Hacker News Reader

Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com