What's Wrong with XR Collaboration Guide Spring 2020 V4
When the XR Collaboration Guide was published around February 20, 2021, I was looking forward to reading what was shaping up to be a competitor document to the still-in-editing State of XR Report from the Immersive Learning Research Network. I knew that the Guide was going to be focused on the XR producer community (content, hardware, events, etc.) so they would have a focus more on business and less on research.
However, I still opened it eagerly to see what they would say.
This is the disclosed group of authors:
The reason I posted the authors is that at least one *should* have the education background to know better for something that caused my jaw to drop later in the report. As a matter of fact, I would have thought that the presence of this contributor would have stopped bad data from circulating. However, it did.
The report opens with a Glossary. That makes me snicked just a tad since, academically, that would be called "Definitions" but oh well. Tomaytoe, tomahtoe. 🍅
The "explanations" are, I must observe, wishy-washy and tend to include a distinct head-nod to what the reports considers NOT the item (AR, VR, XR, or MR). This includes a troubling swipe at 2DVR (p.14):
Note: Handheld device and computer users also have the ability to join these events, but with far less immersion. In particular, you have to do a lot more work to control your “camera” position or your rendered point of view. This makes interacting more of an effort."
It always bothers me when part of the industry tries to say "We're the real thing and they are not the real thing" when there is a long road that led to where we are. That road is paved with pioneers saying "it's the real thing" and scratching to get even a tiny bit of progress acknowledged (I'm looking at you Second Life educator community).
Some of the writing veers too. For example, a statement about shipment dates in the middle of the "glossary" looks like a hardware person just tacked that in there.
After this is a confusing section where, in 3 events, they give you the history of teleconferences as--apparently-- done in 3D. I said it's confusing.
Here it comes...
Now let's get down to it.
The whole page of text starting the Presence section. My eyebrows went up when I realized there is not a single reference on the page. actually, it reads like "talking" like what one person would say to another when talking them into XR.
But by the next page, these authors are willing to land on some bad research-- hard. I'll screen capture this because even looking at this more than 20 months after it came out, I can't believe these folks put their names on this.
Oy. Where do I start with this mess.
First, Dale's Cone of Experience is debunked. This one web page will pretty much take care of that.
https://www.worklearning.com/2015/01/05/mythical-retention-data-the-corrupted-cone/
Second, the pyramid is NOT explained in the text. OK.
The pyramid is rainbow colored...that already sets some academians off as it was NOT even originally a triangle or pyramid!
Actually the rest of the writing is what I would call lukewarm (as in, you want to spit it out of your mouth) with little to NO connection to research, no cause-and-effect reasoning, and a lot of "what if" statements and a saw a scant "brain science" phrase in there. If I could summarize the writing, it says "we can collaborate in XR "far beyond what is possible in traditional collaborative structures".
Next is a section on avatars that doesn't really fit the Guide but oh well. Then some comments on trying for accessibility (OK, I'm down with that!) but seems to be surface level talk given that they just dissed 2D earlier in the same Guide.
The Guide goes on to do some "hand waving" arguments that XR allows for better collaboration (the date of February 2020 is not lost on me...the planet was about to switch into Zoom mode and collaboration...like it or not...was about to happen on a huge scale.)
The reasons they give for XR being better for collaboration are:
1. Less distractions during meetings
2. Highly customized meeting environments
3. Increased presence/immersion
4. Interaction with 3D objects
5. Text input can be challenging (this appears to be an 'anti-reason'....sooooooo....does it really fit on this list? The heading style says yes. I say no. But I'm not loving that list anyway.)
I don't see anything remarkable about the rest; some of the Guide is OK, some of it is "meh".
In general, I'm just really sorry that this report didn't really hit hard on what XR can do really well and instead clung to the "but it's really cool, you'll like it" argument. Oh well.