Are you bored of Zoom and Microsoft Teams yet? Fed up of seeing your colleagues pixelated faces in 240p?
Since the lockdown started millions of us have benefitted from swapping boring face to face meetings for…..boring online meetings. With the occasional quiz thrown in.
One problem is the design. Although the technology behind online meetings has vastly improved in the last few years, it hasn’t taken the step forward to being truly immersive in the way that, for instance, video gaming has.
Could virtual reality help?
Last week I did my first presentation in a virtual workspace called QUBE. If you want to imagine what that’s like it’s a bit like listening to a presentation in Fortnite - and being able to comment and contribute to it.
What I talked about - the opportunities and challenges of remote work - is linked here. However for the purposes of a Lab post I want to talk about how we could use this type of technology to improve our collaboration at work.
The people behind QUBE don’t actually describe it as VR but as Enhanced Reality (ER). In VR the focus is on consumption so users are passive, playing games etc, whereas ER enables collaboration, interaction and extends skills and capability.
That’s me - in the middle..
So how does it work?
Firstly you’re not visible on screen so not distracted by worrying about what you look like. You’re represented by an avatar just like you would be in a game. You sit at a laptop with a conventional headset on.
You can move about the conference room and campus and chat to people either through voice or text chat. Impressively the closer you get to someone the more you can hear them, which encourages ‘social bubbles’ where you can sit and chat or walk over to a white board and collaborate with sticky notes - just like the real world.
This is a vastly different experience to conventional video conferencing where people are represented in a gallery as if they are suspects in an Police ID parade. It feels more human.
As Tammy Watchorn has said this is about collaboration across organisational boundaries and geography. It is not 2D voice/video conferencing.
“It’s not a talking shop, or run using traditional hierarchies. But it does challenge current ways of working – meetings, papers,reporting, and…hierarchies. Everyone has an equal voice. It challenges our normal thinking to help create, and deliver, innovative solutions at speed while saving time and money and removing the need to travel. It is the future of work.”
The experience of presenting in QUBE was completely different to presenting on a stage - I imagine that it is much more accessible for introverts or just for people who don’t enjoy being the centre of attention.
That to me is the design challenge that the present crop of video conferencing tools have yet to crack. They haven’t disrupted the meeting format - it’s too easy for one person to set the agenda and lead. It’s too easy to just do what we did back in the office, just online.
If I have to work at home forever I want my own island like in Animal Crossing. I want to be able to have a walk about and drop into random conversations with people I don’t know. I want to visit other islands not just be stuck on Planet Bromford. I want to be able to get my friends, new and old, around to work on common problems and to come up with creative solutions. I want to play games. I want to have fun.
That’s the future of work I want to see.
