Day 12 in the Virtual Office!
Total Time in VR: 5 hours and 21 minutes (across 13 VR sessions)
Use Cases: Focus Time (1 hour 46 min), Team Meetings (2 hours 5 min), Quest Pro Usage (1 hour**), MiniMindfulness (28 min), 1:1 meetings (28 min), Evening Work (22 min), VR Fitness (10 min) [**Quest Pro usage is removed from overall time, as I run simultaneous timers when using the Pro]
While not yet back to 100%, I definitely felt much better today and was able to use VR more effectively over yesterday’s sessions. I decided to watch our Weekly All-Hands Meeting for OssoVR in VR again this week, and one of my co-workers joined the session. We had a pretty fun time watching the Zoom on the big screen, and since we were muted in Zoom we were able to chat a bit during the session, asking questions, commenting on the Zoom Chat to each other. It was just a very dynamic way to do something that is familiar. OssoVR certainly makes our All-Hands meetings fun, but sitting next to someone in a “real” space is unmatched when it comes to engagement (only a physical meetup could beat it IMO).
Cup Half Empty: I saw a couple issues today with tracking in Workrooms. I had a weekly 1:1 with another manager today and his desktop passthrough was failing to track properly. Sometimes closing and re-opening the desktop passthrough resolves the issue when I’ve seen it happen. But that didn’t work today. He ended up re-starting his headset and then re-joining the session without further tracking issues. Unfortunately the glitches did not end there though, as his avatar froze for me shortly after he re-joined. He could see me moving, and he could see himself moving. I decided to return to my “Personal Office” and then rejoin our meeting and that quickly resolved the avatar issue for me, and the problem didn’t arise again. These are the types of simple issues that can derail what might be a productive meeting in VR, and must be resolved in order to see wider adoption of VR for meetings.
Cup Half Full: I have had some good engagements in VR meetings today and yesterday. I even was successfully “pranked” by one of my co-workers who snuck up out of my line of sight in a VR session with another person. Only when I turned to my left did I realize someone was 3 inches from my head. I nearly fell out of my chair! Those moments are impactful. For every avatar that freezes up, or desktop not tracking properly, stories like this help balance things out. You can put up with some “technical issues” if there is a pay off. And while this engagement was mostly humorous, it proves a deeper point about how these interactions in Collab VR feel VERY REAL. I love working in VR solo now, especially with the updated screens in the Private Office, but the real power of Virtual Reality for Productivity remains in Collaboration.
I added a new category today called “VR Fitness”. If I’m tracking my mental fitness with “MiniMindfulness” I think it’s worth tracking other fitness apps during this experiment. I’ve been struggling with back issues and I used the app “Supernatural” to do a series of stretches. I’ve loved this app for a long time, but this low impact exercise was exactly what I needed to end my day strong. So as I use fitness apps, I will be tracking that too.
#TLDR
The VR Office Experiment is picking up steam again in Week 3. I encountered several bugs today that a beta tester can easily tolerate but that a skeptic would use to throw VR directly under the bus. Understanding how to quickly resolve those glitches is key in the short term, while we hope that the developers of the software (in this case Meta) fix the problem more permanently. Tomorrow I do my first “Face Cover Test” switching up from my Fan Face Cover to the one that comes right out of the box. Fingers crossed I’m not too miserable. Who knows, maybe I’ll be surprised and the negative impact on my experience will be minimal. Time will tell.
Till Tomorrow…
Carrier Pigeon XR 