Transformative VR Is Likely Coming Soon

I disagree with pretty much everything you've said here.  

First, zoom meetings (or google meet) are not necessarily worse than in-person.  They're great!  I've been working from home since the pandemic started, and I actually have more meetings and interactions with colleagues than I did before.  Before the pandemic, having a meeting not only meant setting a time, but finding a spare conference room, which were in short supply at my office.  With WFH, any time I want to talk to someone, I just send them a brief chat, and boom, instant videoconference.  I love it.  It's great.  

Second, what problem, exactly, is VR supposed to solve? Facial expressions are much more accurate over videoconference than VR.  Looking at poorly rendered and animated avatars is not going to fix anything. Gestures and hand signals are more accurate over VC.  Slide presentations are easy over VC.  Shared documents are easy over VC.  I really can't think of anything that would actually be better in VR.

Third, I'm early adopter and VR enthusiast, and owner of a high-end ($4k) VR gaming rig, and I can tell you that the tech is really only suitable for niche applications.  VR headsets are heavy, sweaty and uncomfortable.  They're a pain to use with glasses.  Screen resolution is low, unless you spend lots of $$$.  You don't have good peripheral vision.  There are lensing artifacts.  Lots of people still get nauseous.  It's hard to use a keyboard, or to move without bumping into things.  I've got a strong stomach, but an hour or two is pretty much my max before I want to rip the damn thing off.  No way in hell am I going to wear a VR headset for meetings; I'd quit my job first.

VR is really great for certain things, like flight simulators, where the head tracking and immersion makes it vastly superior to any other option.  But if Meta thinks that ordinary people are going to want to use VR headsets for daily work, then they're smoking some pretty strong stuff.

Are you long Meta?

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.

Meta seems to have trouble motivating the developers who actually develop Horizon worlds to use it. I would expect at least some of them to do the alpha/beta testing of the new device. 

I would expect that it takes more than 6 months to get to the point where the product is good enough to be superior to 1-on-1 meetings.

Aight, I have a Meta Quest Pro to test now, so here are my first-day impression. I haven't updated away from the bottom line of this post, though a few things were better and a few things were worse than I expected.

• They really knocked it out of the park with the pass-through cameras. While wearing the headset under typical indoor lighting, I can see the regular world about as well as I see it without my glasses (I'm nearsighted -2.75).
• The underside is open, rather than covered, which makes it much easier to peak out eg to check your phone compared to Quest 2. A side-effect of this is that you can see the same object in both normal and pass-through vision at the same time, and verify that it lines up perfectly.
• Text clarity improved more than I expected (they improved the optics, but didn't significantly increase the panel pixel density). The minimum acceptable font size is now a font size that most people (without my unusual preference for small fonts) would find to be normal.
• I haven't found someone else with a Quest Pro yet to try out eye contact and face tracking in a call, but I was able to try it out on an avatar in a mirror. Eye direction, blinking, winking work, and most mouth movements work. Eyebrows don't move, sticking out your tongue doesn't come through, and I don't think it can distinguish real smiles from fake smiles. Translated onto a slightly cartoonish avatar, this is enough to get me over the uncanny valley.
• The weight distribution is good, with the thinner front and the battery moved to the back, but I don't like the head strap (compared to the Quest 2 Elite Strap I was using). It puts too much of the headset's weight onto too small an area of the forehead, and as a shear rather than a compression. I think it can be remedied with an aftermarket modification to add a fabric strap across the top, but the strap is much less customizable/replaceable than it was on Quest 2. This seems like a major weak point and some people will probably find it to be a dealbreaker for extended use.
• I paired it with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, opened a web browser and tried it as a laptop replacement, and it Just Worked. (Choice of a virtual environment with hands, keyboard, and browser window visibile, or pass-through camera with a browser window floating in virtualized physical space. Caveat that transferring a keyboard into a virtual environment with computer vision only works for a whitelist of supported keyboard models, and I was lucky in that the first keyboard I tried happened to be a supported one). It's not at a level where I'd choose it over my Macbook Pro under normal circumstances, but it's within striking distance, and I *would* use it that way if I was stuck in an airplane seat without room to properly angle a laptop screen, or looking at something highly confidential in a public place.
• The controller tracking is solid. It's the same experience as Quest 2, except the dead zones are gone, as are the bulky tracking rings.

Latency, regardless of the cause, is one of the biggest hurdles. No matter how perfect the VR tech is, if the connection between participants has significant latency, then the experience will be inferior to in-person communication.

This is plausible to me and pretty interesting (I think there are more obstacles that the ones you list here and it'll take longer to work out kinks, but the overall point that a VR paradigm shift isn't that far away still seems pretty plausible)

My question, though, is, "is there anything you can do to profit off this now if you're not personally investing in building the VR future?". It seems like it'll be pretty easy to start hiring people remotely and using VR once the tech becomes workable. It seems useful to be anticipating this, and be "ahead of the curve" when the tech gets good enough, but that gets you maybe a 3-12 months of getting a bit more value.

I wrote more about this https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/K3JZCspQMJA34za3J/most-social-activity-will-reside-in-vr-by-2036 [EA · GW]

It's not going to be very transformative until it has widespread adoption, but it will, very soon.

Why better than in-person? Because of commute times, because of people being in spaces adapted to their own preferences, something else?

I think the problem with zoom meetings is not the meeting itself, but instead the bounds of the meeting. It's easier to have better coordination if you can freely wander in and out of a casual conversation. It's hard to get super-in-sync over, say, 60 minutes a day of facetime. To put another way, zoom does fine for "full meeting" mode, but much worse for casual, semi-meeting mode. VR does nothing to solve the second category, so I'm skeptical.

Inward-facing cameras with face and eye tracking

Before I read this phrase, I was about to comment something along the lines of "Facebook, and other tech companies, are no strangers to generating galaxy-brained arguments to persuade investors/analyst firms that their company's future is more valuable than it actually is". After I read that phrase I completely flipped.

Anyone else with sufficient real-life experience analyzing this industry would also flip when they see a phrase like this one.

And Facebook knows this.

crosslink to related: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/K3JZCspQMJA34za3J/most-social-activity-will-reside-in-vr-by-2036 [EA · GW]

Concretely: I think we're 6 months from the crossover point

Now that it's been 6 months since you got your Meta Quest Pro, how has it held up? Also, what are your predictions for Apple's VR headset, which is rumored to release next month?

Judging by the hammering that Meta's stock has taken over the last 5 years, the market really disagrees with you.

Here's an argument against radical VR transformation in the near term: some significant proportion of people have a strong anti-VR aversion. But the benefit of VR for meetings has strong network effects: if you have 6 friends you want to meet with, but 2 out of the 6 hates VR, that's going to derail the benefit of VR for the whole group.

I think I agree with your technological argument, but I'd take your 6 months and 2.5 years and multiply them by a factor of 2-4x.

Party of it is likely that we are conceiving the scenarios a bit differently. I might be including some additional practical considerations.

Basically, everyone tried out Zoom meetings and discovered that they sucked compared to in-person meetings, for reasons that are slightly hard to put your finger on.

If the problems are unclear why will good VR solve them?

Or put differently: What makes Zoom meetings worse than in-person-meetings and what will make VR-meetings better? 

'Meetings' are torture and making them better doesn't make me want VR, but reframed, making virtual 'hanging out with friends' better is quite appealing. So if it's way better for that  - particularly for low intensity socializing while watching shared media (virtual couch) - then I may be interested.

The thing I miss the most shared living spaces, or college, is doing the TV and video-gaming you normally do, but always with friends in a social setting.

The resolution is such a bottleneck though. It feels like it's not that far off but I keep trying to squint to read things on a display in VR. Just one more half generation maybe.

Are they going to solve the audio quality problem? I would say that is the number one thing that ruins video calls for me. Number two is eye contact.

@jimrandomh [LW · GW] I'm curious how your views on this have changed in the last 7 months?

I think it’s plausible to say this generation of headset will be better than a group video conference. At a stretch possibly better than a 1:1 video call. But better than in-person seems extremely unlikely to me.

Perhaps you are intending something broad like “overall higher utility for business and employees” rather than strictly better such that people will prefer to leave offices they were happy in to do VR instead? Taking into account the flexibility to hire people remotely, avoid paying tech hub wages, etc.?

Personally I think 1:1 video is much better than team/group video conferences (where interruptions and body language matter much more), and those group sessions are likely to be the meeting that VR wins first. But I think the comparison is VC versus VR, given many employees are going remote now. I strongly doubt that VR will persuade in-person companies to go remote/VR in the next few years.

I do think that enterprise is the right segment to target; even for one group meeting a day, most companies would get good ROI on these headsets if it is good enough to make people feel an interpersonal connection. I don’t think that quality bar is certain for this iteration though.

One big item I see missing is haptic feedback. Like, if I ask myself in what ways is VR still different from regular reality, I feel like there is still a lot missing.^[1]

I think working with physical objects is a big component of activities that can't be done remotely currently. But even if we just focus on interpersonal communication, being able to touch other people is an important component. Even if we are just talking about a strictly formal business context, handshakes at least still almost always occur.

And I just don't see high fidelity haptic feedback getting sufficiently advanced in the near future. Interaction even with just macro scale objects is still a major challenge. And the human touch is remarkably sensitive at the micro scale as well. "The lowest amplitude of the wrinkles so distinguished was approximately 10 nm, demonstrating that human tactile discrimination extends to the nanoscale."^[2] There is even research suggesting that we can sometimes detect single atom differences.^[3]