Gartner’s 2022 Emerging Technology Hype Cycle puts the metaverse at the very beginning of the “triggering innovation” phase of technology adoption, with a decade to come before the “productivity plateau” is not reached. However, recent news suggests that the “trough of disillusionment” is appearing sooner than expected.
Meta’s Reality Labs division reported an operating loss of $3.67 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 30, and losses of $9.44 billion for the previous nine months. Just two weeks after these worrying third quarter 2022 results, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced 11,000 layoffs across all divisions of Meta (about 13% of the workforce), citing “the macroeconomic slowdown, increased competition and loss of signal advertising”.
Despite this setback, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta remains committed to a small number of high-priority growth areas, including its “long-term vision for the metaverse.”
Immersive meetings, an identified use case
The metaverse, or at least Meta’s vision of it, is clearly proving to be expensive to build, and recent media coverage – including reports of sparsely populated virtual worlds, the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange , and legless avatars – took a bit more shine out of this much-vaunted component of Web3.
However, the metaverse technology adoption curve may actually follow the standard pattern, and immersive virtual meetings are an early use case.
With remote and hybrid working now well established, attention is turning to the issue of proximity bias, i.e. the idea that incumbent workers have disproportionate influence and experience greater career success. simply because they are more “present” in the workplace, including in meetings, than remote employees.
Video conferencing device vendors, such as Logitech and Owl Labs, are working to provide a more level playing field for remote participants in video meetings, but avatars (enhanced, with full bodies) interacting in spaces 3D virtual meeting rooms are soon a viable and more inclusive alternative.
To start, choose your version and build your avatar
Meta and Microsoft have been promoting this solution recently and others are sure to follow, but we decided to test hardware and software from a well-established vendor in this field: HTC.
The author, in avatar form and in real life. Screenshot: Charles McLellan/ZDNET
HTC’s virtual meeting app, Vive Sync was announced in November 2018. It received a boost in visibility at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic when it became available for free in beta. Now it is an integral part of HTC’s metaverse ecosystem.
Vive Sync offers a variety of virtual meeting spaces, including meeting rooms of various designs and sizes, a trio of auditoriums, as well as a sci-fi space, a scenic bayside location, and a cloud room.
You can host meetings from the Vive Sync website by copying the invite to share with other attendees, creating them from Sync on your headset, or scheduling them directly from your Outlook calendar with the add-on appropriate. From here, you can also upload various types of files to your meeting space, including 3D models, and upload screenshots and other files (such as audio recordings) created during your meetings.
Once you’ve created an HTC Account and set up your headset, you’ll need to choose your pricing. There are two versions. The first, Lite, is free: it limits you to five hours of hosted meetings per month, three participants and 500MB of storage per meeting room, and one 3D model uploaded and shared at a time.
The second full version costs $250 per user per year, or $30 per user per month (a 30-day free trial of the enterprise version is also available). It allows you to organize an unlimited number of hosted meetings, accommodate up to 30 participants, have 5 GB of storage space for meeting rooms, share multiple 3D models, save minutes audio in meetings and share a PC desktop and web browser. The comprehensive plan also lets you add custom branding to virtual meeting rooms and assign roles and permissions to attendees.
Besides using a PC or standalone VR headset, you can access Vive Sync meetings via desktop or laptop (Windows/MacOS), or smartphone or tablet (Android/iOS).
Finally, you will of course also need an avatar, via Vive Sync Avatar Creator, which is available for Android and iOS devices. You can base your avatar on an existing selfie or photo, and customize various settings to achieve a reasonable likeness.
Lots of features, for a fun first experience
HTC lent us two Vive Focus 3 headsets (including one with the new Facial Tracker plugin), so we had the bare minimum for a metaverse meeting. My ZDNET colleague, Steve Ranger, and I first found ourselves in a modern-looking meeting room with a garden and a mountainous landscape as a backdrop. We also found ourselves in a tropical-looking “ocean view” meeting space. The weather, naturally, was fine – no storms or natural disasters in this metaverse.
HTC’s Vive Focus 3 headset with the Facial Tracker, a mono camera that plugs into a USB-C port under the visor and captures your expressions. Images: Charles McLellan/ZDNET
You can move around the meeting space using the controller to turn around or teleport to another location, shake hands with other participants or congratulate them, and access a bunch of meeting tools from the menu Sync. Audio is spatial, so an avatar’s speech comes from the good part of virtual space. If necessary, you can mute your microphone, engage another avatar in a “private chat” that other participants won’t hear, or even designate a “safe zone” where other users’ voices can be muted and the plates hidden identifications.
In my Vive Focus 3 headset, the Facial Tracker was plugged into a USB-C port under the visor. This accessory contains a mono tracking camera which, according to HTC, “captures expressions through 38 blending shapes on the lips, jaw, cheeks, chin, teeth and tongue to accurately capture facial expressions and lifelike mouth movements on the avatars”. It certainly brings an improvement when it comes to expressing yourself, although we did notice a slightly disturbing backlight quality of the oral cavity at times.
The Vive Focus 3 with face tracker in action. Screenshot: Charles McLellan/ZDNET
The Sync menu offers a laser pointer as well as tools like pen, emoji, sticky notes, and camera. Text and images created during a meeting can be accessed later. The Sync menu also provides access to files, a web browser, your PC desktop (if you’re using a PC-connected headset), a virtual whiteboard, and information about roles and permissions. attendees. With a full subscription, resizable file, web browser, and PC desktop windows can be made visible to all attendees. Each meeting room also has a maximum of three giant screens on which content can be projected. With a PC VR headset, you can even join Teams and Zoom meetings as an avatar from a Sync virtual meeting space (again, a full membership is required).
The ability to upload 3D models (FBX, OBJ, gITF, or Unity Asset Bundles), manipulate them with the controller, and show them to meeting attendees (only the host can interact with a 3D model) is a key benefit of Sync. We found a free FBX file of a Kinder Bueno, zipped it along with its texture file, and uploaded it to the meeting space, where Steve Ranger and I debated who was going to virtually consume the virtual snack. Obviously, design teams looking at a complex model would be more professional, but we ran into the constraints of our free subscriptions.
A 3D model (an FBX file), uploaded to Vive Sync, with the manipulation controls visible.
Screenshot: Charles McLellan/ZDNET
There are many more features in Vive Sync, and more are coming. For now, it’s fair to say that Steve Ranger and I were surprised at how interesting and even fun the experience of meeting in the Vive Sync metaverse was. Obviously the novelty element wears off over time, but we really enjoyed the exploration phase.
Is this the future of meetings?
Even without cost constraints, metaverse meetings would likely become cumbersome and cacophonous beyond about 30 users. However, given the current prices and wear time of the headset – up to around an hour with the Vive Focus 3 in our experience – it takes much smaller teams to get any return on investment.
And what ROI are you getting, compared to the traditional Teams/Zoom video grid? The key, in our opinion, is an increased sense of presence – despite the artificial nature of avatars interacting in a virtual meeting space, and the learning curve of the user interface. This should be especially beneficial for remote workers, who often feel like “strangers” when encountering office colleagues huddled around a table in a meeting room, mostly talking to each other. and address themselves intermittently to a camera placed in front of the room and to a large wall screen.
There are video solutions to address this proximity bias, but as headset prices drop, wearability improves, avatars become more realistic, and virtual meeting software becomes more capable, small and medium-sized teams could increasingly turn to the VR alternative. That, however, could take up a good chunk of Gartner’s decade-plus time horizon.
Source: ZDNet.com