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Sometimes in remote work meetings, a supervisor will kick things off with a group icebreaker to get things going, like your favorite movie or the last trip you took. That’s essentially what virtual workplaces in the metaverse are: an elaborate attempt to get ideas flowing by pretending you’re not actually working. And like those icebreakers, it’s not entirely convincing.
Shared 3D environments in VR have been an obvious staple in gaming for years, like world of warcraft or any game your friend is spending too much time on. But those virtual worlds have monsters, dragons, and spaceships shaped like dragon monsters. They are meant to create a reality impossible to duplicate in life.
Is the office really an environment that needs a virtual upgrade? It depends.
Your boss’s avatar would like to talk to you
You may have seen ads for new virtual workspaces while you were in your real office with walls and tables. Facebook launched a workplace app called Horizon Workrooms for Quest 2 users who are also work-from-home employees. It’s a pretty specific demographic, to say the least.
The app lets co-workers chat with each other as more professionally dressed Pixar avatars, and share photos and files on a cartoon whiteboard that you can’t help but look like in your regular office.
Like all the others, Microsoft Mesh is very much a work in progress. Provides a mixed reality overlay in Teams that enables workers to collaborate in virtual workspaces on 3D models and other areas where visualization is required. Workers can appear as avatars in VR or even in real places as somewhat realistic holograms, just as they did in Star Wars Work meetings.
Advantages of the virtual workspace
It’s clear why these projects are necessary, as there have been numerous studies that make the obvious point that workplace collaboration and brainstorming tend to suffer when people work from home. That little thumbs up or “Sounds good” under your coworker’s idea in Teams or Slack isn’t exactly getting the creativity flowing.
And there are other obvious advantages of visiting a virtual office: your avatar always wears pants, no one can tell that you haven’t shaved in a while and you’re getting carried away, and there’s no chance you’ll run into that smelly guy in the office.
But going all out as if people ever donned a VR headset and spent several hours in a virtual office, let alone 40, is a bit of a miss. We don’t need to build entire worlds that recreate the sheer thrill of being in a meeting room, or walking into your boss’s office to have that sinister conversation.
A virtual workplace, if you’re employed at a somewhat typical company, is likely to be something that employees visit briefly, and may never end up justifying the cost and potential distraction inherent in VR technology. Now, if you’re a worker who regularly uses 3D models, like an engineer, surgeon, pilot, or graphic designer, the applications are obvious.
More fantasy, less offices
That’s part of the reason Mark Zuckerberg took a beating online for his recent presentations on virtual workplaces, as it ultimately showed a lack of imagination. Criticizing the technology aspect is easy to do because good VR takes time – the real disappointment is that they are using their time to recreate the more mundane and commonplace parts of reality.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Meta’s Horizon Workrooms remote desktop feature, which lets users strap on a nearly $1,500 VR headset so they can type on a virtual floating computer if their real computer isn’t working at all. being real and limited by the constraints of gravity. There may not be enough lubricating eye drops in the world to deal with that situation.
We don’t need a VR version of a messy cubicle or desk at home, we need exciting experiences like butterflies carrying swords and flying pancake saucers shooting blueberries at dinosaurs with guns. I’m going to spend $1,500 on it.
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