How VR Helped My Team of Stir-Crazy Professionals Get Through the Pandemic
The following is adapted from Deep Tech by Eric Redmond.
If your work situation and team are anything like mine, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge. It has required new working arrangements, remote collaboration, and the added difficulty of maintaining connections between colleagues without being in the same room for months on end.
After a while, my colleagues and I found that our camaraderie had taken a hit. Video chat wasn’t cutting it. Fortunately, we found another solution — a way to break through the stir-craziness of working from home and reconnect with one another through technology: virtual reality (VR).
Far from its uses being limited to video games and novelties, VR can be a powerful tool for remote collaboration, communication, and productivity. It worked for my team, and it can likely work for yours, too.
The Challenge of Working from Home
On March 16, 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of Oregon joined other US states and countries by instituting a stay-in-place order. Offices were closed, along with my kid’s school and the park across the street from my town house, and just like that, my colleagues and I joined others in the great transition to working from home.
Being a team of mostly software engineers, our day-to-day work could be comfortably executed remotely. We had long ago adopted real-time chat apps like Slack and kept track of our work in a digital Kanban board with computer source code on GitHub. The only major change to our work was that our daily standup meetings, Agile Scrum, were done remotely through Zoom video chats. But no matter how many tools we adopted, something was missing.
We completed our work, but the sense of camaraderie faded. That ineffable sense of companionship — of being around one another, sparking unstructured dialogs and socializing in person — was lost in sanitized video chats. It was better than email but still a disappointing simulacrum of true presence.
Finding a Solution to Remote Working
Being a team of professional problem solvers, my colleagues and I hunted for a solution to our connection problem.
We first tried keeping an ever-present video chat open, but the endless apologies of background noise and a burning need to explain each time you stepped away from the keyboard quickly grew tedious. We structured team lunches, which were nice, but a screen covered with a dozen closeups of ravenous maws can kill an appetite. My team is mostly teetotalers, so happy hour was out. What were we to do?
By pure dumb luck, I had happened to buy top-of-the-line VR goggles for my entire team a month prior to the pandemic as a reward for delivering an unrelated project. So we looked to VR as a potential solution.
After several false starts, we finally found a service called Immersed VR. This app allowed us to connect to one another in a virtual room, with an avatar representing each team member. We could show one another our monitors, the virtual version of leaning over your coworker’s shoulder to collaborate on a problem.
Best of all was the virtual whiteboard. Robbed of a physical office space, this allowed us to stand around a whiteboard, draw out concepts, and speak to it. Craziest of all, since we connected to our physical laptops in a virtual world, we were still able to answer emails and attend the odd Zoom meeting inside of VR.
Regular workdays were only the beginning. We began attending conferences in virtual reality. Saving the cost and time of travel or nights alone in janky hotels, we were able to walk around a conference space, attend more lectures together, and comment on them live. We were stuck at home, and yet we were everywhere.
Leveraging the Advantages of VR
Virtual reality effectively allowed my team to feel like we were in the same room together when we weren’t. It helped us bridge the gap caused by remote working and transported us to a space where we could connect. How does the technology do this?
VR teleports our minds into a world unreal. Unlike video games or video chat, which trigger one or two neurotransmitters, VR has been shown to trigger more, enabling a sense of brain-body presence that other technologies can’t match. Researchers call this “deep embodiment,” which can increase feelings of connection and fight the isolation inherent in mass quarantine.
If you and your team are struggling to stay connected while working remotely, consider VR as a potential solution. Like any new technology, virtual reality comes with a learning curve, but once you move past that, it can be a powerful tool for bringing your team together when you have to be physically apart.
For more advice on emerging technologies, you can find Deep Tech on Amazon.
Eric Redmond is the Forrest Gump of technology: a twenty-year veteran technologist who always happens to show up wherever deep tech history is being made, from the first iPhone apps to big data to Bitcoin. He has advised state and national governments, Fortune 100 companies, and groups as varied as the World Economic Forum and MIT Media Lab. He has also authored half a dozen technology books (including two tech books for babies) and spoken on every continent except Antarctica. Today, he’s a husband, a dad, and the leader of a global tech innovation team.
