Day 5 in the Virtual Office!
Total Time in VR: 4 hours and 3 minutes. (across 6 VR sessions)
Use Cases: Focus Time (1h 10m), 1:1 Meetings (56m), Team Meetings (53m), Abbey Road (50m), Mini-Mindfulness (12m)
Woo! Wrapping up Week 1 of this VR Office Experiment! I am pretty excited about this first week! Today was my shortest of the week, but I also had several team members out of office and not as busy of a calendar. Used Focus Time to wrap up my tasks, and Abbey Road to do some “VR WeWork” this morning. A good end to a good week in the metaverse.
Cup Half Empty: The theme of the week was “keyboard not tracking well” and that continued today. Even the AR overlay in desktop passthrough is struggling with mapping over the keyboard. Since I’m on Quest 2, that means the passthrough is still quite grainy and I have to lean down really close to see the keyboard. Thankfully I’m old enough to remember typing on a word processor and I had a rigid teacher in typing class, so I don’t need to look down very often! I might switch to the Apple Magic Keyboard next week, as I’ve used my Macbook almost exclusively this week, so toggling between computers is less important.
On a different note, I had the problem of my Elite Headstrap with Battery cracking late last night, so I’ve been using a Kiwi head strap. While a nice design (especially with the hinge), I immediately noticed the lack of weight on the back of the head. All day today has felt different and a little uncomfortable. Plus without the extra battery, I’ve been plugged into the wall often while in VR, which isn’t ideal. I ordered a new head strap that arrives over the weekend, so hopefully this issue is resolved next week. I’m trying a new design as I have now broken THREE Elite head straps from Meta. Stay tuned.
Cup Half Full: This morning I was involved in a 3 way convo on Slack about an issue. Shortly into the convo all three participants ended up in Workrooms for a different meeting. It was notable to me how different the interaction was in VR. That shouldn’t be a surprise, in VR we are actually present in the same room. But the difference was the convo, which was still work related, had HUMOR. There was joshing around. There was laughter. There was “physical comedy” which our limited half bodies. That was the start of my Friday and I really enjoyed it.
#TLDR
I set out do 4 hours a day, and I exceeded that by a fair amount (spoiler alert for my upcoming “weekly review”, my total was 29 hours and 24 minutes, or roughly 5.8 hours a day). Today, though a quieter day in VR, I still hit the 50% mark. I am finding it remarkable how easy it is to move in and out of VR, and how productive I feel when I’m in here. I know this might just be “first week sizzle”, so I’m looking forward to Week 2!!
Till Monday…
Carrier Pigeon XR 