Joining a meeting right now is as easy as clicking on 'join' on your phone or laptop. I can then see everyone in the meeting and they can see my facial expressions etc. VR doesn't add anything useful and removes a lot of social cues visible on video (or in person). I don't see why I'd accept employees joining a meeting using an avatar instead of showing up 'in person' (on video).
You're arguing about the experience today, not what it could be. I definitely don't want avatars.
I want this meeting to have higher immersion representations of the rest of the people in the meeting than boxes on a screen. I want to be able to shift my view to focus more on individuals. I want to be able to have a meeting with 40 people where I could still focus on a single person and see them with high-fidelity, instead of just having 20 of the boxes at low-res in front of me, with the rest off-screen. I want less eyestrain because I'm not just staring at a flat wall but my eyes are moving and shifting and re-focusing more. I want to have depth to things. I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody. All things I could do in the real world, but would be very hard to make seamless without a real-world interaction model.
Again, we clearly aren't there yet. But it's easy to imagine something better than what we have today.
How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.
>I want the ability to have a quiet side convo off to the side. I want the ability to write on a whiteboard off to the side that people can look at when they want instead of taking-over the entire viewport for everybody.
None of this requires VR and is available in, for example, Jitsi video chats.
My standard for the future (10+ years out) is "if i have to hit the keyboard or click the mouse it's failed." In that case I'll definitely still want to go back to in-person collaboration.
> How are you going to wear a headset without compromising face to face video? I can't even imagine a theoretical solution and not a single company is working on this problem. Am I wrong? Obviously on a very long timeline you can solve this problem but the next 5 years? No way.
My best guess of what this would look like would be much closer to glasses than a full headset (no "sticking" to the face) with very good ultra-wide cameras + image processing to capture your face and upper body language at the same time. Maybe toss in a desktop-mounted webcam too. Not 100% immersed/blackout, but quite possibly good enough to be better than a flat monitor with also isn't 100% of your FOV.
Video chats drop body language, natural speaking cues, reduces the quality of group conversations and more. VR even with some of the tech today restores a bit of that and gives the feeling of presence. I'm excited to see where we're at with it in 10 years, I agree that today we're not there.
