[jarcane]

I have to ask: Who the hell is any of this for?

Simula, Facebook's virtual office meetings, all of this virtual office stuff ... ISTR we loudly declared the death of skeumorphism and yet here we are. "Put this dumb thing on your head just to have an office call" is such a bizarre over-correction to something, and I can't figure what it is. Are some people just really not coping with the shift to remote-first work life?

Who would actually want to do this? What benefit does this provide me over just ... having an extra monitor? Is this just throwing cash after a fad?

[saladuh]

It has literally nothing to do with the metaverse or virtual offices. It's a productivity device. While I don't think it's something I want, plenty of people like the idea of having 6+ monitors which take up the space of less than one (at the expense of having to wear it on your face). They're also marketing it as being useful for remote work, so instead of taking your laptop with you with one screen, you take this headset and you've got your whole multi monitor desktop with you. Bit more clunky because you need to carry a separate mouse + keyboard (keeb with a trackball/trackpad on it), but for certain people that's worth it.

[jarcane]

I know some of those people with 6+ hi-res monitors and a huge part of the appeal has to do with how much screen space you get out of that many screens, and I see nothing of this tech that gets anywhere close to what any of their setups can do, for the simple reason that VR headsets just don't have the resolution.

Have you ever tried to browse the web on a headset? I have. Even with the highest resolution available it was still a dismal, squinty experience, and actually trying to so much as type a URL was an exercise in frustration.

[georgewsinger]

One of the founders of Simula here. Thank you for your comment.

We're about to update our website (www.simulavr.com) with pictures of our prototype, pricing information, and a blog.

The first blog post's working title is "We don’t want to socialize in a Metaverse; we just want a productive VR computer". Here's a draft of it: https://gist.github.com/georgewsinger/611767c7a5dd63a12f1d93...

TLDR: The Metaverse is jamming VR through the framing of "giant social network". Maybe this isn't entirely bad, but to us what's exciting about the technology is its potential as a "Tool for Thought", or something which can help us create new things and get more stuff done in ways previously unimaginable.

[barnabee]

Me.

I want all of it (except the bit where any of it comes from Facebo^H^H^H^H^H^H Meta.

I am convinced AR/VR will eventually give a miles better working experience than PCs. Even sooner for mobile where you're severely limited in screen real estate already. It's nearly there now. Can't imagine it'll be more than 2 years.

I am convinced that group audio/video calls are a totally different (and usually much inferior) experience to face to face meetings, even with the best 2D collaboration tools, and that VR/AR can and will (does already, to an extent) make remote face to face meetings possible for the first time. I have had some great meetings in Walkabout Mini Golf on the Quest 2 — try it! Sometimes being together is what counts, and after a while it really does _begin_ to feel that way.

Even if it were only equal in experience, a desktop class experience in AR/VR will soon take up way less space than the smallest useful laptop and have all the screen space I get when sat at home. I love to travel. This will be great!

And that's not to mention games (VR "toys" already often feel more immersive and compelling than most AAA games to me — on a $250 all-in-one headset that costs less than a Nintendo switch), media (ever tried watching a movie or live sport with friends in BigScreen? …it's great!), etc.

I expect a lot of people will be really surprised how far this goes in the next few years, as costs come down and hardware shrinks. A lot of people get surprised by every new tech…

[GekkePrutser]

I think the paradigm of floating windows could be liberating. Right now we're tied to physical screens and their positioning. I think you shouldn't view working in VR within the constraints of the existing paradigms like a 'desktop'. That concept doesn't really work in VR. I see much more in free-floating windows, probably with different depths as well.

After all the 'desktop' itself was a transitional paradigm for the office workers that came before the age of the computer. It simulates a messy desk. We're taking yet another step away from this and it doesn't make sense to hold on to these concepts.

I think if we liberate ourselves from these artifical constraints and go back to the drawing board, we could come up with something great. I was thinking about a virtual brainstorming room where you could hang up scraps and connect them. A bit like the serial killers do in movies :D But without the killing though ;)

I've also done detailed trials with VR meeting software for work and I have to say, they're on to something. It feels way more like actually meeting people than it does staring at a bunch of choppy videos in Teams.

And I was always a fan of skeuomorphism by the way... I think computers have become really boring with the flat design phase. Even though I agree it holds us back, there were ways in which it would really shine. Like turning a page in iBooks. It was beautiful and intuitive. When done in a minimalistic way it can work well. It's just when it becomes overblown (like iOS Notes and Game Center) that it becomes a burden.

[XorNot]

Yeah, the real magic is being able to bring a lot of the conventions of my actual desk into the virtual world in a more useful form.

The idea of a whiteboard can go away and be replaced with a 3D structure I can walk/zoom through - which for complicated systems design is actually a much better solution anyway (short version: you basically never need to have linking lines overlapping or colliding).

My desk can then basically go away - all I need is a chair with a keyboard support so I can spin around, and that means I don't need to dedicate a wall to "office space" at all.

Dashboards, alerts, "control centers" - all these things can be implemented in optimally efficient ways in a virtual office, shared amongst team mates, overlaid or augmented in different ways.

[mdp2021]

If the display is a "limited window" in your field of vision, instead of a surrounding environment like the natural one, the abstract idea of a virtual/abstract in-space office environment will probably not really work.

[GekkePrutser]

But why does the "office room" analogue even have to be there? It'll be nice to get people in on the idea just like the windows desktop was for traditional office workers. But we don't have to sit in a "room" in VR. The sky is the limit! :)

[mdp2021]

What I meant is that a narrow field of vision may make interfaces built on an idea of immersion not fully effective.

[GekkePrutser]

Ahh ok. Understood, but our peripheral vision is awful in terms of resolution anyway. And working with your eyes to the side is annoying, so we tend to turn our heads anyway.

Probably a bit more than we would in real life, due to the narrow FOV I agree.. But I think this will be resolved in newer-gen headsets. It looks like Pimax has already got this covered technically. Though I've never tried them, I wonder how well it works.

[indrax]

I look at this like Multimedia and the web in 1995. Yes some of this is a shadow of Microsoft Bob. We don't know what we're doing with VR yet but the technology has crossed over the line from being a toy or experiment. Skeuomorphism is a temporary workaround until we (users and designers both) learn what conventions are most powerful and port more applications to VR.

[roughly]

> the technology has crossed over the line from being a toy or experiment.

I agree with you generally, but I think the people who are big on this space are overstating this point in particular. The existing VR hardware still feels like a prototype of what will eventually "work" here. It's too big, too expensive, too low-resolution, and too dim, and it relies a lot on our brain's willingness to accept and accommodate sub-par imagery. Similar to the AR space, I genuinely do not believe that the technology we're building with has enough of a performance ceiling to get us where we want to be - I think that "LCD screens + funky optics" is getting us close enough to trial some VR experiences and play around with the interaction models, but I think it's got too many compromises (shitty resolution and no differential focus, among them) to really be the technology that takes us to the "promise land" here.