In the latest blog post by Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, a lead developer/consultant at Oculus, Eve Online, and of course Linden Lab, he shares his thoughts on using virtual worlds for real world work. Most of the examples he gives there are from his time as a Linden -- but I wouldn't be surprised if we see Oculus come out with products partly inspired by the lessons he describes here. Such as:
After an hour or so of pair programming with Zero to hand off the code I’d been working on during the UK daytime, other Lindens would start arriving at the San Francisco office and we would start using Second Life for larger scale team meetings. Even without tracked headsets, the 3D positional audio and instantly recognizable avatars made these meetings more successful than video conferencing. Because everyone was in Second Life together I felt far more present than I typically do using video conferencing to join a meeting in Menlo Park as the lone participant in London. Everyone was an equal participant in every meeting.
I expect this to be a common model for collaboration between remote workers in VR: the virtual space provides a forum for communication, conversation and annotation while existing applications, editors and tools are brought in to VR to provide familiar and powerful ways to create content together. I’m particularly excited about the possibilities for people to collaborate on very complex problems at the limit of human comprehension like large scale software development which are often hard to discuss in real life, but possible to visualize, understand and explore together in VR.
This doesn't necessarily mean copying business standard meeting tools into a VR space, so much as leveraging the capability of virtual worlds in a work context. As Jim puts it to me:
"There's lots of low hanging fruit around building skeuomorphic work experiences which allow people to import cues from real-life work environments, but what I'm really excited to see are experiences which take advantage of the affordances of virtual worlds to allow things like turning data in to landscapes that can be explored by groups of people to understand large scale problems at the limit of human understanding. As a software engineer the obvious use case is exploring large scale code bases to understand things like dependencies and code coverage, which is what I was exploring with the Second Life Reflector demo, but I think these ideas are portable to many domains. The IBM build in Second Life which allowed people to explore [3D models of'] chemical structures together is another good example."
This probably becomes even more important in the COIVD age, when more and more work is done by employees working remotely.
"I think virtual worlds can be valuable for most people working with distributed teams," as Jim puts it. "Second Life didn't have functionality specifically designed to support work when [fellow Linden Lab engineers} Zero, Kelly and I started using it for work, but I'm most excited about experiences designed to support work in complex domains where the ability to use the digital environment to support the work becomes valuable.
"As a concrete example I've been in innumerable meetings where engineers have drawn software diagrams on a whiteboard. That information already exists digitally. Instead of reproducing it I should just be able to import it and then navigate around it to find the piece I want to talk about and hide the details I don't want to discuss.
"In many domains just being able to add the people you want to work with to your workspace as avatars would be huge, but it doesn't leverage the virtual environment as much if those avatars are just overlaid on your real environment."
I agree with all this, but don't believe a VR headset should be necessary for all this -- just enabling it on a cloud-streamed 3D space on any device should be the end goal. I explain more at length here.
Read the rest on Babbage's blog, and don't miss his other posts (and my commentary on them) below:
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