And they weren’t as popular then. They also were unobtrusive in the ways that matter - you could walk around and talk while doing other things. David Foster Wallace has a whole thing on this in IJ that really captures it well, where even corded phones are really better than we give credit because they give you freedom and privacy. You can do chores, look in the mirror, and signal to people in the room all while talking.
If anything I think things move more towards Slack Huddle where you retain your freedom of movement in favor of just voice + screen. It’s an anachronistic pov to try and force real world into virtual so literally.
It’s just a very SV thing to ignore all the social and emotional needs and just look at “oh it’s higher fidelity” or whatever. If it was all about immersion people would carry iPads around, but they don’t.
The difference in asking someone to give 10% of their vision to a TV or phone screen that can be turned away from with 0 effort, vs giving 100% of their vision, with considerable effort to enter and leave, is so under appreciated.
I don't think you've spent enough time learning about the technology or the goals of its proponents to argue against it. You're starting to veer off into strawman territory. Most VR proponents see two big use cases: immersive entertainment and augmented reality.
Immersive entertainment will demand 100% of your attention but you will want to give it 100% because there is no other way to have such a deep experience otherwise. Watching a movie or playing a game on a screen is fine but it doesn't give you the same visceral reactions that you have with even the simplest VR experiences like standing on a ledge 10 stories up or killing an NPC in melee combat. Both feel real and the second one can be quite disturbing the first time you do it even though the graphics are still low res. I've never experienced anything that even came close through a normal screen
Augmented reality will be unobtrusive and only demand part of your attention. It will be additive to the world around you and it will replace the phone in your pocket along with thousands of other things. This technology is still a long ways off but we're already building the bridge to it with mixed reality and high-res passthrough.
I don’t think you have the capability to understand this thread.
I’m talking about virtual meetings specifically, and then adding a note about why it’ll never be generally popular like we see smartphones only because someone replied with that.
I’ve used VR and whatever joke AR exists (the MS headset) extensively and I don’t need to be familiar with “proponents” to make any argument whatsoever.
VR will be cool for sunset of gaming, some may like it for work. Meetings not so much. AR doesn’t even really exist and no passthrough doesn’t count at least not this decade.
Hey man, I wasn't trying to start a fight so reel it in a bit. If you don't like VR personally, that's fine but I don't think your personal experience generalizes to everyone.
I'm perfectly happy admitting that VR will remain niche for quite some time, just like cellphones did and pretty much for the same reasons: size, cost, battery life, cold start of a tech that requires network effects to grow, and social acceptability of use in public spaces. Similar cycles played a factor in the adoption of home computers and the internet, it takes a while for new technology to get off the ground and the initial versions of it are always clunky and unergonomic compared to later revisions that take into account knowledge gained by building and deploying the naive and constrained design.
VR headsets won't always look like they do now, that can be guaranteed as long as technological progress continues. We can argue about the timeline but I admit that no one can predict the future so what's the point. I do think VR will matter for meetings and social activities, there's a huge market consisting of people who live far away from their loved ones or who lose touch with friends after a move. As the technology and UX improve it will become more common to visit someone in VR instead of calling them occasionally. I did say AR doesn't exist and that what we have right now is MR (Mixed Reality) which involves passthrough. I don't even know what sunset of gaming means, it sounds as non-sensical as sunset of movies or sunset of radio to me.
While phones now are "simple, unobtrusive and easy to position and use contextually", they certainly weren't then.