I think a "serious" telepresence application would be good. VR Chat is a meme-haven / non-serious location for now. But... there's that good YCombinator blogpost about non-serious apps: https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-toys/
It really does seem like VR Chat (as immature and silly as it is...) is a killer app. How to grow it into a serious application is still a major mystery to me, but I'd bet on VR Chat (or at least its successor that fixes its issues) to be a driving use of VR.
(I find this dream doubly alluring now that I found myself remote-working from a smaller town.)
3d collaborative virtual worlds are a great toy and seem to build communities relatively easily. Its not really mainstream, but Second Life is still relatively big... and has a long-term presence. It was initially released in 2003. It is kinda surprising that people still play that game. 16 years is an eternity in the video game world.
Also:
> after rewatching Sword Art Online recently, I found myself thinking that a VR Chat is actually a good idea
I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-) Granted, I don't think we have any microwave death-triggers implemented on the back of real-world VR Headsets yet, so maybe we're safe from that particular problem.
Yeah, I've been surprised to learn recently that it's still alive and kicking. I'll check it out eventually, I'm gearing myself to do it for more than 10 years now :).
> I'm pretty sure Sword Art Online was about how VR could be a... bad idea. Just saying. :-)
Yeah, well, one of the reason I like it is that, despite every single VR and AR system presented being abused by some villain to do evil things, including just straight imprisoning and killing people thanks to mentioned microwave death-triggers, the anime series and the movie still manage to present a lot of positive sides too, and do a decent discussion of the social impact of such technologies.
I guess it's like with all anime - focused on both extremes, at the exclusion of the mundane :).
Open offices are trash in the first place (at least for me), headsets do not have enough resolution to pretend to have a screen in front of me, and even if they did, it would likely produce more eyestrain than just looking at an actual HD screen in front of you.
Maybe with enough presence remote would become even more commonplace. A man can dream.
1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing beats a real whiteboard)
2) Observe people working at a whiteboard. It's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication. Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.
The best in class tool I've found to date is Microsoft's Whiteboard app running on their 84" Surface Hub. Anyone who has the budget I highly recommend taking a look at it.
The app itself is free on windows 10.
Well, the main benefit of writing on a whiteboard is for you to draw your thoughts and for others to see what you wrote/drew. Not to get tactile feedback.
Besides it would be trivial to actually write on a whiteboard on your office while wearing a VR headset and have it be seen by others in VR space in different offices/countries (thus getting the "tactile feedback" as well).
Chalkboards are actually a great way to communicate and collaborate in small groups, and have been for a long time one of the main forms of communication in professional mathematics and some other technical fields.
The chalkboard is a very democratic medium, because anyone can more-or-less produce the same output, it is easy to add notes over / adjacent to other people’s writing (including formulas, diagrams, ...), and the possibilities are very free and open-ended. This stands in contrast to fancy typography and bespoke technical diagrams, which are often slow to produce, difficult to modify, and require great expertise to do well.
Using a chalkboard well as a collaborative thinking tool takes practice though.
And it is true that this is the way many people use whiteboards, as a kind of presentation tool rather than a thinking tool. But that is largely down to lack of practice with the chalkboard/whiteboard as a personal, one-on-one, or small group tool.
There are plenty of people who successfully use white boards as a tool for routine technical conversations in small groups, with multiple participants writing on the same board.
“Not everyone is writing literally simultaneously” would be a vacuous and uninteresting statement, so I’ll give the previous poster the benefit of the doubt that he/she was saying something more substantial. No kind of conversation involves every interlocutor literally simultaneously talking/writing in the same space at the same time: that would just be a cacophony of monologues, not a conversation at all.
What this means in practice is that we have a lot of software that makes it easy to bring a group of strangers in to pseudonoymously vandalize a whiteboard by drawing dicks on it - a true "cacophony of monologues." See also: most comment threads.
That doesn’t mean people collaborating won’t be taking turns as a practical matter, enforced by social convention.
Sometimes I'm hesitant to start scribbling on the drawing space because I don't have the social queues to not step on someone else's thoughts. Maybe this Whiteboard app solves that?
To be fair, people said that in 2007 about virtual keyboards.
There's no possible such affordance in virtual space. You're literally writing in air.
But it doesn't feel that it's hitting a button (because the button it's virtual), and people then had made this point repeatedly (e.g. in favor of Blackberry).
BigCorp had introduced the VR goggles about eight months ago, and though it was initially a boon, most of the dev team had come to hate them. Sure, working at home was nice at first. You didn't have to wear pants anymore, you could cook fish in you apartment and not get death-stares, the commute over the Bay Bridge was gone along with the tolls. But it quickly became apparent that you still had to 'put ass to seat.' Initially you could skip out, take a long lunch, go to the dentist, take the dog out when you were bored stiff from the monotony.
But then that first update came out.
Thing was, in order to downplay the nausea effects from the screens, the goggles tracked your eyes' saccades, pupil dilation, and a bunch of other bioengineering stuff Greg barely knew about. It really did help with the nausea, not the Greg really suffered from it to begin with. His ex-girlfriend certainly did, making VR-sexting nearly impossible with her back in NYC.
It wasn't so much that the VR-goggles could track exactly what you were looking at, that data stream was just too much to parse, it was that they knew you were there at all. Once most of the dev team was no longer in the bullpen, and instead they were off actually living a life, productivity skyrocketed.
Well, initially.
Greg's boss, Jose, had loved it. But as the product reached it's natural limits, sigmoided to the economy, the squeeze began. At first, the number of tickets became the metric to game. Then it was peer-feedback, which naturally came to an armistice between all of them. One thing after another, as Jose was squeezed from all of this many bosses. Until eventually, you had to have 'continuous telepresence' during work hours.
Sure, when the new JK Rowling product came out, the entire virtual office became Hogwartz, complete with the ghosts and staircases. Fridays were a reliable beach scene. Mondays had that dark humor of a Dilbert strip in the skin and layout of the office. But Jose had each scene constructed so that he could monitor if you were there. Like a manager in a Cuban Cigar factory, his seat was higher. He could easily see if you were there in his goggles. A little red mark in Jose's HUD came up when you pulled out of the office. He had to, it was one of the few metrics he knew about and that he could manipulate to appease the matrix of his bosses. 'Put ass to seat'.
But Jane knew people. Greg didn't know who she knew, maybe one of the hardware guys at the VR goggle plant. But Jane was faking it. Greg has seen it, cataloged it, and studied it. The times she would message him, idly talking about some show, all of them were pulled from the NYT's RSS, easily a chatbot she'd actually paid for. The voice was just that side of choppy. And the way her head moved, that here eyes scanned across Greg's virtual face, totally scripted. He'd seen her replay the exact facial scan at least six times in one meeting. Greg knew: Jane was faking it.
Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game, and I adore rhythm games
Multiple driving/racing sims, including assetto corsa, project cars, and Euro Truck simulator (though I struggle to play that one in VR)
VTOL VR is an incredible near future Flight and military simulation seemingly focusing on weapons handling
I have over 30 VR applications, and at least 10 I would consider full fledged "games", but those are what I spend most of my time in
I pick up the phone or email people in the same building. I'm not sure jumping into a virtual room with people in different physical locations is a need.
I love my VR headset for gaming, I have a really hard time seeing it implemented in our workplace: software company with development offices in US/UK/India.
Being able to see each other's face is not how a lot of work is done imho. Collaborating using tools like MS Whiteboard on a surface hub to express and ideate on a design is where work gets done in my experience.
Not sure how VR solves the problem you describe. Your wife needs to be there in person if a skype call wouldn't suffice.
Her job description is basically investing several million dollars at a time into projects that a large number of participants in her industry (impact investing) believe are worthwhile, but no one fund would bankroll on its own. A key part of that job description is working to build partnerships & syndicates of investors whose goals are aligned. A key skill for that is building trust and rapport - the foundations, family offices, entrepreneurs, and hedge funds involved all need to feel like the deal is in their interest and they will be treated fairly, both if it goes well and if it goes poorly.
There's a bunch of social science that's shown that repeated in-person interaction builds trust in a way that e-mail, phone calls, written communication, and videoconferencing does not. It's not just the facial expression and emotions - there's something about interacting in real-time within a shared environment that makes us trust each other. And that's what I'm referring to by "good as there" telepresence - existing systems are not good enough, because there's still a big gulf between VCing with your coworker across the country and chatting with your officemate about a cool new opportunity. I don't know whether VR will ever be good enough to bridge this gulf, but I'm saying that if it can, that would be revolutionary.
If it were just a matter of deal terms & conditions, we could stick all that in a blockchain and let computers hash it out. That's my field, and I keep telling her that eventually the world'll move that way. But humans don't work that way; as long as we have squishy emotions and depend on a lot of subconscious cues we can't even describe, then looking at a screen is not going to change peoples' decision making. If you could somehow capture all those subconscious cues so it really is indistinguishable from physical presence, that may change, but that's a big if.
Modern VR headsets already have eye tracking, it's not too out of the picture to imagine some rudimentary face tracking to capture the rest of the foundations of expression. In my experience the sense of "thereness" is much greater in a VR room than a teleconferencing session; but it's difficult to compare since VR presupposes better audio conditions.
That’s part of what VR aims to disrupt and achieve.
VR is just a video conference call on steroids. Business travel is 'common' but relative to the rest of productive output at an average business it's peanuts. Also what portion of those business travelers absolutely need to be there. Would you buy from (a) a salesperson who took the time to travel to your workplace or (b) some telepresence pitch?
How about option c) donate the plane ticket to buy carbon offsets so as not to act "cheap". Even better, give the client that choice and see if they readily choose to pollute the environment (twice).
Plus I would hope that the big black glasses eventually give way to something sleeker, more akin to an eyepatch or sleeping mask.
HIGH-FIDELITY FACIAL AND SPEECH ANIMATION FOR VR HMDS Kyle Olszewski, Joseph J. Lim, Shunsuke Saito, Hao Li Siggraph Asia 2016 http://www.hao-li.com/publications/papers/siggraphAsia2016HF...
FACIAL PERFORMANCE SENSING HEAD-MOUNTED DISPLAY Hao Li, Laura Trutoiu, Kyle Olszewski, Lingyu Wei, Tristan Trutna, Pei-Lun Hsieh, Aaron Nicholls, Chongyang Ma Siggraph 2015 http://www.hao-li.com/publications/papers/siggraph2015FPSHMD...
(Could look like Google's nap pods but a little bit smaller.)
Entertainment is certainly not niche by any definition. If VR replaces gaming consoles alone we're talking several Billion dollars. Let alone TV, Movie theaters, internet porn etc
"All the tedium and productivity-killing of corporate meetings now in your telecommuting job" (tm)
You would have to go beyond mere conferencing, and create specialized tools that can be interacted with in VR so people can produce something together that they couldn't before. There is little value in just having everyone pretend they're in an office.
There are many more reasons for the housing cost disparity then closeness in work spaces.
Telepresence done right would be an absolutely huge economic boon - it subsumes transportation, housing, national boundaries, and lots of education and training. If you could get the same sort of "all the web experts in the room" like you get in Silicon Valley or "all the electronics experts in the room" like you get in Shenzhen, but do so where you literally have all the experts (rather than just those who live in those cities), you'd get rid of a lot of economic inefficiencies like houses costing 40x more in Silicon Valley than Detroit.
Failing that, I see it as a niche product that'd revolutionize the entertainment industries but doesn't change much outside of them.