> It doesn’t have to be better than Zoom. It has to be $1500 better than Zoom. Per employee.
Is this sarcasm? That's less than 2/3rds of the entry-level price of a 16" MacBook Pro.
If whatever your (remote) business makes isn't valuable enough to spend $125 / month per employee on (assuming you buy a new system every year!), then the future is bleak...
The question isn’t if your business can afford to spend $125/mo on VR headset for every employee (I’d even amortize that over 2-3 years to $42-62/mo).
The question is — does the employer get more than $125/mo of benefit out of the VR solution — for every employee that needs to attend meetings. Because this only works if everyone in a meeting has a headset. And you’re only going to see $CORP buying these headsets if they get more benefit out of them than they cost.
Buying a ten seat license for Zoom Pro is an easy thing to approve. The laptop/computer required for a zoom meeting (as you pointed out) is already a sunk cost. Buying $15k of VR gear to have that same 10-person meeting is a much tougher pill to swallow.
For some small teams, I could see this absolutely making sense. But Facebook needs to sell this to large enterprises to have the transformational impact they are looking for.
There is zero chance my enterprise would go for this - besides which taking on and off VR headsets during the day vs opening Microsoft Teams just doesn't currently seem that practical.
I'm sure the day will come where this is more normal, but there are still a few more cultural and technical hurdles to overcome.
During the last lockdown here, I took a few meetings in VR with a digital avatar (using teams) and it was a pretty good experience and broke up the monotony of working from home, but I haven't done it again since being back in hybrid mode...
All that being said, I desperately want one of these to try out as essentially a 'replacement' for my monitor at home.
> All that being said, I desperately want one of these to try out as essentially a 'replacement' for my monitor at home.
I’m very much in the same situation. I have a Quest 1 and 2. And they were great during lock down to have something for my kids to do to be active indoors. I had a few meetings that way too and liked Immersed the few times I used it.
But, this has me excited. (But not for meetings)
I’m very interested to see how this new headset will work as a monitor replacement. Especially if I can take my “work” environment home with me, or when I’m working in the car while waiting for my kid’s $SPORT practice.
It’s just as difficult to swallow a $15K cloud bill and companies do that every month. They will have money to buy employees VR equipment to improve productivity with the money they saved on real estate.
My company profits millions a year and I can barely get a new keyboard as a top SW developer :)
While working for a small startup of 5, I had very nice equipment.
Is this sarcasm? That's less than 2/3rds of the entry-level price of a 16" MacBook Pro.
If whatever your (remote) business makes isn't valuable enough to spend $125 / month per employee on (assuming you buy a new system every year!), then the future is bleak...