Many people have found remote interactions awkward or difficult in remote life.

We’ve all found different ways to cope. I turn closed-captions on during Hangout meetings, I can read and screenshot what I couldn’t capture otherwise.

Spatial audio also offers new options.

I finally met people who I follow on Twitter, “in-person” or in a spatial format during an ice-cream social on High-Fidelity, courtesy @EstellaTse

WEIRDNESS of Hi-Fi

• The navigation controls are weird

  • the rotate (WASD) rotates the world not you

    • even though it’s 2D and 3DOF (rotation) it’s awkward for your “camera” to stay stationary and have the world move, maps (like Google and Apple maps) don’t function like this

    • this is how Metaio operated (early AR system purchased by Apple)

      • rotating the world, and not the camera

      • it’s a hard concept to wrap your head around.

      • Fortunately, with SLAM we won’t have to think about this much, but it might make sense in some scenarios. Like medical imaging where it makes sense to rotate an object

    • Rotating the map (on mobile) seems to be the secondary method of rotation (primary being by rotating your body or phone)

  • the zoom seems unnatural (or inverted)

  • I mistook a beachball floating in the pool as a person – the avatars are similarly round

  • I was more likely to engage with people if they had an avatar photo and not just initials in their bubble. Some experiences like Glitch give people an avatar by default, which could make people appear more approachable

  • Your “ears” or spatial audio is fed through a cone that you can see, but the hearing is so sensitive, you get tired of walking too far away or might not want to seem awkward from walking way to far away from the group.

    • I wish there were a sensitivity control to the spatial audio

PROS of Hi-Fi

• You’re able to notify someone if they have an audio issue.

  • on Hangouts I usually end up muting the person for everyone, to their and my embarrassment.

• It’s spatial

  • Noclip mode is on – so you can walk through walls (or move through them like a ghost), as there aren’t physics

    • at first, I navigated to walk through a doorway, then learned you can WASD or click-drag through everything

• It was still social

  • At the beginning, Estella “walked” around and asked everyone if they were ok, as she “wanted to be a good host.” Similar to how you might start a party IRL

• I was able to meet multiple new groups of people, I reconnected with other mentors from the MIT Hack Reality, I caught up with the dev relations from Microsoft & Magic Leap.

  • These are individual groups of human interactions in a group setting that couldn’t happen in either the “one to many” or “cross-fire radio coms” of Zoom and Hangouts that are our current limitation of real-time remote meetings.

    • excluding breakouts because those are still controlled by the host and not natural and organic

It was a little draining maybe because that was my first time in Hi-Fi, but you wouldn’t be able to have that many conversations with that many people and allow conversations to emerge in a normal group video call.

Shout out to @estellatse and @HighFidelityXR

Give High-Fidelity a try here https://www.highfidelity.com/ and let’s figure something out better than walkie-talkies with TVs.