The title of the study published in Nature is "Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation", but it's specifically referring to Zoom-style online video calls:
In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas... Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus.
This tracks with my personal experience. I do countless editorial/brainstorming calls on Zoom and Skype video, and to make real substantial creative progress, find myself putting a browser window in front of the video feed, so I don't get distracted by people looking at me (looking at them). Or only having my camera on for the Hello and Goodbye portions of the call.
This strikes me as an opportunity for virtual world/metaverse platform-based meetings where typically, there is no direct eye contact, and the visual cues are immersive 3D graphics:
Judge for yourself, but I recall my Breakroom-based chat with Matthew Ball and Gene Park last year more vividly than I do pretty much any Zoom call -- both the visuals and what we discussed. I would love to see more peer-reviewed research, but I suspect there's something to this. In fact, as work meetings are frequently mentioned as a real world use case for metaverse platforms, I demand to see the research.
Hat tip: Kottke, who's taking a much-deserved sabbatical.
At vComm we've been banging that drum for more than a decade. It is easy to get early adopters and evangelists to see this. It is almost impossible then for them to convince enough other people in their firms of it. It is such a massive change that wide-spread adoption has been almost impossible to achieve. Zoom became wildly popular because they made something most people were already familiar with easier to do and more reliable. I'm still not sure how you go about achieving a total paradigm shift where every element is different. Maybe when there are enough Fortnite and Minecraft players in senior positions in the workforce?
Posted by: Neil Canham | Wednesday, May 11, 2022 at 11:53 PM