Day 30 in the Virtual Office!
Total Time in VR: 3 hours and 40 minutes (across 6 VR sessions)
Use Cases: Focus Time (73% – 2 hours 40 min), Team Meetings (14% – 30 min), MiniMindfulness (14% – 30 min)
Closing out WEEK 6!!! Today was a busier day in VR than I expected it would be. I only had two meetings (one VR and one Zoom), so I decided to get some Focus Work done this morning. I also decided to use the Quest Pro today, mainly as a battery test. My first observation is that while the screen is a little better in Horizon Workrooms, I did not find it so much better that I could see a strong difference. People might disagree. I’m one of those music listeners that can’t tell the difference between good speakers and great speakers (I can tell when they are bad though!). So different eyes would probably have different opinions.
I enjoyed the passthrough desk of the Quest Pro because it is color and high resolution for certain. Also since the bottom of the Quest Pro is open, it’s easier to look down at the keyboard or my phone when needed.
A lot of people ask me how I can work for hours inside the VR Office and many questions are directed at the input device (keyboard specifically). I made this short video today to demonstrate how the passthrough camera works, even when you are in the immersive VR Lake Office. I figure it’s easier to understand when you can see it.
Cup Half Empty: I’ve saved the battery test for my “half empty section”. I tracked my Quest Pro usage and can say definitively that the batter lasted 2 hours and 9 minutes before dying. I road the battery until the headset shut itself off. That means if you are using a Quest Pro you will need to be plugged into the wall to use if for longer than 2 hours at a time. I haven’t tested the re-charge timing, but managing batteries is certainly not ideal for workplace productivity. With a long cable you can be tethered to the wall without really noticing it, but still it’s not the preferred setup. With my Quest 2 the battery life is similar but I have the option to upgrade battery life with my extended battery head strap (giving me roughly 5 extra hours of time). The design of the Quest Pro is not conducive to the same model.
Cup Half Full: I worked in both my Private Office and my “Workshop” space today, and felt incredibly productive. I used my new neck fan and noise cancelling headphones to really isolate myself in the VR space. While not something I’d recommend doing for a long period of time, it really is a nice lever you can pull in Virtual Reality, that allows you to really focus at the task at hand, and avoid all distractions.
#TLDR
I ended Week 6 with a better day than I expected. Since I’m took some personal time in the afternoon today I actually worked almost 4 out of 5 hours today! That’s pretty wild. I’ve recently started following some people on LinkedIn who do VR 40 hours a week. I think that type of work is good for a small sub-section of the workforce in the current state. I think I could do those types of hours if my Zoom schedule allowed. But we need to find the scalable point. It will most likely be a spectrum, as my manager hypothesized yesterday, while we were pondering a bit during a meeting. It will be cool to see where the curve begins and ends. Two weeks left till the number crunching starts.
Till Monday…
Carrier Pigeon XR 