Runs with OK framerates in a browser on an old imac from 2014. Some obvious UX issues with very fiddly controls. Teleport barely works for example. Nice as a proof of concept; probably useless for anything else.

I was listening to Lex Friedman's interview with Mark Zuckerberg a few days ago. Like most people I have my reservations about Facebook and their strategy with Meta but it was insightful nonetheless. For me a few key takeaway was that a VR environment might be useful because zoom/meets/etc. calls actually kind of suck.

Zoom calls have a lot of issues and limitation. Only 1 person can speak at the time. You kind of have a lot of people looking in random directions so there isn't really any eye contact and it's actually hard to interact with people non verbally. Can they see you? If so, are they even looking at you?. Also, it doesn't really scale to large groups of people; for that it basically reduces to a live video feed that has zero interaction (most online conferences are like that). And when people share their screen to show a presentation or whatever, they kind of necessarily are looking at whatever they are presenting rather than the video of other people.

What Zuckerberg talked about were actually kind of neat features.

- you can have side conversations elsewhere in the space and "vote with your feet"

- your avatar is primitive but has enough interactivity that it could show your hands, which might be good enough to give you some notion of physical presence that you simply don't have with a zoom call.

- there's a notion of standing around something and talking about that thing. That might be an image, an object, a video, or whatever but it's different from sharing your screen and then promptly not being able to see the audience anymore. You can point at things, draw attention, etc.

- spatial audio helps people figure out where sound comes from and who is trying to say something.

- you have a notion of looking at someone or something and standing close to them.

So, I can see how that would be an improvement over a zoom call. Yet I don't think vr meetings are a very compelling use case though that will get a lot of people excited. Fundamentally, it's overkill for having a meeting and you always have people with bad connections, or joining on a phone or simply doing other stuff while they listen in. I guess it would be nice to have the option. But it would have to be opt-in and multi modal. Additionally, many meetings are quite serious and have topics that just aren't even meant to be fun, and involve people that are quite stressed or even angry. Having them appear as some silly avatar in some silly environment is probably not going to help improve these people's mood. Imagine having a performance review with your boss parading around as Donald Duck not giving you a raise. Probably would be a bit tone deaf. Great material for Ricky Gervais to do something with though.

I think the main issue is that VR/AR are cool and all and as soon as we call it a game it becomes actually compelling because then there is something to actually do and be busy with that people actually choose to do. However, having meetings and looking at somebody droning on about some spreadsheet or presentation while hopping around as a duck avatar in some hellscape virtual office type environment that you can't escape from is probably not that compelling/engaging/exciting. Nice the first time, but gets old pretty quickly. Video off, mute on is a popular setting with a lot of zoom calls for a good reason. Kind of frees you up to do more interesting things. Some would consider that an upgrade over sitting for hours in some stuffy meeting room having to listen people talk about all sorts of really boring shit. Haven't done that in years and I don't miss it.