Why Immersion Will Make Video Conferencing Obsolete
While we take video calling for granted — especially now, as our daily lives in quarantine center around Zoom calls and Facetime sessions, during the 60’s and 70’s, the idea of the ‘video chat’ was a thing of science fiction. Video calling was a fantasy technology that appeared in movies and the minds of science fiction writers. The technology wouldn’t have the opportunity to be widely adopted until just 10 years ago when smartphones became ubiquitous. Even then, it took several years of iterating and perfecting cellular data packages before video streams became less pixelated and more reliable, and years after that until they became the de-facto form of visual communication.
Video chatting has, since its creation, remained largely unchanged. Sure, video quality and stability have improved over the years, but the basic technology has remained much the same: 2D video streams on 2D screens with the ability to chat back and forth using keyboards and emojis. That’s about all video chatting will ever be, given the limitations of the 2D hardware it utilizes.
As we enter a 4th computing revolution and computing itself becomes spatialized, the future of connecting and collaborating with others will demand additional dimensions. 2D video feeds — regardless of additional features — will no longer cut it. Talking to and interacting in 2D will be a thing of the past. The crucial missing aspects of human connection, a sense of presence, dimensionality, immersion, will become as important to our communications in a spatial world as they are in our already multi-dimensional ‘real lives.’
Enter virtual and augmented reality. These immersive technologies offer us the ability to build and deliver the next chapter of human engagement. They allow us to see and interact with our coworkers, friends, or family with a real sense of presence, as if they were right in front of you! Even more important — you can do this from anywhere in the world, as long as you have a headset and internet access! This immersive real-time collaboration is the ‘next generation’ of video conferencing, taking the idea of collaboration and communication to a whole new dimension (literally)!
Here are 3 reasons why Facetime will soon be a thing of the past:
Immersion Increases Engagement
Video calling IS boring. It’s true. Ask any student who is attending “Zoom University” during this quarantine (also known as “substitutional video conferencing lectures in lieu of physical teaching”). It’s not interactive, it’s not engaging, and it’s definitely not exciting. Same goes for anyone unfortunate enough to have to attend video meetings. One second you find yourself listening to your peers, the next you’re online shopping or replying to text messages. There are a million distractions and absolutely nothing preventing a user from indulging them. This makes it incredibly hard to focus or have any level of productivity during important calls.
Immersive conferences on the other hand increase user engagement. When a user puts on a VR or AR headset, they are immediately transported into a completely different space. The immersive atmosphere surrounds them fully, stimulating the brain’s capability for learning and increasing attentiveness. Furthermore, immersion removes all distractions from the user’s environment, leaving them fully focused on the task at hand. The user’s mind is completely enveloped, preventing distraction and priming the mind, via novel experiences, for better data ingestion and retention. Once you’ve been immersed, you stay immersed!
You Can’t Top Spatial Interactivity
Video chatting (literally) lacks depth. Expression is limited to one camera and one microphone, making remote sharing, teaching, and learning pretty difficult. In face-to-face situations, multi-dimensionality makes it much easier to communicate insights and arrive at a shared understanding. Things like spatial positioning, presence, facial expressions, physical movement and guidance — all of these things convey a great deal of information and all of these things are lost when communication is condensed down into 2D! They say 55% of communication is non-verbal (Psychology Today, 2011) consisting of body movement and placement, all of which is either lost entirely or dramatically reduced when using 2D communication tools. Sadly, no number of moving screens, high fidelity cameras, or improved call quality will be able to replicate the extent of an in-person meeting.
Therefore, we should focus on making digital meetings as close to real-life as possible to preserve the integrity and value of our communication. Holographic, immersive meetings allow users to meet multi-dimensionally, essentially turning any room into a workspace. Immersion gives us the ability to visualize faces and hands, giving avatars gestures and enabling direct interaction, building an increased sense of remote ‘presence’ (or the ability to really feel as if those with whom you’re remotely collaborating with are truly there in the same room with you).
Let me give you a concrete example: Imagine you and a group of your friends are participating in an escape room, an experience that requires a great deal of cooperation and information discovery in order to solve puzzles and eventually solve your way to freedom. Now imagine completing this task over video chat — how difficult would this be?!
Need To View Data? Save Time, Energy, and Money — With Immersion!
Many companies understandably opt out of using even 2D video chatting when dealing with analyzing complex datasets. Trying to present, explain, and understand datasets over video chat is exceptionally difficult. I mean, it’s even difficult to do these things effectively in real life! Actual meetings, however, often involve travel time, planning, physical office space, and other expenses. And with the recent spread of COVID-19, many offices have chosen to go fully remote. Unfortunately, recent studies have shown that 2D video conferencing often increases cognitive load (mental stress) of team members, due to a variety of challenges, including speaker malfunctions, movement detection, eye-contact coordination, turn-taking, and conversation pacing. (Management Science, 2008). Long story short: teams working with data are facing even more challenging problems than before.
Luckily — a solution is here! Immersion can add a great deal of value to the process of visualizing, analyzing, and communicating data. Collaborative remote data visualization products, such as BadVR, include valuable features such as annotation tools, presenter mode, and the ability to import, or link, your own datasets. Discussing trends and patterns in big data via Zoom is a thing of the past, as immersive collaboration makes it easier, faster, and cheaper to collaborate remotely.
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For decades, the concept of ‘video calling’ was a thing of science fiction; a completely unrealistic, ludicrous idea. But in 2020, we’ve not only successfully created and deployed effective video chat products, we’ve officially hit its (many) limitations. As the world quickly moves towards a fully remote workforce, addressing the issue of effective and productive remote collaboration has become increasingly important. Companies and organizations of all sizes are struggling to find better ways to collaborate from multiple locations. Fortunately — immersive technology is here to provide a better solution.
It’s truly time for us to embrace the value of immersive interactions and collaboration. With VR and AR headsets becoming cheaper, more user friendly, and ubiquitous, the practicality of holding virtual meetups continues to grow exponentially. Here at BadVR, we have been building a platform that delivers interactive, shared spatial experiences since our inception. We fully support the idea of remote work via headset and believe in the value of immersive technology when visualizing and analyzing data. We as a team are extremely excited to offer a solid solution to the current challenges of remote collaboration — but also truly excited see how much closer we all are to a connected, immersive future.
Jason Tam
Junior Designer, BadVR
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Want to learn more about immersive real-time collaboration? Curious about how you could bring it to your team? Look no further — BadVR’s platform offers this feature (and many more)!
Reach out for an enterprise demo today!
