The Dead-Eyed Serenity of a VR Meeting Platform

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

The Dead-Eyed Serenity of a VR Meeting Platform
Photo: Mesmerise

I’m standing in the center of my home office, feeling the full weight of the Oculus Quest 2 headset slouching on my forehead as I prepare for my first-ever virtual reality meeting.


While I wait for the meeting to come online, the home screen transforms from a chill open-air desert patio, into a glaring white background with text that says: Welcome, Samson. From the looks of it, I’m about to enter into Gatherings, a virtual reality conference room created by Mesmerise, a U.K-based startup with a new office in Santa Monica that claims to be the first enterprise platform for VR meetings.

With a few taps on my virtual Oculus home screen using my VR controllers, my avatar joins Gatherings’ advisory board chairman Sean West’s avatar in a minimalist dome-shaped building, well-lit, with a large, wooden arborous sculpture protruding from the center. The view outside the window is nice, a peaceful static rendering of Mediterranean farm country. This is the place Mesmerise refers to as its “Hub” — a virtual meeting space that connects to all of Gatherings’ other virtual conference rooms.

Inside Mesmerise's VR "Hub" meeting space with the company's advisory board chairman Sean West. Photo: Mesmerise

First impression? There’s clearly been a concerted effort to make the atmosphere of each meeting room futuristic but inviting. Mesmerise’s chief creative officer Michael Ogden, who’s spearheading the design efforts, is the former creative director for PlayStation Europe and is looking to bring gaming-quality graphics to the meeting software.

The avatars, however, are a different story. A day before the virtual meeting, I received the headset via Mesmerise inside my mailbox. The company also sent me detailed and straightforward instructions for how to onboard: Gatherings came pre-downloaded onto my headset, so all I had to do was boot up the app and enter a code that was previously generated for me to link my account.

A screenshot of my avatar in Mesmerise's VR meeting room. Photo: Mesmerise

After I was set up, I created my avatar by uploading a mug-shot style selfie to the Gatherings platform. Two minutes later I’m shown a preview of my digital avatar.

“Once you upload your photo we use a variety of services to create and refine the 3D model for your avatar, which we then bundle and publish so it can be shown dynamically in Gatherings,” West explains. “Our process is really focused on optimizing to get the right balance of visual fidelity and maximize the number of users in the space.”

Gatherings' approach to hands in VR. Photo: Mesmerise

Which means that for now, Mesmerise can only reproduce my head stitched onto the beginning of an upper body bust. “It’s optimized for the face, not the body,” West says, adding that “for business communication, we didn’t want to replicate walking.”

Not to mention, they can’t. Even with the $15 billion Mark Zuckerberg’s poured into Meta, the $244 billion company hasn’t cracked the code for realistically rendering a live lower body in VR. As part of its emerging Meta Horizon Worlds VR platform last month, Meta debuted their avatars with legs, but it was later revealed that the legs were instead added in post production before the demo, and not captured live.

In Gatherings, I also have no arms. I do have hands, though. And they float around wildly as I speak and gesture, sometimes overlapping each other while contorting in ways my body never could.

The Oculus Quest 2 and controllers, which were delivered to my door via Mesmerise/FedEx. Photo: Samson Amore

There’s no option to move your fingers in Gatherings either. The Quest 2 headset released in 2019 doesn’t have cameras in the headset or controllers to monitor hand movements. But, West tells me, the $1,500 Meta Quest Pro, which came out last month and which Mesmerise is still sourcing, has much more advanced motion capture tech and could make Mesmerise’s graphics more lifelike.

As for our conversation inside the virtual hub, the audio is clear but West’s avatar’s mouth struggles to keep up with his voice. It reminds me of an old dubbed Kung fu movie. In recordings, I notice my words also seem to emerge too fast for my lips to keep up.

As part of Gatherings, there’s also a feature in which a person can teleport to different places around the virtual rooms using the controller trigger. It does become difficult to hear West at times when he teleports around the room. This is because of spatial audio, a type of sound processing that is meant to simulate surround-sound to make headphone users feel more immersed. The audio feature is designed to make listeners feel that sound is coming from specific directions around them based on their distance to a speaker. It’s commonly used in video games, but becoming popular in VR.

The issue is that when West teleports more than a few feet away from me, his audio begins to fade out. I can only imagine then what it was like in a crowded event space, like the 200 person conference Gatherings recently held for the London School of Economics. Or the custom VR event space Mesmerise built for Morningstar’s Investment Conference—– a sweeping, expansive-open air courtyard made to look like a virtual town square and full of 4,000 virtual attendees.

A meeting breakout room in Gatherings that Mesmerise created for the 2021 Morningstar Investors conference. Photo: Mesmerise

Maxx Bricklin, a partner at LA-based Bold Capital Partners who’s been trying out Gatherings to see if it’s a good fit for his company, says that while he’s impressed with what Mesmerise has created, he doesn’t believe anyone is ready to have a heavy headset on for hours at a time. “Nobody wants to put that on their head,” he says, though he notes that VR components get lighter with each innovation, and says maybe by 2030 we’ll get there.

Bricklin recently tried Gatherings alongside a 65-year-old user. “I was in and operating within a minute, and it took 10 minutes-plus to get it right and to teach him,” Bricklin notes. “My biggest problem is just the huge lift that it takes to get anybody on a Mesmerise learning platform.”

West however tells me that the coronavirus pandemic gave Gatherings a boost. And that the platform might soon be for applications beyond business. “What’s happened in the VR market is everybody’s segmented, and we’re trying to be involved in each dimension,” he says.

Mesmerise’s practice of loaning headsets to users to access Gatherings could also help further overall adoption of VR, which is expected to grow to 70 million headsets worldwide in the next four years. Couple that with other use cases for VR— gaming, education, training and large-scale entertainment—and West believes it’s only a matter of time before we see large-scale VR adoption.

Yet another positive sign that people are slowly warming up to the technology is that Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 (the device I’m using) recently surpassed lifetime sales of the Xbox Series S and Series X, a 97% spike in sales since 2021.

In fact, an interest in entertainment is why Mesmerise chose Santa Monica to be its second home. “People in the entertainment industry have been developing VR for decades,” West says and the company wants to be near the action.

Though West wouldn’t disclose how much money is behind Gatherings, he says it hasn’t taken any outside investment and that some money is already flowing in as companies pay to use Gatherings for meetings. Right now, the company’s primary clients are financial institutions and large multinational corporations that are looking for an alternative to in-person conferences or Zoom meetings to hold live events.

Bricklin, for his part, says he does see a valid use case for VR to “augment” in-person relations in financial services, where he says a virtual client connection is “the highest value and emotionally complicated.” But VR technology overall, Bricklin says, “still [has] interoperability issues” and “puts a lot of creative onus on the users to develop the right use cases.”

West and I converse in a VR boardroom. Photo: Mesmerise

My avatar, left, next to Mesmerise's advisory board chairman Sean West's avatar, right. Photo: Mesmerise

No legs, no problem. Photo: Mesmerise

Even West acknowledges getting C-suites to onboard into Gatherings could be a problem. “Most executives don’t even manage their own calendars, some don’t even make their own coffee,” he says. West believes the slow adoption of VR is also due in part to the fact that people feel “vulnerable” in an environment where “you might reveal that you don’t know how this technology works, or you might do something silly.” His solution: make onboarding in Gatherings a thorough process that gives these newbies the feeling that they’re in control of the tech and can “harness the superpowers virtual reality gives you,” West says.

As for me and whether I’d be interested in conducting another meeting in VR? For now, it’s unlikely. Not only because I feel nauseous as I lift the headset off my face. But after reviewing the video of my avatar, I can’t help but be struck by the uncanniness of it. I know I look tired on Zoom in the mornings, but this avatar version of me looked simultaneously dead-eyed and like it had seen too much.

https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la

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The Creator-To-Podcaster Pipeline Is Ready to Explode

Nat Rubio-Licht
Nat Rubio-Licht is a freelance reporter with dot.LA. They previously worked at Protocol writing the Source Code newsletter and at the L.A. Business Journal covering tech and aerospace. They can be reached at nat@dot.la.
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Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

NASA’s JPL Receives Billions to Begin Understanding Our Solar System
Evan Xie

NASA’s footprint in California is growing as the agency prepares for Congress to approve its proposed 2024 budget.

The overall NASA budget swelled 6% from the prior year, JPL deputy director Larry James told dot.LA. He added he sees that as a continuation of the last two presidential administrations’ focus on modernizing and bolstering the nation’s space program.

The money goes largely to existing NASA centers in California, including the Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory run with Caltech, Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.

California remains a hotspot for NASA space activity and investment. In 2021, the agency estimated its economic output impact on the region to be around $15.2 billion. That was far more than its closest competing states, including Texas ($9.3 billion) and Maryland (roughly $8 billion). That same year, NASA reported it employed over 66,000 people in California.

“In general, Congress has been very supportive” of the JPL and NASA’s missions, James said. “It’s generally bipartisan [and] supported by both sides of the aisle. In the last few years in general NASA has been able to have increased budgets.”

There are 41 current missions run by JPL and CalTech, and another 16 scheduled for the future. James added the new budget is “an incredible support for all the missions we want to do.”

The public-private partnership between NASA and local space companies continues to evolve, and the increased budget could be a boon for LA-based developers. Numerous contractors for NASA (including CalTech, which runs the JPL), Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Northrop Grumman all stand to gain new contracts once the budget is finalized, partly because NASA simply needs the private industry’s help to achieve all its goals.

James said that there was only one JPL mission that wasn’t funded – a mission to send an orbital satellite to survey the surface and interior of Venus, called VERITAS.

NASA Employment and Output ImpactEvan Xie

The Moon and Mars

Much of the money earmarked in the proposed 2024 budget is for crewed missions. Overall, NASA’s asking for $8 billion from Congress to fund lunar exploration missions. As part of this, the majority is earmarked for the upcoming Artemis mission, which aims to land a woman and person of color on the Moon’s south pole.

While there’s a number of high-profile missions the JPL is working on that are focused on Mars, including Mars Sample Return project (which received $949 million in this proposed budget) and Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover, JPL also received significant funding to study the Earth’s climate and behavior.

JPL also got funding for several projects to map our universe. One is the SphereX Near Earth Objects surveyor mission, the goal of which is to use telescopes to “map the entire universe,” James said, adding that the mission was fully funded.

International Space Station

NASA’s also asking for more money to maintain the International Space Station (ISS), which houses a number of projects dedicated to better understanding the Earth’s climate and behavior.

The agency requested roughly $1.3 billion to maintain the ISS. It also is increasing its investment in space flight support, in-space transportation and commercial development of low-earth orbit (LEO). “The ISS is an incredible platform for us,” James said.

James added there are multiple missions outside or on board the ISS now taking data, including EMIT, which launched in July 2022. The EMIT mission studies arid dust sources on the planet using spectroscopy. It uses that data to remodel how mineral dust movement in North and South America might affect the Earth’s temperature changes.

Another ISS mission JPL launched is called ECOSTRESS. The mission sent a thermal radiometer onto the space station in June 2018 to monitor how plants lose water through their leaves, with the goal of figuring out how the terrestrial biosphere reacts to changes in water availability. James said the plan is to “tell you the kind of foliage health around the globe” from space.

One other ISS project is called Cold Atom Lab. It is “an incredible fundamental physics machine,” James said, that’s run by “three Nobel Prize winners as principal investigators on the Space Station.” Cold Atom Lab is a physics experiment geared toward figuring out how quantum phenomena behave in space by cooling atoms with lasers to just below absolute zero degrees.

In the long term, James was optimistic NASA’s imaging projects could lead to more dramatic discoveries. Surveying the makeup of planets’ atmospheres is a project “in the astrophysics domain we’re very excited about,” James said. He added that this imaging could lead to information about life on other planets, or, at the very least, an understanding of why they’re no longer habitable.

https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la

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Provided by BHE

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