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?
I think you’ll just be adding more problematic devices to troubleshoot…
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
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.
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.
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.
