I think remote working really is a part of solution to this.
Perhaps augmented/virtual reality could be a good solution for some sort of application to have remote meetings with colleagues with headset in a virtual room/scenery and collaborate like that.
It could be used for daily standups and other meetings and it would remove the social isolation problem of remote working and make it much more feasible. Is any AR/VR company working on anything like that?
More generally, presence is the missing piece. VR is one possible solution to that, if you can solve the motion-sickness issues. Holographics (if real-time holos ever reach commercial viability...there's some interesting research on it now) is another possible solution. Perhaps there are other possibilities that people haven't found yet. Wrap around screens, like the Google Liquid Galaxy display? Projectors?
But someone needs to invent a way for office workers to feel like they can have an impromptu conversation, casually, with a coworker thousands of miles away before remote work really takes off.
Good virtual reality could make remote working a lot easier. Face time is important. I don't know if VR meetings could fully replace face-to-face, but I feel they'd go a lot further.
People will probably eventually learn to integrate things like video chat, multiplayer 2d environments or AR/VR etc. into a work collaboration system.
It's weird that so many assume that it's either physically in the office yucking it up or just completely disconnected and not using any internet communication tool at all.
Why not suggest something like a Discord server with a voice channel? Or try the new Meta Quest Pro for like a fifteen minute meeting every day. Or any of the various projects related to making remote work more social.
Or set up a weekly real life meeting at a coffee shop. Or playing some game online like Rainbow Six Siege. Or anything.
That's a social problem we'll have to address as remote working becomes ubiquitous. It helps if the remote environment is more immersive, with the team aware of each others' presence and activity even when they're not directly communicating. Keeps your head in the space, so to speak.
I disagree with you. I work remotely, I've had a lot of brainstorming meetings... and they almost always suck, to me the holy grail of remote work would be VR. I really want to have a meeting in VR where I can stand at a whiteboard (or an even better VR version) and show my ideas. The traditional tools REALLY suck.
Finding the equivalent of a face-to-face conversation is, in my opinion, one of the main communication problems (for the record, I don't think putting on a VR headset is the solution).
Working from home and working in an office have very different environments. So finding a solution that feels like the technology doesn't feel like it's present would go a long way to creating an improvement in remote work.
Another key issue, is being able to completely disconnect so that - by design - you can be separated from the constant barrage of communication without feeling worried about FOMO.
...but how do we get to remote working without crushing isolation? Can tech solve that problem?
Can tech solve the problem of getting a coffee with a couple of coworkers and feeling connected to them in a way that helps the technical argument two months from now?
Can tech solve the "Do I have my coworker's undivided attention or are they multitasking and ignoring me" problem?
Can tech solve the "I'm in the room with my boss and he can't ignore that I'm a human being" problem?
We are social creatures. A slack conversation isn't the same, and I don't think a VR conversation will be the same, especially with further distances. Do we say that everyone must live within 1,000 miles?
I admit, part of this is productivity theater. If you can simulate face time, seamless visibility at a meeting, sparking ideas spontaneously around the water cooler, etc., then maybe those dictating corporate conduct might actually be more willing to entertain mass adoption of remote work. As of now remote work is certainly feasible, but it’s definitely steps removed from the actual experience of being in person.
Also, my proposal isn’t meant to benefit engineers exclusively- teleconferencing through virtual workplaces should ideally help anyone who works in an office, not just those who are accorded more responsibilities that don’t involve social interaction.
Not the OP, but I've been thinking about this a lot recently.
The problem is that telecommuting is currently very limited by technology. You can currently only transport your voice and a single video view, while collaborating over a single view from a monitor. You end up missing on very many of the modalities available in the real world.
But my vision of what work and study could be like with good VR is The Magic School Bus. Assume that every time you an your colleagues wanted to do work on any domain, you would be transported into a hi-fi all-senses-included representation of that domain, which provides a perfect sense of presence. That technology is still quite far away, but once we're there, it would be significantly better than just being in a room with them. And the world would be forever changed.
I work remotely, as does pretty much my entire company. Some of the biggest issues we have due to remote work is communication tools. I haven't found a tool that can replace the ease of communicating with a large number of people in the same room when having a collaborative discussion. I think the issue is largely due to latency. It's take a lot of practice to understand how to communicate effectively using video conferencing software.
Another issue is team building / comradery. I don't know my current coworkers nearly as well as I've been able to know coworkers from previous companies I've worked with. When remote you don't get to go to lunch, grab coffee or a beer with your coworkers. We do travel a lot to meet up, but I still only see people I work with closely when doing so. As the company grows it's much more difficult to even begin to meet everyone in the company which is much easier when in and office because everyday you can bump into someone different.
We've tried to solve this to some extent through randomly pairing two people every two weeks to schedule a short 15 minute meeting. However the scheduling itself is not automated and it's not always easy to schedule time due to lack of proper calendaring software and distributed share calendars. This is definitely something that could be solved but it's just another challenge of working remotely.
Without going full VR I still think a dedicated piece of hardware might be the way to go to normalize across everyone's setups and preferences. Maybe a big ass tablet (or around the size of the Surface Studio) with networked persistent whiteboarding / kanban boarding / alert-messaging software could be an MVP. Those are the main things that I wish were improved after ~4 years working with distributed teams. Informational meetings per se I haven't really had problems with, google hangouts/meet or GoToMeeting have worked out well enough. I'm not sure how we'll ever solve the "conversations that only happen because your desk is next to mine" problem without VR though.
Remote work requires eye contact, which doesn’t exist yet. It will happen rapidly once we have VR with eye tracking.
The other thing missing from remote work tools is collocated workspaces (can’t fit that on your monitor). Existing VR tech solves that problem though.
Instead of working on Google Docs in your office, you’ll work IN Google Docs in VR, and your coworkers will be there nearby, and you’ll be able to talk face to face without leaving your workspace.
There is value in face-to-face conversation, and while software solutions like Google Hangouts help bridge the gap to some extent, they don't eliminate it entirely. There may be some advantages to yield with VR, but even at its current state, it can't replicate the real world. It's likely we'll start to see direct neural interfaces before we actually have means to replicate the face-to-face aspect that remote work sorely misses out on.
The current focus you have sounds an awful lot like what the founders of Pragli (later renamed to Pesto) were trying to address. It just shut down recently. https://twitter.com/PestoHQ
When they began in 2019, they reached out to interview me because I had been working remotely for five years. I tried to tell them that the lack of a "sense of feeling together" wasn't the problem they thought it was, and I tried to steer them into taking a look at ways of doing better telepresence with VR/AR, with a focus on pair programming and the like. They didn't listen, and I'm sad to say I was right.
If you want to solve real problems with remote work, you need to focus on how to get work done inside a VR or AR environment, and offer things like easy two-way screen sharing, as CoScreen (recently acquired by DataDog) and ScreenHero (swallowed up and destroyed by Slack).
A workplace is fundamentally about getting things done. Trying to build a virtual office in 2D is just window dressing that will get in my way and has no hope of getting used. You have competition in the most obvious space, which is already handled well through IRC, Slack and Teams.
If you want to facilitate spontaneous conversations and team culture, your client cannot be the company the employees work for. Those things happen on back channels like text messages, Signal, Discord servers, etc.
I'd be interested in glancing at what you've come up with, especially if it's not just yet another web or Electron app.
Well these folks will probably not have much context on what you are doing though. Offices are nice because people working in them have some shared reality, vision and goals. I know that the service or tool I build or use is built or used by another team for a specific purpose. A lot of the innovations I’ve seen happening are because humans with this shared reality try to solve one others problems, or at least talk about it. Many times, others will also actually help out if someone is stuck on something.
We need something to simulate this kind of shared reality somehow. Video conferences don’t do that. I’m sure there will be some innovation that might, I’m betting on cheap, high quality AR headsets. Right now it feels like in 2007... internet on cellphones was a thing but an iPhone with touchscreens had to be invented for something revolutionary to happen...
I still think a market is there for remote workers socialization. Currently trying the Immersed app, it has public and private spaces. It can be something like a virtual coffee shop, but better because you can hop around, mute the room, conference call, and use pass through for IRL interaction.
Instead of tying the purchase to a company, and having the company force it on employees... one can self select and socialize beyond the corporation boundaries
I think there's a broader picture here than our personal preferences about our ideal situations.
Consider software development teams. It's probably optimal for the team to be all co-located so they can communicate in person. But the internet today enables dispersed teams (that otherwise wouldn't be able to work together, e.g. for financial reasons) to pretty effectively collaborate on software.
The internet is providing additional options, that provides additional benefit. VR could provide collaborative benefits along these lines.
Well, as a person who moved to a new state and worked remotely for three years, I can attest that email, texts, and voice chat are no substitute for in-person visits. Just getting out among people or the environment can help. If you stay indoors and just work all the time, you'll get even more depressed and go a bit nutty. I know this from personal experience.
I can't comment on video chat, could never get that working at the other site because their machines were locked down to the point of uselessness without special permission from ITS requiring 5 pints of blood and a signature from god. I'd be interested to see whether actual VR could fill a void.
Perhaps augmented/virtual reality could be a good solution for some sort of application to have remote meetings with colleagues with headset in a virtual room/scenery and collaborate like that.
It could be used for daily standups and other meetings and it would remove the social isolation problem of remote working and make it much more feasible. Is any AR/VR company working on anything like that?
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