[mattnewport]

Ah, ok, yeah that wasn't clear to me from the articles I saw, it sounded like desktop sharing. I went to the BigScreen talk at Oculus Connect and yeah it's pretty clear that their focus at the moment is on people watching video content together in VR but we have used it with some success for code reviews (desktop sharing is key there, I can jump between Visual Studio and the Unity Editor).

Your keyboard sounds interesting and I'll have to check it out but to be honest it's not a big selling point for me as a touch typist: I don't have any trouble using my keyboard in VR. We do have some non touch typists on the team though and it's not always convenient to put your Touch controllers down to type so I can see it being useful.

My ideal VR collaboration app would support at least solid desktop sharing support, well implemented VR whiteboards (including annotation on the shared desktop) and 3D sketching like Quill / Tilt Brush. We use whiteboards and 3D sketching in Rec Room but they're quite primitive. The sketching doesn't have to match a dedicated sketching app but should be better than Rec Room.

It would also be useful to be able to easily import 3D assets for review, Dash support for GLTF is looking like a good implementation of that. Custom environments would also be useful for us so we could do collaborative design of environments for our own VR app.

[gfodor]

You should give Hubs a try, it's a WebVR based collaboration and communication tool we're working on at Mozilla. Screen sharing is behind a feature flag (and not quite working atm) but you can bring in GLTF models, images, and do simple 3d drawing. Also, by being the browser, it avoids a lot of the installation and coordination steps of native apps, and works on phone and PC.

https://hubs.mozilla.com

[idanb]

I was actually at that session as well! It was a bit surprising for me to hear that they're taking such a strong stance with regards to shared movie watching, but generally it's always felt that Bigscreen has been tuned for gamers / entertainment type use cases.

Totally hear you with regards to being comfortable touch typing while in VR, but I think that this is a pretty big barrier for a lot of users that are not as comfortable in VR. In our early experiences demoing Dream to people, we noticed just how overwhelming going into VR is for a lot of people that have had either no exposure, or very little to it. We used to have computer keyboard pass-thru, and this could be something that we add back as we continue to iterate and make the experience better.

In terms of desktop sharing - we used to have this capability, and it's still in the build but disabled. We pulled it back due to some inherent usability issues that we're working on as well as performance limits on low-end machines.

Annotation (whiteboarding on shared content or a white screen) is next up on our road map, we just didn't have sufficient time to get it into the initial release - so excited to hear that's something you would be looking for. Similarly, 3D model import / review is something that we're about to tackle as well. One of the big things we're excited about exploring is actually using chromium to do this vs. forcing every client to download what could be a big file, or push performance limitations on a varied set of machines. Instead, we'd find a way to utilize WebRTC to stream the content in a way that provides a 3D review experience for all clients with no performance limit.

On environments, we agree as well - right now we have one environment, and have 2 others in the pipeline. In the future, it'd be great to allow for 360 stereo videos to be used as the environment or allow teams to customize their environments if they've got the in house capabilities to do so!

Thanks for the feedback, and hope you get a chance to try Dream out a bit and give us some hands on experience if you get a minute a well!

[blazespin]

I've always thought that conferences / education / seminars was the big sell here. Productivity didn't seem like a starter, simply because work is such a cultural thing with all of its own stresses and getting people to adopt these new techniques is like pulling teeth. Students and conference goers who want to save on the extremely big bucks that travel and classrooms and conference halls can cost will see this as a huge win.

Also, the isolated / focused environment of VR could be a big plus for learning as it blocks out so many distractions. I'd love to see a study done around that.

[idanb]

I'm also extremely excited about education applications for VR, especially those that benefit from real time communication. For example, learning a foreign language from a tutor that lives in the origin country of that language - and being able to interact with them naturally, including the various nonverbal cues that are crucial when learning a new language in the same location as someone that has it mastered.

At a slightly higher level, I think VR can unlock a lot of "centralization of expertise" type use cases. Basically, there's some resource that is distributed normally but is required to be centralized due to the way that expertise is consumed. For example, things like call centers, or tutoring - if those people could instead operate from wherever they might be located while providing their expertise to customers wherever they may be located, this could be super useful for both providers of said expertise as well as the consumers of it.

Definitely excited to see what kind of things applications like Dream can enable!