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Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally one big reason why video calls are disliked is because of the clunkiness caused by connectivity and hardware related issues.

* Someone suddenly is not audible

* Someone doesn't realize they are audible, and starts speaking to someone else in person

* Glitches and breaks in the conversation due to words or parts of words becoming cut off

I imagine the VR equivalents may be comical or frightening.

The other "big" issue (anecdotally) is lack of visual cues to know when it's likely to be OK to start and stop talking

I'd bet big on anything that somehow managed to solve these problems.

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It's really interesting that I have the same frustrations with video calls, however I also play VR videogames and video chat with "remote friends" very often, and almost NEVER have those issues.

I'm not sure if it's greater familiarity with the tools, or something else, but I can be on a 4 person group video call with my friends WHILE playing a VR game with them as well and everything runs smoothly and without lag for hours on end, but like 40% of video calls for past jobs have had dropouts, lag, difficulty hearing, and other issues.

One thing I think that really helps some of those issues is to get high quality headsets for everyone and make sure they know how to use it, but the lag I genuinely don't understand what makes it so common in work contexts.

Good hardware is essential to make frequent video calling work well. We have a semi-distributed team, spread between two offices and a bunch of remote workers.

The biggest difference to making it work was for everyone to be issued a decent headset so that you're not battling people using Apple headphones which pick up everyone else in the room, and setting up meeting rooms with decent video conferencing hardware so that its possible to bring in groups from different places.

If I had my way we'd have taken the much simpler approach of declaring that for any meeting with one remote participant, everyone connects by video, but that's a battle I lost long ago with management!

>If I had my way we'd have taken the much simpler approach of declaring that for any meeting with one remote participant, everyone connects by video

I've tried that in the past, but sadly even good office networks often get pretty choppy when you have 4 or 5 people all video calling from the same connection independently.

The best solution I've found for that case is to invest in good video conference hardware for meeting rooms. Get a couple of area mics, and a big TV with a camera on it that can see the whole table.

Thanks for this Klathmon.

The reason meeting in VR is fundamentally better from a technical standpoint is the amount of information your sending over a network is GREATLY reduced. A video is a series of pixels with 4~ values that all have to be sent around 30 times per second at least.

On the other hand, in VR, all the textures are stored locally, so the only two network "dependencies" for communication are voice over IP and positions (usually about 4 sets of coordinates). This allows you to have 20+ people in a room with almost no lag.

> The other "big" issue (anecdotally) is lack of visual cues to know when it's likely to be OK to start and stop talking

This is something that is much better in vr. Eye contact becomes a thing.

We are hoping we can simulate that as time progresses!

I tend to agree, I don't think VR is addressing the major problems - it's simply adding a layer on top of something that is still fundamentally not as frictionless as meeting in person. VR simply adds another input layer and more hardware to go wrong.

Land-lines may have lacked fidelity but they were near enough to 100% reliable and simple enough for a child to use which is quite an achievement. In the world of consumer teleconferencing we are not even close to that experience.

I politely disagree with your premise. I dislike video calls and have never found them technically clunky or unreliable.

Which video call services have you used? My experience has had me use these:

Slack Webex Teams Zoom Skype

Of those, Slack and Teams both cut out at seemingly random times. The others, though, were generally reliable.

I'd love to dive into this a bit more - why do you dislike video calls?

because they are terrible and not fit for busy people who might prefer multitasking calls

That sounds more like a problem with the way the meeting is run not if it’s conducted via audio, video or VR.

If you feel like it’s wasting your time you are probably in a meeting you shouldn’t be in or it’s not properly organized with specific goals that need to be addressed in the meeting.

I feel like running an audio stream in the background and just do other things is not something that solves that. And why wouldn’t you be able to just minimize the video and do what you want to do if you don’t feel like attending?

It is not though and I don't feel like I'm wasting my time. Audio stream in the background and pitching in when I need to is perfect -- I learn all that I need to learn and I can multitask. It is the same concept as listening to podcasts whilst driving, albeit a bit more interactive. You can see why it'd be incredibly awkward to do this via video.

Video can add a significant cognitive burden to someone who is easily overstimulated. It sounds like this could add to it.

Hey Fareesh! Thanks for your input, check out my comment on Klathmon's reply.

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