[bronz]

the seriousness that vr and vr social apps are addressed with is dumbfounding to me. watch the video at the bottom of the page -- this is a huge joke. nobody will ever put on a headset and grab their controllers when they could just use skype. skype, which is much less hassle and gives you a real face to face experience with the other persons actual face. vr/ar contact lenses are never coming within a window of time that any of us care about. vr in general will remain a useless gimmick for longer than any of us are willing to wait, probably well past all of our deaths. im sick and tired of vr hype.

[carlosdp]

If you've actually tried a social/multiplayer VR experience, you would know the presence that being "physically with" the other person is much more impactful than a video chat. The avatars don't even need to look good, as long as they have a head and hands + voice communication, having a virtual environment that is much more human-like than talking to a flat screen is MILES better.

I'd rather hang out with long-distance friends in VR than in video chat, which I've always found to be awkward and uncomfortable personally.

[slavik81]

I agree, but Spaces looks boring. When I hang out with my far away friends, we pile into Skype and play a game. MMOs like World of Warcraft have long served this niche, and it seems that Facebook has learned little from them.

When I hang out with friends in real life, we usually do some activity too. It's not just showing up at their house with a photo album every weekend. We watch movies, play board games, cook food, or various other things while we socialize.

[t0mbstone]

Until you've played in a multi-player VR world with friends you are voice chatting with, you won't understand.

The other day, I played VR disc golf with my buddy who lives on the other side of the globe in a completely different country.

After that, we went into a virtual world sandbox where we essentially played giant legos together and drew and shaped a bunch of stuff. We collaboratively built a rocket ship and then we blew it up. We literally just spent hours together, playing together like kids, even though we are grown up adults. It was a blast.

[drzaiusapelord]

I have a Vive and do all these things and I think its fair to say this is very much an acquired taste.

Maybe for your super techy types like us, but this isn't translating down to people who casually use fb and skype. Its clunky and confining.

[bhhaskin]

Everything has to start somewhere. It wasn't too long ago that most people would have said the same about computers in general.

[drzaiusapelord]

Is that true? I mean the utility of the computer was instantly recognized and brought into offices as soon as practically possible. We've way deep into 'practical' territory for VR and it really hasn't done anything but appeal to some limited industries and a tiny slice of gamers.

You can't just hand-wave the "Google Glasses" part of VR away. There are concrete barriers to entry here. Grandma is not going to like strapping a huge screen to her face, even if it can be made a few ounces lighter, for example. People don't like to be 'locked into' interfaces. Nausea is an unsolved problem. Video card power is significant for non-trivial displays.

There's a lot of cons here for the very few pros.

[TuringTest]

> I mean the utility of the computer was instantly recognized and brought into offices as soon as practically possible.

You may be too young to remember, but that is definitely not true. During the 80's, the only use they could advertise computers to adults was "you can keep you recipies in it" and "you can do accounting". Heck, "there is a world market for about five computers" was a sentence aimed at business at some point.

Wait till the Marketing departments find a way to create the need on all those FB followers, with those "trendy lifestyle" ads.

[drzaiusapelord]

> "you can keep you recipies in it"

That's kinda BS revisionism. I'm an older guy and remember everyone losing their minds over games, BBS's, and such. The utility and acceptance was instant. And that's just the home market. In business they were on every desk well before we had that conversation.

And lets remember the 'grandma' factor was taken care of back then by moving off the CLI and memorized commands and onto a mouse-based WIMP graphical system. VR is like CLI and memorized commands. There's no way around strapping a giant screen on your face and all the negative aspects that entails.

[germinalphrase]

I've always found Skype/Facetime/etc. to be off-putting - if only because by looking at the person I'm talking to forces me to appear to look under them (looking at the screen vs looking the camera). During interviews, I make the conscious effort to look at the camera so as to present a more normal eye contact for my viewer, but this undercuts my ability to read their physical responses. If I had true-to-size representation of a person, either in VR or with a 2D screen, that allowed me to use natural eye contact and body language I would use it far more often.

[cr0sh]

> or with a 2D screen

Free potential idea?

Use the camera and a model to re-map the video image in such a way that it appears the person is looking at you, despite looking down (or wherever) when looking at your image on the screen...? Might have to use some kind of ML system or something to "fill in the missing details", or some other kind of graphics tricks to make it look somewhat proper...

[Stanleyc23]

anecdote: a week ago I tried to get on Skype with a coworker, he couldn't hear me. we hop on google handouts, now I can't hear him. we ended up just falling back to a phone call.

I don't find the life sized hologram thing to be that valuable. I would much rather all that money go into a zero-latency, high quality video/audio experience. life sized holograms don't solve this fundamental quality of communication issue.

am I just being a curmudgeon?

[sAbakumoff]

Reminded the good old-fashioned scene from HBO's Silicon Valley https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2prsYbV1TkM

[oliv__]

Yeah, this is so awkward. I don't get why no one has blended a camera into the middle of the screen already.

[swalsh]

I disagree with you. I work remotely, I've had a lot of brainstorming meetings... and they almost always suck, to me the holy grail of remote work would be VR. I really want to have a meeting in VR where I can stand at a whiteboard (or an even better VR version) and show my ideas. The traditional tools REALLY suck.

[vlunkr]

How does VR improve that? As opposed to some other form of virtual whiteboard.

[TuringTest]

Laying objects and documents in 3D space is way more expressive than on a flat screen.

[sdflkd]

Young people don't use Skype anymore.

[return0]

I thought VR had already flopped, but it seems they want to keep beating that horse for a few more years.