Day 27 in the Virtual Office
Total Time in VR: 4 hours and 20 minutes (across 6 VR sessions)
Use Cases: Focus Time (55% – 2 hours 22 min), Team Meetings (23% – 1 hour), MiniMindfulness (12% – 30 min), 1:1 Meetings (11% – 27 min)
A decent bounce back after a lackluster Monday start. While I don’t require myself to hit 4 hours a day (50% of my working day), I am trying to make it a goal. I won’t sacrifice work productivity to achieve this goal of course, and I never have to because I have found thus far that VR only makes me more productive, not less.
I did half of our weekly All Company All Hands meeting in my private office and then a co-worker who I was slacking with said “let’s jump into VR for the second half” and that’s what we did. It was such an amazing contrast to go from Zoom/Slack Communication to sharing a virtual table with another person, watching in real time, and being able to speak to each other if something in the presentation struck us. Another moment when VR just solidly kicked Zoom to the curb.
Cup Half Empty: Frozen avatars again in my first meeting of the day. It was an hour project meeting and the avatars froze off and on many times. I was also kicked out of Workrooms at one point, but I was in a unique situation when it happened. I was moving from my private office to a virtual conference room, I was casting my computer and didn’t disconnect before jumping rooms, and when I got to the room before trying to re-connect the computer, which had disconnected when I moved, I tried to change the room arrangement. Instead of a new arrangement I found myself kicked all the way out. I’ll admit I caused that as much as anything by trying to do too many things at once. Hopefully in the future Workrooms can handle my fast fingers!
Cup Half Full: I already kind of hit it above. The half full was being in collab for a traditional Zoom meeting. I joined another meeting at the end of the day that I often miss. I was in VR already doing Focus Work, so I added the Zoom call into my right hand screen and decided to watch. I got sucked in due to the topics. And I was conversing with co-workers in Slack on my center screen. I was basically on a Zoom call, but being in VR meant I had massive screens and my distraction free zone of the Lake Office.
Side note: the latest update for the Quest2 and Quest Pro allows for filming via the passthrough cameras. Which is how I took the picture for today’s header! This is HUGE for creating tutorials and reviews of Mixed Reality solutions. Better with the Pro because it’s color, but still good to have it on the Quest 2 as well.
#TLDR
I got back over the 50% mark today. I know my hours will be lower the rest of the week due to a complex schedule, but I keep telling myself that it’s okay to miss those marks. The goal isn’t to prove you can do 50% of your time in VR. The goal (well one of them) is to determine how much time makes sense, is useful, and scalable. I am certain it won’t be 50%. Not yet. But I hope some day that is a low number across the metaverse campuses of the future. But now I’m just dreaming a bit. Gotta keep my “test hat” on firmly. The experiment is still running.
Till Tomorrow…
Carrier Pigeon XR 