"By the end of this decade we're going to replace our workstations on our desks with a VR setup"
Thanks, I hate it.
Thanks, I hate it.
I have a desk with 3 big monitors on it and the idea of being able to take that workspace with me in my backpack is incredibly appealing. Working on my laptop alone (a 16" MBP) is awful in comparison.
We are far away from actually being able to effectively simulate my full-desk workspace in VR.
But even the Quest 2 was enough to make it easy to imagine how it will be when we get there, and obvious that this is how I want to work in the future. And for me, the future can't come soon enough; I'm ready!
That's why I skipped upgrading my phone this year and ordered the Meta Quest Pro instead. I know it also won't be able to replicate my desk setup (and I really hate giving money to facebook too) but I want to experience for myself how much closer we are.
To me, a VR work environment (with mixed-reality option) is the holy grail, and while its clear we aren't technologically there yet, it is equally clear that we will be within a decade or so (maybe less).
So where to?
And that's why the (optional) mixed-reality feature is mandatory.
I wouldn't be self-conscious about wearing a headset at a starbucks (just like I wasn't about using an in-ear bluetooth headset for my phone ~20 years ago when people thought that looked weird) — but I don't want to not be able to see the people around me in a public space even if I look at them.
I think within 10-15 years you will see about as many solo customers at a typical starbucks using a mixed-reality headset as you see using wireless earbuds today.
(However, I wouldn't invest the time and money to build out a cloud-powered VR engineering workspace just to be able to take it to the coffee shop. I mainly mean taking it on trips abroad, taking it home when I visit my family, etc.)
The timeline is unpredictable but that's the excitement of getting in early to these types of things, because we can start to experience and anticipate what the future will look like before others even have the chance.
If I owned a coffee shop I'd ban VR headsets. You are in my coffee shop to be in my coffee shop. Go home to use VR or sit in the park or something!
In this scenario, I am using a headset (VR, with mixed reality so I can see the real world around me also as needed) for the exact same reason people use a laptop computer in a coffee shop.
The difference would be that I have many big screens instead of one small screen.
Like most people who go to a coffee shop alone in the city, I am not going there to... be in the coffee shop. I am going there to get a seat and get some work done (with the added bonus of a coffee, and possibly a sandwich or pastry).
Personally I would never ever want to spend money in any food-providing business that would allow such people around us. There is a world of difference between laptops and this. Don't expect mass adoption in cafes soon, I can imagine some SF tech-friendly cafes allowing it as an experiment but overall it would be taking too much risk as an owner at least in this decade.
It also begs the question why you would actually sit in café if you completely shield yourself from whole environment. At home you can usually create much more comfortable place.
The last time I was in a starbucks (in Tokyo) well over 50% of the people were holding highres video cameras in their hands, swiping away in solitude. I couldn't see what they were looking at, nor could I know if they were recording — but who gives a shit? It's a public place. If I cared about that, I'd have to play it safe and assume they all were.
So I think you have it backwards. It's 2022; if you want to make sure you aren't recorded while out in public, then you stay home. (That starbucks also has its own cameras, mounted on the ceiling.)
P.S. Google Glass failed because it didn't provide sufficient utility and value to its users. Not because it freaked out a certain subset of the population, or because John Gruber called them glassholes.
If it had provided real enduring value, then tons of people would wear them and nobody would give a shit about some subgroup's Luddite anxieties — my great grandpa and some of his buddies had similar feelings about the Sony Walkman. But nobody stopped using walkmans because those old guys didn't like them shutting out the outside world with their headphones; they stopped because eventually minidisc players and ipods were invented.
Since you seem completely oblivious about other cultures - there are still whole cultures where taking a picture without asking for permission is highly offensive. We talk about billions of people. And even in other places, like most Europe, you try something like that in cafe and you will be asked to put it down. I also mentioned current decade, things change but not that fast as some kids project it to be.
I think it would benefit tremendously to basically everybody to actually travel a bit like backpackers as far culturally as possible to challenge themselves and their worldviews a bit.
Sorry if you don't like it, but smartphones are everywhere now, and that's not gonna change. You might feel like sitting alone wearing a headset is somehow fundamentally different than sitting alone using a smartphone, but it really isn't. It is precisely the same in all respects that matter — you just aren't used to it yet.
However, we might be talking about a different kind of "coffee shop". I'm talking about corporate coffee shops like starbucks. They mainly offer industrial coffee and food, wifi, and a place to work, while you are in between things or in transit. I haven't been to Europe since before COVID ,but IIRC it was already pretty much the same there, too, even three years ago. I saw hundreds of people using iPhones, and pretty sure I didn't see anybody get asked to put it down.
Perhaps you could place a doorbell on the table. When pressed it gives you a notification in your eye screens. You could rig up automated contextual replies "yes you can borrow the sugar". Saving you the bother of being human.
Sitting there with laptop or phone, you are not faceless like you are with VR headset.
Anybody could walk up and ask me a question, and I'd both see and hear them. In fact, that is one of the main points of today's announcement. The new "mixed reality" feature means exactly that.
(You could always hear people around you in VR (if you wished), but seeing your surroundings didn't work well at all, unless you used developer mode hacks, and even then the cameras were bad.)
With Meta's previous headset, I wouldn't contemplate using it in a starbucks.
Not because I prioritize people walking over and interrupting me, or them being able to see every inch of my face, but because I want to be able to see them.
Sitting in public without being able to hear and see what is going on around me does seem like a very weird thing to me. But that's not what's being talked about here.
But as a practical matter, adding more than 3-4 monitor arms to a physical desk becomes difficult.
So if your startup happens to sell a-grav monitors that can just float in space above my desk, and be re-arranged by waving my hands at them, hit me up in my DMs!
I don't yet know personally what I want it to look like (and reserve the right to change my mind many times over the next few years) but there is no reason to stick to the conventional paradigm of "monitors" when in theory you could just let every window or widget float in space, independently or in sets.
Lots of stuff yet to be innovated!
Allegedly some of the VR desktop environments support app windows although the one which looked most promising is Quest-only.
I find it baffling that MSFT cannot figure out how to give arbitrary apps their own window in WMR and have to be written specifically to do that. Also: How is their virtual desktop app so bad compared to even the free Desktop+ on Steam?
It's more the Google approach to the ecosystem than it is the Apple approach, though I don't believe the OS is open-source.
Eh. No.
Before these "drivers" had to be signed it was common for various graphics tweak tools to provide a method for building your own custom INF to "overclock" a monitor that only officially supported 60 Hz or whatever.
VR headsets that don't contain their own processing on the other hand do in fact work like a normal monitor. Usually they'll go in to a "direct mode" that does not appear as a monitor when their drivers are installed for both performance and convenience reasons, but they can be configured to just appear as yet another monitor.
Meta accounts only require an email address. There is no real name requirement, which they explicitly state in their help page[1] so this isn't a violation of the TOS.
[1] https://www.meta.com/help/accounts/set-up-meta-account/, see "Setting up your Meta account with email" section.
I'm actually quite optimistic: I don't see a reason why Meta will be the only player in VR.
I don't think long term they can maintain a moat on a hardware level - other headset producers will pop up once the tech is better understood and we may end up with a situation similar to what we currently have in the console world (2-3 big players and a few niche ones).
I think Meta sees that and are trying to build a moat on a social-networking level and, honestly, I don't know how well that will work.
For example people say it's uncomfortable : solved now by Quest Pro. People say resolution isn't high enough. Clear path to being solved as display tech and foveated rendering takes over. Don't like being isolated? Solved by Quest Pro with high quality pass through and open side profile. Can't type without seeing your hands? Solved by Quest Pro. Experienced nausea once upon a time using VR? I will bet 80% chance its solved because the tech has gotten vastly better.
For a lot of people the very fact you have a device on your head is what's uncomfortable. Screens in front of your eyes, your senses boxed in. That's the point of VR, which is why it won't be adopted as widely as some are hoping.
The Quest Pro is aimed like a laser at fixing all of these issues (with the exception of resolution, my main gripe). But your willingness to extrapolate your experience on a $300 headset to infer the limit of everything that will ever be possible is way over-reaching.
Of course, I am over-reaching in the sense that I haven't tried the Quest Pro yet so who knows how real any of the improvements are. But I don't have any trouble believing the tech will get there whether it's this product or future ones.
For real, monitors are ugly and take up space and become super expensive quick.
If we actually manage to come up with something better then monitors, then amazing. If we don't, they won't be replaced.
There are plenty of head mounted displays that don't have any smarts built in.
No magic engineering from Meta are going to fix these issues.
Nausea only occurs (as far as I can tell) when the motion you see in the headset doesn't match your motion in real life. That's not a problem for a simulated desktop experience.
Sweaty forehead typically only occurs if you're getting a work out in VR, which wouldn't be a problem for office work. But for those who have that issue even when not exercising it seems easily solvable with better ventilation. Hardly an impossible engineering challenge.
Neck cramps are solvable by balancing the weight on your head better. Quest Pro has this.
Disconnection from the world is solved by high resolution video passthrough. Quest Pro has this.
Visual accessibility is solved by prescription lens inserts. That's been a thing since the Rift 1.
This one will go into my treasure trove of HN quotes.
If we're talking about disconnection from the world in a more abstract sense then I agree passthrough doesn't solve that. But that's not really a problem unique to VR either.
Just putting on a VR headset, makes my head sweaty within a minute or two, even when I’m just sitting down and doing nothing strenuous. Just different biology I guess I generally don’t like wearing hats for the same reason, it makes my head and hair, sweaty.
Speaking of hats, I generally don’t like wearing construction hard hats either, because it makes my neck sore at the end of the day. And that’s just having a little bit of balanced weight on the top of my head. Balancing isn’t the issue, it’s a higher center of gravity, especially when you rotate the head as you are prone to do in VR.
Nausea I get consistently, no matter what I am doing. Even if stationary, any bit of lag can cause nausea. I can’t imagine doing development work and not causing the machine to lag a little bit here and there, when I run a test, suite or something. Thankfully for me, it’s only mild, but if I were to do this, all day would be a large impact on quality of life. I don’t wanna spend half my day mildly nauseous.
And all of this only so that I don’t have to have a couple of high resolution monitors on my desk? I just really don’t get it. It’s a solution in search of a problem.
For instance, I use the old busted Quest 2 headset every single day, and I don't get any nausea, or neck soreness. (I do definitely get the sweaty head, though. Largely because I use a boxing exercise app with it, which gets really sweaty, but in non-exertion use cases, too. (I also tend to sweat in hats and over-ear headphones.)
The sweat problem will gradually get better over time, as headsets get lighter and more breathable.
Unlike a lot of VR enthusiasts, though, my own interest is almost exlcusively in replicated an expansive, multi-monitor setup for sofware engineering.
Why? I have an XXL desk from GeekDesk with 3 large high-res monitors. It's fantastically productive. So much so that it makes working on a laptop, or even a desktop with only 1 monitor, super annoying.
But I want to be able to take that workspace with me.
(Even to work; I work at home mainly and when I do go into the office and get stuck with a single busted-ass low-res 4K display, it sucks. But I want to take my workspace other places, too.)
I'll put up with some minor annoyances, like sweat, to be able to do that. In your case, it sounds like they will need to solve more problems to make it usable — or you might just decide to stick with a real desk and monitors, and that portability isn't worth the tradeoffs.
The weight issue is lesser with the Quest Pro (since the weight is balanced at the back) and will get better with time with newer devices.
> visual inaccessibility (I need to wear computer glasses)
Quest 2 provides spacers for glasses. I assume Quest Pro will as well.
The disconnect from the world is the only one that doesn't have a solution yet AFAIK.
Any VR absolutely does cause sweaty forehead symptom for me. It’s just my different biology I guess.
> The disconnect from the world is the only one that doesn't have a solution yet AFAIK.
The solution is AR. I would use a Microsoft hololens, if it was available at a reasonable price point.
Interesting, the Quest Pro is I believe aimed at the same audience as the HoloLens, but at a lower price point. Though, not fully AR - more like MR I believe.
And speaking personally, I just don't want to be disconnected from the environment in which I am presently existing. Projected overlays on glasses could be useful, I'll grant, but not a vision-restricting, self-isolating VR headset.
That's what they are aiming for long-term. Zuckerberg said in the Connect talk that glasses would be the ideal form factor.
Do you have a source for that? The lag issue seems entirely solved now, on a device like the Quest 2, it was an issue only in earlier days with slower hardware.
There were lots of different theories early on, but now the cause of nausea seems to be entirely based on motion over a large field of view, which causes a disconnect between your inner ear telling you you're not moving, and your eyes telling you you are. Hence why VR games generally default to teleporting rather than walking/running.
(There can be separate issues such as eyestrain if your IPD doesn't match or relating to wearing glasses, but those are device-specific.)
I think there are transformative / killer applications of AR to certain industries like traditional engineering, aviation, construction, logistics, etc. Microsoft Hololens could be a killer product if they could get it under $1k and open up the software stack a bit.
But as a consumer device, outside of gaming? Or a productivity tool? I don't see it. Keep in mind just how difficult a sell 3D movies were, and that just required putting on some plastic sunglasses.
I guess we’ll have to see how it goes!
If it's better for businesses mandating what their WFH users use.
And then, even, it's more like "if salespeople convince some managers it's better", which isn't the same thing as is-in-fact-better.