I don’t think it’s going to be transformative until you are happy to wear a headset for hours on end. In and of themselves, VR meetings are better than Zoom meetings, but having a headset on sucks compared to sitting at your computer with nothing on your face.
I think the bottleneck is going to be cheap and widely owned. Zoom benefits from ubiquitous built-in or very cheap cameras, which are a huge marginal upgrade over having no videoconferencing capability at all and seem to me (no background in the tech) like they’re build on the accumulated tech stack of a mature camera/video industry.
Well-functioning headsets have higher tech hurdles, will be more expensive, physically unfamiliar, and the benefits of VR vs. videoconferencing are hard to put into words.
I could see the killer app for VR being the ability to remotely control a general-purpose robot that is physically dexterous, is controlled via the same body movements you’d do yourself if you were in its place, and can be mass-produced.
I don’t really think that cost is an important bottleneck anymore. I and many others have a Rift collecting dust because I don’t really care to use it regularly. Many people have spent more money on cameras, lighting, microphones, and other tinkering for Zoom than it would cost them to buy a Quest.
Any technology is more useful if everyone owns it, but to get there, it has to be useful at reasonable levels of adoption (e.g. a quarter of your friends own it), or it’s not going to happen.
To me, the plausible route towards getting lots of people into VR for meetings is to have those people incidentally using a headset for all kinds of everyday computing stuff—watching movies, playing games, doing office work—and then, they are already wearing it and using it, and it’s easy to have meetings with everyone else who is also already wearing it and using it. That’s clearly achievable but also clearly not ready yet.
I agree on this, I think network effects are going to be a big part of VR success in terms of transforming society and economy.
I don’t think meetings are going to be the driver here but they do reflect one problem area the VR can ultimately resolve. As email and messaging solved a temporal aspect of communications VR will be solving a locational aspect of interaction. But I think outside niche areas like the operating room or similar settings where the operator and the equipment need to be well integrated in a way that makes sense to human perceptions it won’t too much traction.
Gaming (and perhaps porn) perhaps get the major growth of the network in the initial stages (which does seem to be occurring now with gaming).
I don’t think it’s going to be transformative until you are happy to wear a headset for hours on end. In and of themselves, VR meetings are better than Zoom meetings, but having a headset on sucks compared to sitting at your computer with nothing on your face.
I think the bottleneck is going to be cheap and widely owned. Zoom benefits from ubiquitous built-in or very cheap cameras, which are a huge marginal upgrade over having no videoconferencing capability at all and seem to me (no background in the tech) like they’re build on the accumulated tech stack of a mature camera/video industry.
Well-functioning headsets have higher tech hurdles, will be more expensive, physically unfamiliar, and the benefits of VR vs. videoconferencing are hard to put into words.
I could see the killer app for VR being the ability to remotely control a general-purpose robot that is physically dexterous, is controlled via the same body movements you’d do yourself if you were in its place, and can be mass-produced.
I don’t really think that cost is an important bottleneck anymore. I and many others have a Rift collecting dust because I don’t really care to use it regularly. Many people have spent more money on cameras, lighting, microphones, and other tinkering for Zoom than it would cost them to buy a Quest.
Any technology is more useful if everyone owns it, but to get there, it has to be useful at reasonable levels of adoption (e.g. a quarter of your friends own it), or it’s not going to happen.
To me, the plausible route towards getting lots of people into VR for meetings is to have those people incidentally using a headset for all kinds of everyday computing stuff—watching movies, playing games, doing office work—and then, they are already wearing it and using it, and it’s easy to have meetings with everyone else who is also already wearing it and using it. That’s clearly achievable but also clearly not ready yet.
I agree on this, I think network effects are going to be a big part of VR success in terms of transforming society and economy.
I don’t think meetings are going to be the driver here but they do reflect one problem area the VR can ultimately resolve. As email and messaging solved a temporal aspect of communications VR will be solving a locational aspect of interaction. But I think outside niche areas like the operating room or similar settings where the operator and the equipment need to be well integrated in a way that makes sense to human perceptions it won’t too much traction.
Gaming (and perhaps porn) perhaps get the major growth of the network in the initial stages (which does seem to be occurring now with gaming).
I’m generally not happy if I have meetings for hours on ends.