Xavier has a story...

Hi!

Long time listener, somewhat recent supporter, listening from Sweden here. This is my first time writing to you because I found the discussion about VR in the last episode very interesting.

I get all the skepticism, the fear for new markets for the big corps to fight for etc but I want to tell you our story.

We (myself and my two partners) decided to abandon our high paying dayjobs as software/infrastructure engineers exactly at the same time that the first covid lockdowns started to hit (not because we planned it we were just this lucky). 

Despite these daunting odds we actually managed to get some clients for our consulting firm while developing a sideproject that now, almost two years after, we are getting ready to launch to the market. In these two years we also managed to bring in two contractors that work for us. 

Business is good and last year right before Christmas we were thinking that we should give us ourselves and our 2 contractors some nerdy present, the kind that you don't buy to yourself because it's silly to spend that much money on it and that no one around you would ever even know that exists. After some deliberation, we were like "we could get everyone one of those Quest VR headsets". 

I must say at this point that all of us 5 live in different parts of the country (one even in another european country) and that we perform all our work remotely. 

What started just as a "bonus" present ended up being our preferred and most used way of holding meetings. 

We are seasoned users of both Google meet and Teams and we are all the time in (several) slacks but meeting using Meta Workrooms is something else. 

You get your own meeting room where you see your colleague's avatars. Hand movements are traced very precisely, mouth movements seem to be activated by sound and one of the best features is that the small speakers in the headset give you precise information about the direction where the voices are coming from with relation to the position of the speaker in the room. 

We can also bring in our laptops so you see them on the table in front of you and you can share your screen "projecting" it to the wall. 

Also there is a pretty neat whiteboard functionality where everyone can draw using the controllers and you can save your drawings. Finally you can bring in non VR users through regular videoconference where they see the room and the avatars in their screen and us in VR see their webcam feed on a TV hanging on the wall.


I am telling you, this was a toy and we were very skeptical but the feeling that you get out of these meetings is completely different from the regular Meet/Zoom/Teams. 

You emerge having the feeling of having collaborated together instead for just absorbed what they are saying to work on it later and it has made casual conversations about non work related stuff better and more frequent. We are hooked and rarely have video meetings anymore.

Downsides of course is that resolution wise it's not yet in a place where i would sit the whole day coding and of course it is Meta with all the privacy concerns that it entails. 

I can't wait to see what Apple can come up with and be able to look down at my wrist and see my apple watch or bring up my iphone in there.

Anyway this ended up being a wall of text, and there probably are some mistakes in there since English is not my native language. Keep up the good work! Coder Radio releases is one of the highlights of my weeks!

Cheers,

Xavier