What Virtual Worlds Need to Become Real World Offices, Post-Coronavirus

With more and more people working from home amid the continued coronavirus pandemic, many virtual world/tech analysts speculate we'll see a rise in virtual worlds used as real world office spaces. Wired just pondered that very topic from a slightly different direction:

[H]ere in the San Francisco Bay Area, office lights are winking out one by one as businesses send their employees home to work, and everyone’s talking about Zoom and Microsoft Teams and Hangouts. We all know these tools don’t work that well. We can all predict the frustration and miscommunications they will cause over the next few weeks or months (or more?) of remote employment. As this future sails ever closer, I can’t help but think: Weren’t we supposed to have virtual reality in the workplace by now?

No, we don't actually want VR to become the remote workspace, at least not any time soon: VR headsets are still too expensive, too heavy and sweat-inducing to wear for over an hour, let alone eight, while virtual reality still causes nausea in a large percentage of people. (There may even be a gender component to the nausea, with women much more likely to experience it in VR, which would make mandatory VR for work a total non-starter.)

Virtual worlds (i.e. immersive 3D spaces), however, do have much more potential as a remote workplace. But at least seven hurdles remain:

Non-human avatar options: The avatars pictured above, from a VR workspace startup, are what I have in mind, clearly conveying their purpose as a professional tool. Many virtual world companies for work offer human avatars by default, which immediately creates an impression that they're for a game -- a deal-breaker for many executives. 

Extremely cross-platform: Some workers may want to use VR for work, but for everyone else, they need every conceivable option: Mac, PC, and iOS/Android, at minimum. 

Extremely thin client: Most people have multiple programs running simultaneously at work. A workplace world must therefore run alongside them, and not require heavy resources to run.

Four -- yes four -- more, after the break:

Immersive, spatial audio: So far, Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity has the best offering that I'm aware of -- click the video above, and listen with headphones. Skype remains incredibly powerful for group calls, but one thing Skype and other conferencing systems don't have is a sense of place -- i.e., the feeling that I'm in the same office room or office lobby with the people I'm talking with, to the point where they sound like they're in front/behind/to the left or right of me.

Tight integration with cloud-based services, especially Google Docs: If you need to exit or minimize your main work tool to access a virtual world -- and for many/most workers, Google Docs/Gmail is that tool -- it's a deal-breaker.  What's needed instead is for Google Docs to work fully within the virtual world, with no need to exit. (I imagine a feature where you click on a virtual world in your virtual office space, and that then opens up Google Docs, or even a fully interactive, low latency web browser, that takes up most/all of your screen.)

Frictionless firewall/access support: I recently worked with a Fortune 500 company experimenting with a virtual world for prototyping. But because employees couldn't get through their corporate firewall, they had to walk across the street to a coffee shop, to go into it. But as far I know, no virtual world has made firewall tunneling easy to set up and manage.

Buy-in from virtual world companies: Remember when Linden Lab was promoting Second Life as software for meetings? I was once on a phone interview with the company about that topic, but had to interrupt the Linden executive to ask: "Shouldn't we be doing this call... in Second Life?"

Which points to what is perhaps the biggest hurdle: Until actual virtual world companies regularly use their own platform for meetings and as virtual office spaces, and can prove they're productive in them, there's really no point promoting them as workspaces to other companies and sectors. 

And the thing is, "virtual worlds for work" are no longer just a marketing angle, but something we need soon: It may actually help save lives and keep the economy from tanking further.

Comments

[Fionalein]

Can we play bullshit bingo on this report? YES WE CAN!...Please inform us
what product your sources has to sell. I smell the fouls stench of some marketing department here.

[Orca Flotta]

\o/ Hoohoo Fiona! \o/
Fancy to see you here. ;)

[Gwenette Writer]

Not bullsh*t. There is no product that offers what businesses needs as outlined above. As a virtual world (vw) developer, I run into these barriers all the time with university and business clients that want a multi-purpose learning space with a sense of place or a structured immersive training scenario, but also need doc support, mobile capabilities, often firewall tunneling, and encrypted communications. The fact is, the viewers for most immersive 3D vw are memory/CPU hogs, require high-graphic cards and are not web-based. I am always testing new software/platforms, but none come close to offering solutions that overcome all seven hurdles listed above. ** Wagner, if I am wrong and you have a hidden card up your sleeve, PLEASE let me know asap!

[fionalein]

The platforms are out there, they even have a common standard: Scorm. What they don't have is virtual space as you really have no need for virtual 3D space in training softwares. So the consensus of the E-Learning community is "We don't need 3D". 3D scenarios can make sense in special occasions but you should embed them in a common learning platform not embed a common Learning plattfform into 3D. You don't want a game environment as top layer, you want a professional learning environment. If you take away human avatars it is still looking like a game but a crappy game to the general public out there. Don't tell me the "But it's no game." mantra, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
Try to devolp something like that and expect the Boards of Directors to ask themselves the question "So what is the educational benefit of that game?" once you they closed the doors behind you,...

[Joey1058]

The confusion stems from needing to do a group meeting. How imperative is a group meeting, that you need to experience physical presence? Skype calls and a separate browser window with a shared set of Google docs has worked for years. 3D/VR will default to social more times than not, with little being accomplished that a Skype call couldn't have done.