this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
32 points (97.1% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36164 readers
649 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm having hard time to help my parents troubleshoot their equipment remotely, when they try to observe the objects both with their eyes and manipulate phone camera for our video chat simultaneously. You can get sick of camera shaking, and they are getting tired too. I thought maybe if they had a VR headset and could stream their view directly to the chat, it could be helpful. Maybe I could even somehow point at things in their view to tell, for example, which cable to check. I do not own a headset, and I couldnt find info of such tools via simple/AI search (maybe wrong keywords). Maybe you know of such domestic solutions?

top 14 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think you'll just be adding more problematic devices to troubleshoot...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

1 billion percent

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Nah. First of all, VR headsets are great for working in a specific room, when one is standing in the middle of it. Not when you are looking down nooks and crannies. SteamVR would lose lighthouse tracking 100% of the time, disorient and grey out. It could actually be dangerous. Second, the passthrough cameras are ass quality. It won't be enough to see cables well. They're made with the idea of "I want to see where a dog-like object is, so I don't step on my dog". Three, headsets are heavy and tiring, especially if holding a phone is too much. Now you are holding two screens close to your face. You most likely cannot fit glasses well under them either. So you need to add prescription lenses, which make it usable by one person only.

What you need is a small wireless camera on a cap they put on their head, that's connected to the PC to stream the video to you. It already adds complexity - where the camera needs to be charged, needs to be turned on etc, but not as much as a VR headset.

Then you add into it some sort of interactive board features. Slack for instance lets you draw on someone's screen when sharing. Either two people would need to be there, one to look and one to see what you are marking, or you could just stream to their phone, where they see the output of the camera and you can mark / write on it to mark what you need to.

But yah, VR isn't the tech for this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

I wouldn't recommend it either but your VR info is out of date. Quest3 can live stream and does inside out tracking so it never "loses" tracking. It can stream a live color view. Even my Quest 2 lets me walk all over the house but only with a grainy black and white feed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you are a little techie you could attach a camera to a hat, and a laser mounted to a motor to point at stuff with. Run it all through a PC and stream it to yourself

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

don't even need a motor just a streaming camera mounted to the forehead and a laser pointer. yeah I think money is to a hat would be the simplest set up

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I think it is technically possible - with the Valve Index you can read the camera input like a webcam, and I'm sure theres some way to do it with the Quests (although probably not easily). That said, as others have noted, between the bulkyness of the headset, the lower quality of the cameras, the risk of losing tracking, and the natural shakyness of people's heads, it likely wouldn't be an improvement. Try watching VR footage from someone who doesn't stream/video it regularly and you can get an idea of how hard the footage can be to follow, even before the lower camera quality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is it possible to have them share their screen instead of using a phone camera? Unless it's hardware stuff, I guess

But I know for sure on Teams you can use your own pointer on their screen during screen share to point at what you mean and to motion towards stuff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

For computer problems we use remote desktop. But for dealing with the printer, tv, phones, car, or checking the router we need to have video chat.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Maybe ask in [email protected]? It seems to be the largest community

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I think the biggest issue is that people dont like to look at the object through phone when it is much clearer here in reality. So looking for themselves and looking to show it to assistant naturally split into two separate processes. While looking "for yourself" the phone is randomly dangling in the hand, making the stream sea/sickening.

So I thought, VR headsets have a good see-through mode, which could also be streamed. It also could easily display a pointer from remote. Thus both processes would merge into one, and you could directly comment on what is on focus.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There's nothing VR would give you that streaming video like FaceTime gives you. A smartphone is better because they can point it at things they couldn't reach if they had a headset on.

Just video call and have them point with one hand while holding their phone with the other.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm guessing you haven't tried to do it. I can spend twenty minutes trying to read something my father-in-law needs help with over video chat. From his "and how do I turn the back camera on?", to my "no back a bit and left. The other left", and the classic "you turned off your video, let me call you back" because it's faster than guiding him on how to turn it on while he swears that he didn't press anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I've done it a few times. It's not the best but vr would be far worse.

Do you think "how do I turn video back on?" would be easier in VR? You have obviously never used VR.