Even HN doesn't yet seem to be discussing the impact of coming VR/AR on people's geographic distribution.
Perhaps it's still too low profile? Eye tracking; facial expression tracking (researchy); foveated rendering reducing GPU requirements; inexpensive laptops with discrete GPUs; HMDs with monitor-like angular resolution; inexpensive finger tracking (hopefully)... perhaps it's easy to not notice these if you're not tracking the tech? Easy to think "remote work, so video conferencing, so limited impact - far better to do open plan offices"? Instead of "the practice and spatial constraints of software development will change dramatically over the next half decade".
1.) MIT Stanford Wormhole http://archive.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/...
The designers of the installation, who call it the wormhole, say it is meant to encourage random encounters between students and staff at two of the country’s premier technology-oriented universities. Someone at MIT’s Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences, hungry for lunch and conversation, will be able to chat under the dome with a stranger who’s grabbing a morning coffee in Stanford’s Huang Engineering Center. Casual meetings can be held at the wormhole. New ideas may be spurred, new science inspired.
2.) Google Fiber
3.) 200 inch LED video wall https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/07/samsung-4k-146-inch-micr...
Or perhaps video in addition to XR? HMDs don't entirely play well with eyes (at least until we get adaptive optics or light fields), so I want to give my eyes a break periodically. A video wall in the kitchen would permit a "let's take a break" conversation with a non-local colleague.
The power of the XR argument, is that if your ideal development environment is XR, and your ideal collaboration context is via XR, then locality constraints have simply gone away. Rather than video's challenge of being an impoverished medium, which may or may not be worth some non-locality benefit.
> MIT Stanford Wormhole
I spent a lot of time in Stata, over may years, and I'm not sure I ever saw the "wormhole" used. But perhaps there was some pattern of use, like late lunch, which I systematically missed. And one can walk by the cafeteria without easily noticing.
The problem is that telecommuting is currently very limited by technology. You can currently only transport your voice and a single video view, while collaborating over a single view from a monitor. You end up missing on very many of the modalities available in the real world.
But my vision of what work and study could be like with good VR is The Magic School Bus. Assume that every time you an your colleagues wanted to do work on any domain, you would be transported into a hi-fi all-senses-included representation of that domain, which provides a perfect sense of presence. That technology is still quite far away, but once we're there, it would be significantly better than just being in a room with them. And the world would be forever changed.
To loop this back to the topic at hand, the idea is that you need people in the same space to work effectively. That idea forces collections of people (cities) and drives up the value of the land (a fixed commodity). Having technology that removes the need to have the workforce physically opens up vast amounts of relatively cheap land to live on.
Perhaps my imagination isn't big enough, but I just don't see VR replacing dasein as it were.
Sure. It's just that "tolerable commute" would no longer need to be one of those gains.
A fun conversation went by with someone from the Sierra Club. It was pointed out that the built environment which best matched their resource conservation/efficiency goals, was Manhattan. Their response was something like "yes, but we don't emphasize that, because it wouldn't appeal to our membership". ;)
> dasein
Picture brainstorming in front of a hallway whiteboard. Picture grabbing some nearby colleagues to collaborate. Now picture how relatively ineffective and unpleasant it would to do that collaboration over video conferencing and such. It's suboptimal, but that's a price you're sometimes willing to pay for non-locality. But now imagine that given a choice, you would much prefer to be brainstorming in front of a virtual whiteboard.[1] And collaborating there. Simply because it's a more powerful and helpful environment. So your physical whiteboard languishes, gets taken down for wall painting, and is never rehung. Then non-locality is no longer something you pay for. Locality constraints are just gone.
There's a fun decades-old metric on communication technology: Given some communication task, and a choice of technologies, how far would you walk to get access to them? Physical letter, email, phone, in-person conversation. Down the hall, different floor, different building, across the city.
Already, there are some tasks where even if you are sitting in the same office, you would use some tech rather than turning around. VR/AR seems likely to greatly increase that set of tasks. Reducing the importance of being able to physically walk to people.
[1] Here's a limited existing virtual whiteboard: http://store.steampowered.com/app/585040/Dry_Erase_Infinite_...
There's actually a very fundamental reason why land perceived as being worth living in becomes an urban center, and remote work doesn't change most of the climate, water, resource distribution, etc., reasons why particular sites are much more attractive for human habitation.
https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projec...
IMHO, one very insurmountable reason is that you could never convince everyone that an urban center is worth living in. Quite a few people just don't enjoy that lifestyle.
First, your response doesn't make sense (and I think it's just because it's a misreading of the comment you replied to).
Second, I agree, there are people (myself included) that wouldn't enjoy living in an urban center. But that doesn't address what I think the comment was getting at, which is that land in urban centers is more desirable to a greater number of people than land outside of them.
https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...