View from my headset aboard Immersed’s “Orbitarium”
I float in space, surrounded on all sides by a grand view of the Milky Way Galaxy. A movie-theater-sized screen hangs before me, gently curved, everything at the perfect viewing distance. Eight different panes glitter with code, facets of a technological jewel granting views into the brain of a system responsible for moving tens of millions of dollars a day. A communications console canted like a drafting table at my fingertips holds a workshop of quick-fire exchanges with my colleagues, my meeting calendar, various API references, and camera feeds of the “real” world. To my left, abutting the mammoth array of code, a two-story tall portrait display shows the specifications for the task at hand atop an ever-present Spotify playlist. I crank the tunes and get into my flow.
But this isn’t an excerpt from some Ernest Cline novel—this is my every-day experience. I’ll spend 40–50 hours in Virtual Reality this week, like I did last week and every (work) week for the last 2½ years. It’s not just fun and games — there are plenty of those, along with exercise, meditation, creativity, socializing, etc. — but for this article, I’m only focusing on (and counting) the work.
Yes, really: 8–10 hours a day strapped in. I’ve encountered a fair amount of skepticism about both the technology and the general premise, many nit-picks about the software, or how it fails to match some preconception about how things “should” work. Reddit in particular is full of naysayers, to whom I will rebut:
People saying: “It can’t be done,” are always being interrupted by somebody doing it. — Puck
The technological timeline is replete with supposedly doomed-to-fail notions and novelties that went on to wild success. Most were not born “fully formed”, and required several generations to grow and adapt as we grew and adapted to them. And no, this isn’t for everybody, not yet — but not only is it possible now, it’s the only way I use my work computer anymore.
My work is not VR related, either; it’s regular old programming, information systems development, and office stuff I just happen to do in VR. The strategy and tools apply to any computer and communications work right now and will apply to nearly everything in the future. “Working remotely” takes on entirely new dimensions when the distance from the beach to low-Earth-orbit is a single click.
Why am I telling you this, and why should you care?
To answer the second question, look at the Personal Computer boom of the 1980s: diehard computer geeks of the day saw incredible potential in the tools, and while they (we) spent a lot of time goofing off with the technology itself, still helped shape that state of the art into something useful to the general population. Not everyone was on board with the clunky beige boxes and the soothing squeal of a modem handshake at the time, yet in 2021 fully half the world carries a sleek pocket computer connected to the Information Superhighway.
Right now, Virtual Reality is at its “1980’s beige noise machine” stage: a geek cynosure and a consumer novelty. What’s coming will look very different from what’s here; nevertheless, the DNA is already taking shape and it’s not going to take another 40 years to change the world.
On that first question: I’ve been a full-time VR worker since April 2019, spending in the neighborhood of 4,500 hours banging away at real work on virtual screens. It’s not a stretch to say I’m in the top few percent of VR users on the planet; I’ve spent much time watching developments in the field and extrapolating future possibilities. I don’t insist on my version of the future, but I hope what I’ve seen is worth sharing.
I’m not going to cover everything — simply give a taste of how I make it work for me, and get people thinking, talking about, and pursuing the possibilities.
In common use “Virtual Reality” refers to a headset worn by the user, presenting them with a three-dimensional computer-generated environment. It’s the same kind of interactivity and visual feedback available in modern video games or simulators, only more engaging due to the sense of scale, presence, and all-encompassing field of view.
The cool kids have added several new companion phrases for how simulated content might blend with the physical environment, such as “Mixed Reality” (MR) or “Augmented Reality” (AR), with the umbrella term “Extended Reality” (XR) covering everything. For the sake of this article, we’ll stick with “VR”.
This is only the latest iteration in a long line of “virtual” environs and abstractions, a logical evolutionary step. Books are fantastic examples of conceptual environments: models of real or fictional actors, events, settings, and ideas—but static, frozen in time. Theater is a better illustration, a manufactured (virtual) scenario presented to an audience as a dynamic shared experience.
Technology has refined and distributed these shared experiences throughout history. Live theater evolved to movies, then television, then dynamic/responsive video (i.e., games): from stage to silver screen to LCD. It’s the same with music or audio performances: live presentation gave rise to the phonograph and its successors — home stereos, boom boxes, and the walkman moving it ever closer to the “user”.
We’ve had virtual audio strapped to our heads for over 100 years, and have finally reached a point where consumer-grade virtual visual can join it. Those visuals bring with them the illusion of space and scale and make it easy to translate physical actions into contextually rich commands. The dynamic, responsive, and immersive experience coopts our senses into perceiving the simulated environment as our inhabited space: our Virtual Reality.
Interacting with computer-generated worlds can be an engaging, magical experience — but is by definition immaterial unless there’s something to connect those actions to non-virtual outcomes. Sometimes that’s advantageous, like heavy equipment training, or rehearsing medical procedures. Inherently immaterial activities, those whose only product is communication, or a digital artifact, make no such trade-off — which brings us to computer work in an information economy, AKA “my office.”