I've had a course about social media last year (analyses of
communication via social media, not the marketing kind) that talked a lot about the problems with online human-human communication and how VR might be able to solve these problems.
Physical space has social meanings.
We use space to structure how we start conversations,
to show our engagement with our partner, to show our openness to engage with others. Think of the formations you form at parties, and how you know as outsider if you can join a conversation or not.
You also have the important of gaze. Eye gaze is not only an outward expression of an emotion, it is used as a communicative device – as a tool to interact with others. People turn towards to each other to make eye contact and initiate a conversation.
Both space and gaze have so far been missing in online social media. This is the positive value for better communication you add to social media with VR. It's very exciting to see this development already going so fast.
It saddens me though that it seems Facebook is the company making the first steps into this future. This cynic in me says Facebook only develops this to have more ways to manipulate people in seeing ads and other forms of commercial persuasive communication. Tupperware parties 2.0.
"You also have the important of gaze. Eye gaze is not only an outward expression of an emotion, it is used as a communicative device – as a tool to interact with others. People turn towards to each other to make eye contact and initiate a conversation."
It will be interesting to see physical body cues (or body language) become "photoshopped", as it were.
At the most basic level, one could simply record oneself saying something really genuine and honest, and then replay the resulting body language when lying to someone in VR.
Many more subtle body cues could also be either recorded/replayed or simulated.
In the physical world people often seek to look in to each other's eyes to determine whether the other person is lying or has something to hide. In VR, of course, what the eyes express will be entirely under the conscious control of their operator.
It will be interesting to see how human interaction in VR changes as a result of these expanded possibilities, which will not be limited by the muscles of the human face, or even the limits of human shape, or physics.
Many new ways of expression are likely to occur in VR in the future. One could argue that this is really not that new, as such things are possible in, say, Second Life, or many MMORPGs today, or even that things like the use of emoticons in text chats are an early instance of this. But I expect VR has the potential to take this to the next level, and seeing where that leads in one or two hundred years would be pretty interesting.
Well they're not the only ones trying towards this. See what we're doing at Mimesys by using depth cams to stream people in 3D in the world. See the vision we have for Skype in AR in a few years : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P37DVcPHGNY
I agree with you that the importance of physical space is something we realize more and more every day building Mimesys ; that would where VR could lead to new representations of information (see for instance Bret Victor's insights on the topic : https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fvimeo.com%2F115...)
There will be ways to collaborate and share information, even remotely, that will go far beyond the casual whiteboard
One aspect, and I sure many already realize this, is it seems FAR more simple and natural to be able to communicate via text/chat/forums etc when you have had physical interactions with them outside the computer and are already comfortable talking to one another - aside from groups of friends who have never met. It have spent a great deal of time doing something together of common interests...
Like gaming together or sharing whatever on IRC or Reddit or some such.
If you're trying to randomly talk to a new person with not a common-ground of topic interest it's easy to see how visual cues and body language feel like they are truly lacking.
Also the problem with VR is on any other platform I'm not consuming my entire field of view and immersing myself... so I can't keep a periferal view of my child to make sure she doesn't help her self to yet another yogurt in the fridge among the the many other thousand of small perceptions we need to make about our environment around us....
Indeed, I think it's very what is lacking (online empathy) and I am glad that VR is intended to address some of the challenges we currently have with online communication.
Main problem is multiple people starting to talk at once. VR could help but also school system where you have to signal if you want to talk and the head of the meeting gives you the voice could help.
Surprisingly there's no real pressure to introduce any solution
I wonder about how eye contact will function in VR - cameras inside the goggles tracking eye direction? I suspect that eye contact is the kind of problem without a lot of room for error. Get it only slightly wrong and the effect could be very disconcerting.
I'd bet on cartoonish, stylized avatars being the most successful (at least initially). Cartoons work for a reason, we're very good at taking a cue and filling in the blanks. But the more information an image carries the deeper you go into the uncanny valley. For realistic VR avatars to catch on, they'd need to be nearly perfect.
Michael Abrash gave a great talk later in the presentation about future directions in VR. He talked about retina tracking in the context of foveated rendering, which he said has a higher accuracy requirement than avatar eye direction. He seemed confident we'll get there.
I agree with everything you've said, including the negative sentiment towards Facebook, but they aren't the first. There are actually several social VR apps out and/or in the works right now, perhaps the most popular of which is AltspaceVR.
Placing a video call from the outside world into VR is pretty amazing.
Besides that, you can do many of the things demoed even now on AltspaceVR. I tested it out for a few nights, and turns out hanging around in an interactive VR space with random strangers is ruined by trolls and people constantly quitting and joining. We never got successfully through an entire game of "Cards Against Humanity".
Another interesting one was vTime, which focuses more on chatting. You can move your head around and sit around virtual spaces with others, but you cannot move. That felt much like grabbing coffee in real life with someone and we got into deeper conversations this way. I would rate it as perhaps the most interesting experience I had before selling my Oculus to wait another year or two to see things improve.
Being able to place a video call from the outside world into VR is pretty amazing.
Youtube and twitch are capable of doing the conference call equivalent, streaming live video of content that doesn't actually exist, such as a video game, to a video receiving device. The ability to dynamically create live video is more than a few years old, even in live chat systems, from the capability to alter the background behind you while you video chat, to being able to wear virtual hats.
There's a lot in here that is interesting, but so much of it is a different form factor and UI/UX on technology that already exists.
You're saying it's just a user experience shift, but that's exactly what the comment you're responding to is saying. User experience changes can be earth-shattering.
I remember back when Skype first launched. Very few of us were using it (few hundred, maybe a thousand?). Many of us were just calling people randomly, myself included. Trolls weren't even a thing yet thank god, and all of us early adopters were very pleasant with each other.
Oh man I have great memories of that. I made friends with some girl in California and we spent hours talking to an old man in South Africa who had hunted lions when he was younger! It really made the world feel small and we felt special. It's really hard to find connections like that. Spending a little bit of time in AltspaceVR did sort of feel like this. Within a few minutes I was talking to some kid about his life and how he was feeling that day. I hope we can preserve these anonymous experiences without trolls ruining everything. In Second Life there was gating and banning (so there would be a private owned 'night club' that you could be kicked out of, you'd literally be launched away) which seemed fairly effective. 100% public spaces with no policing don't seem to work online, unfortunately.
I tested it out for a few nights, and turns out hanging around in an interactive VR space with random strangers is ruined by trolls and people constantly quitting and joining.
I can't help but wonder what the revelations about Palmer Lucky's ties to racist "shitposting" brigades bode for the future of collaborative VR spaces. I guess at least this time we know we're wading into a cesspool, all utopian forecasting aside.
Is there some relationship between technology and the people who make it that isn't evident to normal senses? Perhaps something that would carry this taint you call out? I don't find myself noticing the politics of the people who make the things I use, but I admit to having a low amount of worry for moral standing.
Does anyone remember Playstation Home. A social 3D environment with in-world purchases, in-world movies, etc.?
The experience were similar. People discovery was hard.
Yes, it was really fun, just running around the square and having conversations with strangers. I loved my Playstation 3, but Sony took away all the things I loved about it, one-by-one:
1. Folding at home. I loved letting it run and getting points and looking at the cool night time map of the world with all the yellow dots showing others running Folding at home. I felt like part of something!
2. Playstation Home went away
3. The ability to install Linux went away. There's a class action lawsuit, if I join I could get $7. Wheee.
4. They sent a firmware update that bricked it. I was never able to recover it.
I've had a great time playing with groups in BigScreen (Beta). I spent three hours playing with a free to plat smash bros style game within big screen beta. It felt like I was back in college but my roommates were from Estonia, England, and Michigan.
The whole demonstration seemed very synthetic and not really that impressive to be honest (The position detection for hands seemed a bit low res, facial expressions seemed like something out of a 2006 webcam to cartoon-avatar app.
They are working with what they have. There are no face cameras or anything like that in Oculus Rift, so the expressions are literally "gestures", from what I've read. You raise your hands, your avatar is "happy", you wave your head, your avatar is "sad" etc.
This should change in next generations of VR helmets.
AltspaceVR can do hands with LEAP Motion, yet weirdly feels way less natural than the type of control you get with VIVE controllers.
Purely optical tracking just doesn't seem do it for now, since there are all types of occlusions happening. Maybe something like LEAP with multiple sensors in the room that are able to reconstruct the whole skeletal model up to digits and facial expression (minus eyes, which obviously have to be captured in headset if needed). Currently that is possible with the perception neuron, which is not really fit for casual use based on price (+ USD 1500) and setup time.
I did not get it, what is the use case for having all these things? I can take a selfi of my virtual me and share it to facebook? Is this something that customers would want to do?
Conference calls. Team Meetings. Seeing your family when travelings. Playing games with kids. Lots of use cases. Live concerts. FB 3.0. Online Gaming. Virtual Amusement Parks. Doctor Visits. Online Shopping.
I think two major things social VR and this demo highlight:
1) The amount of things you can do in VR is more expansive than any medium before. Video conferences for the most part is used to catch up or transfer information faster (or at least that's how I use it, to catch up with friends/business who are far away). However, it's tougher to use video chats to build NEW experiences, and I can only really think of Google Hangouts and playing something like WarLight/editing a doc that does that. Humans for the most part build better relationships when both parties have shared experiences, and in VR you can actually do a lot of things that you could in real life. This is why it's so different from just "videoconferencing"
2) It finds a balance in anonymity and not having to commit 100% to a conversation. For example, when you video conference you have to pay more attention/be more aware of how you're acting, which explains why many times we choose to have text convos rather than just calling the other person. In social VR you're just an avatar so you don't have to care as much about your appearance/interaction/subtle facial expressions etc. The outward behavioral bar is lower so you can relax and enjoy the environment even more.
VR is a powerful medium because it addresses the above two points - you don't have to be as concerned about your appearance/interaction when you're an avatar AND you can actually do more tangible things in VR to actually BUILD better relationships.
> And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair- checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.
> ...
> The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.
Thanks for sharing this. It's always great to reread DFW. He had such extraordinary prescience about so many things.
Another bit of gold from that excerpt:
> First there’s some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has certain un- foreseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people’s stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations’ own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another’s TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end’s Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn’t have to exert.
I agree, but there are different types of commitment. There's commitment in terms of time, energy, emotion, attention, etc.
While VR provides anonymity (taking away some emotional commitment of human expression/emotion), the actual shared experiences you're doing is more powerful than any other medium and is pushing on the multiple other levers of commitment such as time, energy, attention, etc.
So VR is creating better relationships through commitments of multiple type and strength.
Social VR is what second life has been doing for 15 years. I have anecdotally surveyed a few users and none of them was sold on VR. It's fun for the first day, but between being expressionally and physically limited and getting nauseous, none of them found it pleasant enough for long-term use. Virtual worlds are having a rennaisance nowadays, with many new companies springing up. Personally , i am not sold on the future of VR-goggles at all.
Why judge on the limitations of first gen hardware? How many nascent technologies and industries would have been dismissed if we'd done that? Or is it the possibility of creating a fully immersive new medium for creative expression, potentially a new artificial substrate of reality, that doesn't excite you?
uh... We're easily on 3rd-4th gen hardware at this point.
1st gen: Those VR stations that used to be in malls
2nd gen: Shitty headsets you could attach to a genesis/snes
3rd gen: Occulus (you may be considering this first gen?)
4th gen: vive/fove/[Sony/Samsung/Google]VR
Almost daily I do Skype calls most of them are video calls. Most of the times I have several people in the room who still can continue to communicate directly without and technical intermediary. In addition you can write down notifications, doodle, multi-task.
For games, I used to play doom in vr in 1997 and after 5 min the whole looking around thing gets stale and you just want to sit down and relax on the couch/chair. See Wiimote.
In a lot of ways, you're not wrong. I am a huge VR enthusiast and I admit that it's been more than once I've said to myself "Man, I really want to play VR but I just want to sit down" after a long day at work.
Thankfully, for these cases, I've got EVE: Valkyrie, which is a sit-down experience. Looking around is required as you are flying a ship in 6-degrees-of-freedom.
But imagine if all of your doodle and multi-tasking can be virtual. The promise of VR is you can video conference, multi-task, and doodle with many virtual apps all at once. Or with other people. Of course the problem with that is that paper is often a better medium.
If that will be good or not is a question of the user interface. I regularly sit in multi-nation phone conferences. And while there are many collaboration tools we mainly still use a simple Excel sheet via screen share to track things. Why? This abstraction layer works with most business users. In addition, in Asia internet connectivity over several countries is not good so that is the least expensive communication method in terms of bandwidth.
Why are there so much negativity? I thought the people here are supposed to be more visionary. We are one step ahead in the future than other people. Avatar with your facial expressions. This is huge and innovative. It will not be limited to just game players or geeks. Common people will be drawn to this.
Well as a long time deliberately non Facebook account holder for many reasons of my own, I can say I found this compelling. Partly because I bought an Oculus dev kit several years ago and was quite impressed with it at even that stage and I'm very excited to seee resources being devoted to a technology I would like to see in common use as soon as possible, especially for these basic productivity tasks.
I hate to admit that I sympathize with the slightly critical comments, I was left with a feeling of "really, that's it?" from the demo. I think it's just a case of managing expectations though, I would have been impressed if this was done by a couple of college kids, but I thought that FB was betting big on VR and was going to wow everyone with something new.
I'm probably just being ignorant and not appreciating the amount of effort that went into the app.
I loved the demo, thought it was well thought out and impressive. However I would not want to use it on a regular basis and cannot see many people being that interested in purchasing a VR setup. I think VR outside of gaming is limited appeal and only AR will offer any mass appeal as long as it is portable and discrete.
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Physical space has social meanings. We use space to structure how we start conversations, to show our engagement with our partner, to show our openness to engage with others. Think of the formations you form at parties, and how you know as outsider if you can join a conversation or not.
You also have the important of gaze. Eye gaze is not only an outward expression of an emotion, it is used as a communicative device – as a tool to interact with others. People turn towards to each other to make eye contact and initiate a conversation.
Both space and gaze have so far been missing in online social media. This is the positive value for better communication you add to social media with VR. It's very exciting to see this development already going so fast.
It saddens me though that it seems Facebook is the company making the first steps into this future. This cynic in me says Facebook only develops this to have more ways to manipulate people in seeing ads and other forms of commercial persuasive communication. Tupperware parties 2.0.
It will be interesting to see physical body cues (or body language) become "photoshopped", as it were.
At the most basic level, one could simply record oneself saying something really genuine and honest, and then replay the resulting body language when lying to someone in VR.
Many more subtle body cues could also be either recorded/replayed or simulated.
In the physical world people often seek to look in to each other's eyes to determine whether the other person is lying or has something to hide. In VR, of course, what the eyes express will be entirely under the conscious control of their operator.
It will be interesting to see how human interaction in VR changes as a result of these expanded possibilities, which will not be limited by the muscles of the human face, or even the limits of human shape, or physics.
Many new ways of expression are likely to occur in VR in the future. One could argue that this is really not that new, as such things are possible in, say, Second Life, or many MMORPGs today, or even that things like the use of emoticons in text chats are an early instance of this. But I expect VR has the potential to take this to the next level, and seeing where that leads in one or two hundred years would be pretty interesting.
Don't forget that last part.
Like gaming together or sharing whatever on IRC or Reddit or some such.
If you're trying to randomly talk to a new person with not a common-ground of topic interest it's easy to see how visual cues and body language feel like they are truly lacking.
Also the problem with VR is on any other platform I'm not consuming my entire field of view and immersing myself... so I can't keep a periferal view of my child to make sure she doesn't help her self to yet another yogurt in the fridge among the the many other thousand of small perceptions we need to make about our environment around us....
Indeed, I think it's very what is lacking (online empathy) and I am glad that VR is intended to address some of the challenges we currently have with online communication.
Surprisingly there's no real pressure to introduce any solution
I'd bet on cartoonish, stylized avatars being the most successful (at least initially). Cartoons work for a reason, we're very good at taking a cue and filling in the blanks. But the more information an image carries the deeper you go into the uncanny valley. For realistic VR avatars to catch on, they'd need to be nearly perfect.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv_eIRv1Vk4
Besides that, you can do many of the things demoed even now on AltspaceVR. I tested it out for a few nights, and turns out hanging around in an interactive VR space with random strangers is ruined by trolls and people constantly quitting and joining. We never got successfully through an entire game of "Cards Against Humanity".
Another interesting one was vTime, which focuses more on chatting. You can move your head around and sit around virtual spaces with others, but you cannot move. That felt much like grabbing coffee in real life with someone and we got into deeper conversations this way. I would rate it as perhaps the most interesting experience I had before selling my Oculus to wait another year or two to see things improve.
Youtube and twitch are capable of doing the conference call equivalent, streaming live video of content that doesn't actually exist, such as a video game, to a video receiving device. The ability to dynamically create live video is more than a few years old, even in live chat systems, from the capability to alter the background behind you while you video chat, to being able to wear virtual hats.
There's a lot in here that is interesting, but so much of it is a different form factor and UI/UX on technology that already exists.
I can't help but wonder what the revelations about Palmer Lucky's ties to racist "shitposting" brigades bode for the future of collaborative VR spaces. I guess at least this time we know we're wading into a cesspool, all utopian forecasting aside.
1. Folding at home. I loved letting it run and getting points and looking at the cool night time map of the world with all the yellow dots showing others running Folding at home. I felt like part of something!
2. Playstation Home went away
3. The ability to install Linux went away. There's a class action lawsuit, if I join I could get $7. Wheee.
4. They sent a firmware update that bricked it. I was never able to recover it.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/457550/
Try it out. The rooms are smaller so less people jumping in and out.
This should change in next generations of VR helmets.
[1] http://www.veeso.com/
Purely optical tracking just doesn't seem do it for now, since there are all types of occlusions happening. Maybe something like LEAP with multiple sensors in the room that are able to reconstruct the whole skeletal model up to digits and facial expression (minus eyes, which obviously have to be captured in headset if needed). Currently that is possible with the perception neuron, which is not really fit for casual use based on price (+ USD 1500) and setup time.
http://altvr.com/full-body-mocap-in-vr/
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1) The amount of things you can do in VR is more expansive than any medium before. Video conferences for the most part is used to catch up or transfer information faster (or at least that's how I use it, to catch up with friends/business who are far away). However, it's tougher to use video chats to build NEW experiences, and I can only really think of Google Hangouts and playing something like WarLight/editing a doc that does that. Humans for the most part build better relationships when both parties have shared experiences, and in VR you can actually do a lot of things that you could in real life. This is why it's so different from just "videoconferencing"
2) It finds a balance in anonymity and not having to commit 100% to a conversation. For example, when you video conference you have to pay more attention/be more aware of how you're acting, which explains why many times we choose to have text convos rather than just calling the other person. In social VR you're just an avatar so you don't have to care as much about your appearance/interaction/subtle facial expressions etc. The outward behavioral bar is lower so you can relax and enjoy the environment even more.
VR is a powerful medium because it addresses the above two points - you don't have to be as concerned about your appearance/interaction when you're an avatar AND you can actually do more tangible things in VR to actually BUILD better relationships.
On the Rise and Fall of the Videophone:
> And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair- checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.
> ...
> The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.
Full Excerpt from Infinite Jest: http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527
Another bit of gold from that excerpt:
> First there’s some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has certain un- foreseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people’s stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations’ own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another’s TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end’s Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn’t have to exert.
We know that IRL we can be in physical proximity with one another, but perhaps it's the joint commitment to the experience that builds the meaning.
Better relationships probably are built on more commitment, not less.
While VR provides anonymity (taking away some emotional commitment of human expression/emotion), the actual shared experiences you're doing is more powerful than any other medium and is pushing on the multiple other levers of commitment such as time, energy, attention, etc.
So VR is creating better relationships through commitments of multiple type and strength.
1st gen: Those VR stations that used to be in malls 2nd gen: Shitty headsets you could attach to a genesis/snes 3rd gen: Occulus (you may be considering this first gen?) 4th gen: vive/fove/[Sony/Samsung/Google]VR
How long ago was this? VR advances very quickly.
Almost daily I do Skype calls most of them are video calls. Most of the times I have several people in the room who still can continue to communicate directly without and technical intermediary. In addition you can write down notifications, doodle, multi-task.
For games, I used to play doom in vr in 1997 and after 5 min the whole looking around thing gets stale and you just want to sit down and relax on the couch/chair. See Wiimote.
Thankfully, for these cases, I've got EVE: Valkyrie, which is a sit-down experience. Looking around is required as you are flying a ship in 6-degrees-of-freedom.
I'm not sure what the solution is.
I'm probably just being ignorant and not appreciating the amount of effort that went into the app.
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