Day 34 in the Virtual Office
Total Time in VR: 4 hours and 59 minutes (across 7 VR sessions)
Use Cases: Focus Work (54% – 2 hours 41 min), 1:1 Meetings (31% – 1 hour 34 min), Team Meetings (8% – 24 min), MiniMindfulness (7% – 20 min)
Take a look at that mountain in the distance of my cover photo today. I look at that mountain all day long. I actually arrange my screens so that I have an unobstructed view out that window. Today I really noticed how working in the Lakes Office gives me the illusion of working in a much larger room (with some nice views, albeit cartoon-y). That’s one of the things I think I’ve been taking for granted. I have been so focused on how going to the Lakes Office makes it feel like I’m “leaving my house”, but it also makes it feel like I’m in a different sized space. Here is my home office setup. You can see I’m very much backed into a corner (mainly because I don’t like facing the wall when I’m not in VR). But in VR I have space all around me. It’s good for my head, and I look forward to more virtual worlds to set my virtual desk inside and work.
Cup Half Empty: Workrooms access continues to be a challenge. I’ve had a few folks find success by un-installing and re-installing. Another was having issues, then did the update successfully and issues went away. It’s just been inconsistent, which is challenging with new tech and a semi-skeptical audience. The people at my company, OssoVR, deeply believe in the value of Virtual Reality, but the scope is tied to Medical Education and Surgical Training. Even for these true believers, the idea of working all day long (or 50%) in VR seems un-realistic. That’s one of the goals of this experiment, to understand what is realistic. And fighting with Workrooms access and updates is only making my job more challenging this week.
Cup Half Full: After the last update the screens seem more stable. They also pop up much quicker. I was hoping the update would finally bring virtual monitors to PC users, as that is a huge area of interest, and I’m one of the few Mac users at my company. Fingers crossed that feature comes soon.
It was another super productive day in VR. Met with my boss in Workrooms to go over some documents. Hosted several other meetings in VR and it is always better than Zoom (of which I did a bunch of today as well, as always). I started in MiniMindfulness alone today, and took the opportunity to find a new spot that fit one person. Here’s a shot from my hidden location on the El Dorado course.
#TLDR
The numbers stay strong on Day 34, and not because I’m trying to fudge the numbers up; I’m actually just having more time to spend in VR and I have lots of focus work to do before the end of the year. We wrap up Week 7 (of 8) tomorrow. I always think Friday’s will be slow, but last week was a full rich VR day, so….
Till Tomorrow…
Carrier Pigeon XR 