Day 13 in the Virtual Office!
Total Time in VR: 5 hours and 26 minutes (across 9 VR sessions)
Use Cases: Focus Time (52 min), Team Meetings (1 hr 15 min), 1:1 Meetings (1 hour 15 min), Mini-Mindfulness (30 min), Community Time (35 min), Evening Work (40 min), VR Fitness (15 min), Quest Pro Time (1 hour 55 min – not included in totals)
I am starting to settle into my upstairs office finally (right before I do my “remote office work” tomorrow!) The desk downstairs never had a monitor on it, as it was purchased for this very experiment. But the desk I’m working at this week used to have two 27 inch monitors sitting on it! I actually ditched one of the screens because I didn’t like so much monitor clutter on my desk. But then I found my productivity challenged with less screen real estate to work with after the switch! I guess with my VR Office I’ve found the happy medium. I have an empty desk when I’m not in VR. And when I’m here I have screens literally wrapped around me! I love it.
Cup Half Empty: Today was my first round of “test some other face covers” ahead of my review of the Face Cover with Fan this weekend. I won’t go into the details here, but needless to say, when a fan isn’t blowing gently on your forehead for the many hours of VR, you notice! I expected the heat, but the real challenge for productivity today was that the screen wasn’t as clear as usual. I don’t mean that the lenses fogged up. I think that it was “muggy” in there, and created a haze that I’m not used to seeing.
One issue came up in Horizon Workrooms today with audio. I was getting lots of feedback from others in the room and causing feedback myself (as my team informed me). I ended up muting myself when not talking, which might be status quo on Zoom calls, but when you are meeting “in person” in VR, it’s so much better not to have a mute button between you and the others in the room hearing you. I’m going to keep my attention on these audio issues, and hope it doesn’t become a trend.
Cup Half Full: I got to do OssoVR Community time again this week after being too busy for it last week. And a couple people from a different department showed up unexpectedly! It was so awesome to connect with team members outside my immediate organization. To just chat about life and family. And to immediately mock misses and cheer amazing shots (including a stunning hole-in-one). I feel connected to these folks even if I don’t work with them regularly, and that is one of the powers of Virtual Reality and the emerging metaverse.
I started my day with my two favorite VR meditators. It’s been almost six months since we started doing these morning “Mini-Mindfulness” sessions. So I snagged a shot at the end of our session. To many more mornings together!!
#TLDR
Despite the audio issues that plagued my first couple sessions of the day, today was a solid day in the VR Office. I did a lot of switching back and forth between Zoom and VR today, which gave me good balance and was EXACTLY what I needed with the native face cover heating up my face to uncomfortable levels. I spent some time with my manager at the end of the day and we were both a little tired from the busy day. That’s when we discovered that when using Quest Pro, you can’t hide your yawns!! This was my first experience seeing another person in VR using facial tracking and it was pretty cool. A game changer for collab VR??? I’m not so sure about that, but we’ll keep testing and seeing what ends up having value and what is just neato.
Till Tomorrow…
Carrier Pigeon XR 