What's wrong with that? That meetings are necessary in modern working life is a fact. So might as well have products and services that make them better on some axes. And it doesn't necessarily have to be just office meetings either. University lectures or tutorials this way also sound pretty cool to me. You could have a student from Taiwan, the US, Germany and Sweden sit in the same classroom and interact, without having to travel thousands of miles. I think that's very cool.
The point is not that meetings are not a good application, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of useful productivity stuff beyond that.[1]
Also in person meetings are useful over a video call largely because there is lot of information from body language you can pick up being up close to someone. There is a lot of information on how someone breathes, moves or posture etc.
AFAIK there is no good VR solution that is able to solve that today. Even if there was enough cameras on you to pick up that level of detail , the bandwidth on transist across continents today or in next 15 years is not going to be available even for it make sense for businesses let alone regular users. VR as a replacement for zoom sure is interesting gimmick , but as replacement or equivalent to sitting next to each other we are atleast 2 decades away .
[1] real estate is only successful business application I have seen in the VR space
I keep reading about this multi billion army contract , I am sure the money is real, but whether it is actually effective remains to be proven.
> Also in person meetings are useful over a video call largely because there is lot of information from body language you can pick up being up close to someone. There is a lot of information on how someone breathes, moves or posture etc.
I keep hearing this but don't feel I've lost anything working fully remote for the last five years. Are there experiments proving that a call with high quality audio is so much worse in business than a physical meeting?
Perhaps I'm just not perceptive enough to pick up on all the nonverbal cues. Though even if so I think calls are more equitable and accessible.
It depends on the kind of work you do. Some roles doesn't require that much collaboration or discussions.
A senior developer/IC in a well run shop maybe requires to attend 1-2 meetings a day and can function efficiently for years without distractions of a work place.
However roles that require a lot of whiteboarding and brain storming simply don't work well remote on zoom. it is hard to share a meaningful simple white board, it is impossible to walk around and ideate .
Teaching a class of 20 in remote is hard. Teaching for me depends on my ability to see their eyes clearly to know see the light of understanding so to speak then changing my examples speed or approach to make sure most get the points. Many business meetings are also not that different. It is impossible for me to look at 10 boxes on a screen to do the same.
I have heard from sales professionals that without being near the customer it hard to judge what their interest levels are, what kind of discounts / packages to offer etc . Video chat simply doesn't give you the same inputs.
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When you share a public space with few others , by design the reduction in privacy also helps everyone learn and collaborate better, some just turn around for help and gets it in a minute, I look over a shoulder and see they are stuck and could use help .
Small ,informal and unstructured discussions is where lot of nuance is learnt. Slack doesn't replace this very well at all.
"...roles that require a lot of whiteboarding and brain storming simply don't work well remote on zoom"
Agreed. And the point about eye contact really extends to any remote exchange... though I believe it is particularly important in education (where we've supplanted a human-rich interaction with staring at files or tiny heads).
If I may be so bold, our team is working on a solution to both of these issues. By digitizing contents from physical/analog surfaces in real time, we're trying to encourage folks to keep the whiteboard (or blackboard or paper...). If you have the energy, would love some feedback: https://sharetheboard.com
The last in-person meeting I attended, I drew on a whiteboard, made exaggerated gestures with my hands to point to different parts of it, and established spatial metaphors by establishing one side of the room as the backend, and the other as the front-end.
When people asked me questions, they walked up to the whiteboard and pointed directly, and then scribbled on it to clarify. I felt a lot more connected when I was able to make direct eye contact and get backchannelling. Perhaps it was my perception, but I felt like it was a lot better for communication as a whole.
I'm sure you can replicate all of this stuff in Zoom or VR, but it sure is a lot more clunky and annoying.
Isn't this just the natural progression of technology? I don't understand how having a more effective way of communicating with remote coworkers is "dystopian".
