Last year, Facebook's parent company changed its name to Meta and announced a way to work within an immersive VR environment, with as many screens as needed and a virtual keyboard that can be paired with a real one, at its Connect developer conference.
Its popular Quest 2 VR headset was released in October 2020 at a price point designed to bring VR to the masses. During the first year of the pandemic, the idea of being able to work from home, or indeed anywhere, gained traction, and VR appears to promise that if one prefers to sit at their desk while occasionally staring out of a starship window, they can.
A flood of technology articles extols a futuristic vision of work in which we interact with a virtual- or mixed-reality version of the world. Our office is wherever we set up shop. We simply put on a headset, step into the bath, and away we go, several virtual screens hovering in front of us, possibly a custom keyboard tray sitting atop the bubbles, wirelessly linked to a computer in another room and another world - one we used to know before we discovered something better.
Indeed, Meta Quest invites us to enter our ideal workspace, a place "where distractions vanish and productivity reigns." If I can shake the nagging feeling that a new era of increased productivity will be preceded by an awful lot of troubleshooting while nodding through several virtual settings menus while ankle-deep in lukewarm bathwater, then I'd agree that the future of work looks promising.
However, one concern I have with devices designed for both work and play is that they do not lend themselves well to discipline, and if we can work wherever we want, does that mean we should? The pandemic provided an opportunity for employers and employees alike to reimagine what work could and should be, but I don't believe there is widespread agreement on what that is, though I'm sure we all have a preference one way or another. VR has enabled us to further redefine the boundaries of our ideal office as well as the overall work experience. If our working hours include wearing a headset and our downtime includes wearing a headset, then perhaps we're just trying to perfect escapism.
According to a literature review published by the UK government Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy titled The safety of domestic virtual reality systems, much of the current research into VR use focuses on 'cybersickness,' a type of motion sickness induced by immersion in VR that can produce physiological effects such as nausea, dizziness, and loss of spatial awareness.
Long-term effects of sustained VR use are currently unknown due to a lack of research, but it is reasonable to argue that a technology that attempts to redraw our perception of reality may have some unexpected and potentially hazardous effects.
A practical road map
VR is still in its infancy as a technology. Meta's roadmap now includes Project Cambria, a higher-end VR headset due this year, followed by the next iteration of the Quest VR headset in 2023 and two more headsets the year after that. Meta appears to be following a release schedule familiar to smartphone and smartwatch owners, a promising sign that it is committed to serving its Metaverse vision and extending Facebook's 2004 mission to 'bring the world closer together,' albeit in a new digital frontier.
But it's worth noting that this is all still in the works. Quest 2's regular update schedule, which unlocks new features for the headset, reflects the VR space's hotbed of development and innovation. The company announced a new feature called Infinite Office in September 2020, which is a virtual reality office space that effectively tracks your real keyboard, allowing for immersive solo productivity, but this seems like an odd addition for a headset primarily marketed to gamers.
In April of last year, Andrew Bosworth, Vice President of Facebook Reality Labs, said on Twitter: "There's this old story in the PC era called 'the reason to buy and the excuse to buy,' and the reason to buy a PC was to play games, the excuse to buy was to do spreadsheets." And you couldn't buy it until you could do both games and spreadsheets because you need both the reason and the excuse."
This is an intriguing revelation, not because it speaks to humanity's overarching motivations, but because there is an implicit acceptance that gaming may win the battle for VR, and that's fine. Meta's current goal is widespread adoption, and with VR looking less like a fad and more like a movement, it appears that they are succeeding in bringing about this vision of making virtual reality a mainstream reality.
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