly hurl insults at the internet, video games, comics, or any new trend

All of my analogies are exactly the same. It’s using technology to try to poorly replicate what already exists rather than using technology to enable a bunch of new things possible without the bounds of the physical world.

> This is a terrible analogy because the DMV is not a meeting. It’s a service and it’s already being automated.

You’re missing the point. Renewing a license over the Internet removed an instance of one of the worst facets of the DMV. Quest isn’t working on getting rid of the worst parts of meetings, it’s working on copying (poorly) the whole experience as-is.

The quest version of the DMV if the website didn’t already exist would be to sit in a waiting room. Innovation would be to get rid of it.

Given your comments, it’s very hard to believe that you’ve used VR much if at all. VR has many problems, but not the ones you’ve mentioned

After all this time, you’re still getting confused and think my complaints are about VR. They are not. I’ve used VR for gaming and simulations on and off for 6 years now.

The problem is not VR. The problem is Meta’s approach to what VR should be used for. They are taking some of the worst facets of business and copying them as-is into VR.

That’s why the DMV analogy. They’ve done nothing to improve the actual meetings which is why they would do nothing to improve the DMV experience beyond making the entire thing virtual.

You know what would be great? A VR DMV replacement for a basic driving test. Yet you didn’t even suggest that because your fixated on the most boring aspects of VR like Meta is.

That’s interesting because your complaints that are supposedly exclusive to meta are so generic that it seems to apply to VR at large. That and your DMV analogy would still lead me to conclude that you haven’t really used VR much if at all, but Ive been wrong before.

Today you don’t need to invest a lot of time or money in order to be familiar with VR. A meta quest is an affordable console, and so are many older gen PCVR headsets. You can also rent the meta quest or borrow it from certain libraries.

Any other remote meeting features like virtual whiteboards are usually the same level of convenience, or more so. It’s almost like progressive enhancement when the meeting has both VR and non-VR attendees.

someone's not tried it.

VR meetings are, for a very select type of interaction, awesome. Talking to someone over VC is shite. Its half duplex, emotionally and physically draining. That effect is magnified when you add more than one other person.

VR meetings in a very supirsing way, feel more natural than VC. Its got 3d audio, which means low latency duplex talking can happen. You can have more than one conversation in the same VR "room"

None of that is possible with Video conferencing (yet).

Coffee shop, no 140ms ping time away, yes. But you are confusing latency with half duplex. VCs cut the sound to all other streams when someone is talking[1]. which causes huge stuttering.

[1] mostly

There's no way I'd want to have to strap a VR headset on to appear in a meeting I don't want to be in, and for it to be obvious when I'm ignoring it.

But I don't see any sign of that here. You're saying that, if the headsets were easy to wear, everyone would use them, but I can't imagine why. How's this better than a laptop with a camera? I can read text more easily on the laptop. I can share documents more easily on the camera. I can see people's faces and emotions more clearly with the camera. This gets me nothing, and it does so at significant cost.

This appears to be a solution desperately searching for a problem, and remote meetings certainly have problems, but this doesn't seem to be able to solve any of them.

Sure, I'll be excited about this if I really need to collaboratively design the frame of a car with a team that's all working remotely. It'll work great for that. But you know how often my meetings would be greatly eased with a collaborative 3D space? Not often.

Yep, agreed. I keep seeing glossy promos with people standing around collaborating on a design. But honestly how common is that? In my experience the collaborative moments are much fewer than the one person design marathons between meetings.

There seems to be a misplaced idea that everyone wants collaborative design. The Figma founder guy said something like "multiplayer design is the future". Really? I don't think so. The process of focused expertise in design is often driven by the designer, who then meets with colleagues or stakeholders to review and MAYBE try a few things in real time.

Collaborative real time design of course happens, but not as much as they're trying to express. Too many cooks being the basis of avoiding over-collaborative design!

    for making the remote more efficient

Literally the worst of all worlds. Looks like you get the inefficiency of in person meetings... along with all of the tech headaches plus nausea... count me out

Whoa there - you’re speaking only for yourself! There’s a minority of us that abhor Teams and wish daily for another company to come up with something better. Of course, that doesn’t mean (badly) reinventing the wheel like this. Really, I’m just hoping for a snappier and more ergonomic Teams but I welcome any and all innovation in the space.

If your team is getting on a call to present things or to talk things through, you’re very likely on a train to nowhere.

In a remote setting, every ounce of effort spent toward emulating “meat space” distracts from the artifact, the work product, and the result.

I am on a team now who records meetings so they can re-watch them. Let that productivity drain set in.

If no meeting happened, but all the artifacts required to guide work exist and are accessible and understood, you come out ahead.

A pull request doesn't replace a meeting, but it can obviate the need for a meeting. Information sharing, done. Feedback and suggestions, captured. Goal and metrics, visible.

In my experience (working on both coding and non-coding initiatives) the most effective meetings are the ones teams ask for in addition to a thorough, async, text-driven collaborative process.

Can I type faster while wearing a headset and holding controllers? Can I navigate source code better than on my three 4k screens and ergonomic keyboard? Does it somehow improve my deployment workflow?

EDIT: I had the image of a "glasses" like VR form from the parent comment when making this comment. It is not talking about Meta's product.

1. https://varjo.com/products/xr-3/

1. https://www.nreal.ai/

There is nothing in the world that could convince me to bring a Meta VR headset into my home. May as well just install surveillance cameras and pipe the feed directly to Meta.

I don't personally want to wear a giant computer on my head all day.

The reason they're spending so much time on reinventing meetings is because they see that the killer use case for VR/AR headsets is to replace your laptop with a device that shows you a screen, or multiple screens, wherever you go, whenever you want it there.

If you start from the premise that eventually people won't huddle over their 16" laptop screens to make calls, but will instead be wearing a headset that shows them as many giant monitors as they like, then everything else flows from that. How do you handle calls in a world where every user is essentially wearing a visor? How do you collaborate? These aren't solved problems yet, but I'm a firm believer that the headset will replace the laptop, and if that happens I'll be glad somebody has put the effort in to make everything else around that as seamless as it can be.

Within a few years, very comfortable lightweight goggles or glasses will have capabilities that can replace phone and PC interfaces.

Your comment is the equivalent of someone who bought an early airplane and based on that decides that commercial jets are impractical for long flights. Or someone who saw the early CRTs and decided that since they preferred reading paper teletype output that computer monitors would never be usable.

I don't think your analogies work at all. I think VR is great for games, which is what occulus originally marketed it for, it's only since Facebook bought them that the direction has totally changed.

[0] https://www.vive.com/us/product/vive-flow/overview/

Already Lenovo and others have pretty lightweight glasses that provide a basic (1080p or similar) screen, the Quest Pro looks like a definite step forward from prior VR headsets, Magic Leap and HoloLens are on their second iterations, micro-OLEDs are coming, Apple is working on something, etc…

If you see the direction travel then I'd think you may at least admit that your Rift S experience (which is long in the tooth even prior to the Quest Pro announcement) is no useful guide to what the VR/AR future people are excited about will actualy be like.

Those meetings that could have been an email? Now they're the worst of both worlds, remote but still forced to have this meeting in VR.

Instead of having a screen (or multiple screens), force people in a shitty virtual reality where you have to walk around still, but this time it's either by teleporting with joysticks or making you puke with smooth movement.

Could you be strawmanning any harder?

I've been now full time remote working for 3 years and I have done exactly zero work from any kind of cafe. I have however done one day of work in a virtual desktop, but currently (as of couple years back) I didn't find it any better than just using normal desk and monitor setup.

>Those meetings that could have been an email?

This is complete a company issue. This VR tech is meant for actual meetings.

>Instead of having a screen (or multiple screens), force people in a shitty virtual reality where you have to walk around still,

You are completely misunderstanding the tech. You can literally have infinite amount of screens in a VR environment if you still want to cling to the notion of screens.

This all being said. I doubt this will catch on, however the facial expression capturing tech will be nice for future gaming and chatting applications.

Facial capture for gaming will be absolutely worthless, and so will it be for chatting. Firstly because it already exists without wearing an expensive helmet that makes you sweat and is uncomfortable, secondly because nobody wants to wear a damn helmet so that people can see you smile ingame, and thirdly because nobody wants to put 1k+ on a device whoses uses are extremely limited.

How is this any different from having multiple screens?

>Oh and good luck with using both a pointer and a keyboard while in VR, I hope you remember where your keys are.

What? Remember what keys? Like keyboard keys?

>Facial capture for gaming will be absolutely worthless, and so will it be for chatting.

Based on what? Just because you don't want them? How many people are cybering in VRchat at this very moment? You don't think these people would very much like to have a way to show facial features as they are performing them?

>Firstly because it already exists without wearing an expensive helmet that makes you sweat and is uncomfortable

Citation needed. What tech already does this? Also I don't sweat much with my Oculus Quest headset, why you think this is any different?

>secondly because nobody wants to wear a damn helmet so that people can see you smile ingame

I would very much like this. It would make VR games even more immersive if expressions would be captured and translated to the in-game models.

>and thirdly because nobody wants to put 1k+ on a device whoses uses are extremely limited.

Why is the price an issue? You said that you had Valve Index, looking at the price the headset with controllers and the tracking stations cost over 1k. Did you lie about having Valve Index or where the disconnect is? Anyways, yes, 1.7k for VR headset is a lot, but the tech will find its way to cheaper headsets as well, so price argument seems very weird to me.

If the resolution was bumped high enough you could probably use 3 monitors like you do in real life at a similar distance with similar resolution.

Wouldn't facial capture make chat in an MMO better too? Certainly not a requirement but it could make it more immersive and enjoyable?

Then you just pop your displayless laptop down on the café table and start typing away like you would with a normal laptop, except you're the only one who can see your screen.

No need to wave around any controllers, no danger of accidentally smacking someone's grande venti mocha latte.

The future sounds _great_.

In addition, I will not let you besmirch the name of the venti mocha latte. Sometimes all you need is three times your daily sugar intake in a single, deadly, way too hot cup of very average coffee.

Yes, the reaction to the iPod was negative, but honestly, at the time, the iPod wasn't dramatically and obviously better than the competition. It took a couple generations to show that it was not only better, but it was getting better considerably faster than the competition.

I've got so much more I want to use my desk space for than a monitor =)

Because Meta needs to find new revenue streams.

Pretty obvious in the light of the above why they want to be the metaverse platform of choice.

Meta wants to be Apple.