Day 3 in the Virtual Office!
Total Time in VR: 4 hours and 51 minutes (across 8 VR sessions)
Primary Use Cases: Team Meetings (1 hour 7 min), 1:1 Meetings (58min), Focus Time (48min), Community Time (49min), Abbey Road (42 min), Mini-Mindfulness (24 min).
Today was a pretty smooth day in VR. I added a new category to my tracking: Abbey Road. This is a space we’ve built on our virtual campus that serves as a “VR WeWork” if you will. Basically a room with a bunch of tables that people who want to work around others can use for just that. It’s not an active social space. In fact, I’ve been calling it “Passive Collaborative VR” because the goal is to be together, while doing your own thing. It’s actually quite cool, and was the brain-child of one of my team members (in the pic above) who wanted a space to be able to look up and see a co-worker across the table, both working away at their own projects. I hope to utilize this room more during the VR Office Experiment.
Cup Half Empty: During a few meetings today there were moments where the VR caused distraction. In one instance, I was talking but my audio stopped, but my mouth did not! It proved very humorous to my team, but it also broke the flow of the meeting. As beta testers we certainly tolerate these issues, but those glitches must be few and far between if the technology was ever to scale to a wider, and less forgiving, audience.
Cup Half Full: I did a few 1:1 meetings with my team today and it was awesome to be able to really look at each other while we chatted. In one instance I was able to capture video of part of one meeting to share with my leadership. We also had our weekly Company Community Time this morning and four other co-workers came to play some mini-golf! I try to be a good cheerleader for Community Time because as a fully remote company it is easy to feel isolated and then slip into thinking that it’s okay to feel that way. Collab VR reminds us that our teams are not as far away as we might think!
#TLDR
I’d almost call today “normal”. I was in for 5 out of 8 hours today, moving between solo experiences and collaborative work. I did some troubleshooting live with a co-worker just spur of the moment. That might seem like something small, but as a remote company that is actually pretty amazing. Because we were sitting at the same table while troubleshooting, not sitting at our home desks staring at webcams. Tomorrow I’m taking this show on the road to the remote office I use once a week. I’m curious how the VR Office travels!
Till Tomorrow…
Carrier Pigeon XR 