What’s you guys views on VR demand due to the other things we’ve seen?
1. Meta trying to drum up demand via social media metaverse way
2. MS promoting the corporate metaverse with people putting on goggles and pretending to be at the office.
Chance of success? Dead as a doorknob?
The stuff we’ve seen so far looks like shit.
Both dead.
Normal people that use social media dont want to spend more than 5 minutes in VR at a time.
The corporate metaverse is less efficient than purely digital tools. Software like miro is super efficient for collaborative whiteboarding - in physical offices in 2022 you'll see a meeting with 8 people heads down on laptops collaborating on a shared document. It's not that different to being on a zoom call and doing the same thing. Moving that into VR only serves to make it less convenient and slower.
I'm using it for presentation purposes in real estate. Even got asked to do some contract work for facebook - for a while now zuckerberg has refused to sign off or review any product / architecture design unless he can see it in VR. so they have a huge manpower issue and are frantically outsourcing a ton of work, so once someone in house has finished designing and got something ready to present, it then needs to go out to a third party to get optimized and wrapped up into an experience just so zuck can comment and give feedback on it. when they called us i thought it was the dumbest fucking thing i'd ever heard and we refused to work on it because the last-minute changes and turnaround times would be a nightmare.
A large part of what people are doing in VR is making a traditional working process more convoluted and difficult for everyone involved. maybe it will get streamlined, but we're a long way off.
Architectural review in it can be very useful - there's a tool called prospect where you can dump a model into it, get into a shared meeting where you can all see each other, and walk around measuring and marking things up. The only people who need this are those that dont understand how to read floorplans and cant judge scale very well though - so it's only useful for packaging up a 'finished' design to ask for more comments and changes. Within architecture, there's a fine line of how much you let a client fuck around, and it can open a door to endless reviews and changes. Sometimes it's better if the client doesn't fully comprehend the design, you know?