This keeps getting repeated but aside from "it's not the status quo", I see little evidence for it. I'm sure nobody wanted to spend their entire waking and working life sitting in front of a computer screen back when PCs came out and yet here we are...
In the off chance that VR does work out, Meta's going to be a huge benefactor.
Besides the fact that only 50 people are in the Metaverse right now? Literally nobody is using VR for meetings and work and stuff. Nobody likes being cut off from all real human interactions. At least with a video call I can see your face and you can see mine. VR? it's just voice chat with a stupid headset.
How many people visit the metaverse multiple times per day?
What percent of the population spends hours per day in a VR headset?
The answer to those questions needs to be much better than "miniscule" for this project to be any sort of success.
> There is no reason they cannot be solved.
Explain?
Saying we'll "never" get there, or that we couldn't get this into sunglasses-weight, does seem unrealistic. If joining a meeting was as easy as dropping on a pair of glasses, and I could "focus" on (virtually) further-away objects instead of just a computer screen in front of me, it would be pretty powerfully appealing.
I want this meeting to have higher immersion representations of the rest of the people in the meeting than boxes on a screen. I want to be able to shift my view to focus more on individuals. I want to be able to have a meeting with 40 people where I could still focus on a single person and see them with high-fidelity, instead of just having 20 of the boxes at low-res in front of me, with the rest off-screen. I want less eyestrain because I'm not just staring at a flat wall but my eyes are moving and shifting and re-focusing more. I want to have depth to things. I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody. All things I could do in the real world, but would be very hard to make seamless without a real-world interaction model.
Again, we clearly aren't there yet. But it's easy to imagine something better than what we have today.
> How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.
My best guess of what this would look like would be much closer to glasses than a full headset (no "sticking" to the face) with very good ultra-wide cameras + image processing to capture your face and upper body language at the same time. Maybe toss in a desktop-mounted webcam too. Not 100% immersed/blackout, but quite possibly good enough to be better than a flat monitor with also isn't 100% of your FOV.
This is a side project. Something to make sure FB has a foot in the game for when the technologies make "it all" (whatever that is) possible.
Part of me wonders if this is a decoy - look over here! While I do something useful elsewhere.
I think you're wrong.
From this[1] great essay about mainframes:
> Ultimately, there are only two natural kinds of computers: embedded systems and mainframes.
And this is so true. People have moved from personal computers to laptops and are in the process of moving to phones[2]. Smart watches seem to be a promising device; we'll see if people can put enough functionality into them to obviate the need for a phone.
Of course, not all tasks are suitable to be done on a phone or a watch. But one way to think of VR is a desk setup with huge monitors that happens to be extremely portable. Of course the promise of VR is much greater than that, but that is a pretty important use case - a use case that would obviate the need for laptops and desktops for many if not most tasks.
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1. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...
2. This isn't to say that the shift has been complete at all. Many people, including me, continue to use a desktop setup. And laptop use is still quite strong. But the derivative is ultimately what matters.
Have you ever tried to work in VR? It's not amazing at all, my Quest 2 (which has reasonably high resolution per modern headset standard) just can't render clearly enough for me to use VSCode. I tried it and it was just not there yet. Double the pixel density and you would have something I would consider using.
I'm not necessarily convinced that we'll do all of our meetings in VR ever, but it's reasonable to say that tech still has a way to go before I'd call it as "VR is the issue".
Pretty big problems - I don't really have any argument either way on how solvable they are in 5-10 years, but I really think the implication that people dislike the concept of working in VR itself is misguided.
For sale to consumer VR headsets have been available commercially for about 35 years. Is it really reasonable to call a consumer tech product category that's been around for 35 years "early" or "nascent"? Look at something like the EyePhone (yes, that was its name). How is that not the very same product category as a modern VR HMD? Of course a modern HMD is better, but not fundamentally a new category of device. This shit is ancient by tech standards. It's had almost 4 decades to evolve since its consumer debut.
One of these shifts is not like the other. The laptop can, in principle, do everything the desktop can. The speakers and mousepad are kind of limited, but peripherals erase this barrier too. A phone simply doesn't have the text input rate of a keyboard, which I'm feeling intimately right now as I tap out this comment with my right thumb. Strap a keyboard to the phone, now the screen is too far away. It might as well be a laptop.
You can run a business on laptops. Currently, businesses still use desktops mostly because they're still significantly cheaper at equivalent performance (and maybe harder to steal). But on phones? That's nowhere near practical. The keyboard has yet to be disrupted; voice input is antisocial unless you have your own office.
You lose so many cues, tells and deep interactions that you get with a physical presence via video call. I have seen VR start to solve some of these and I think it will be pretty big if we get to the point where the cartoony graphics are ditched.
The quest pro just added expression tracking as well so now you have body language and normal emotional expressions. Wayyyyyyy more natural feeling than video chats, even if I'm seeing an avatar of someone and not their actual face.