I miss the office environment. The office was a place where working felt right. It was a place I had made quite a few friends and routines that I enjoyed with those friends. Due to the circumstances that COVID-19 has forced us into, we can’t have the office.
Our solution to the lack of having an office is more Zoom calls. I don’t have a rant on Zoom calls because the interaction that comes from actually seeing your coworkers and friends is better than nothing (if anything, I’m the one with my camera off and my microphone muted). The thing is, they are not effective replacements for personal interaction.
I don’t think we should be trying to replace personal interaction. We should be trying to establish new interactions.
I write this because of a combination of absurd experiences: reading Peter Thiel’s Zero to One (I have my thoughts on the book), Fortnite’s Travis Scott concert, and watching a Twitch streamer play VRChat. I also happened to spend time with some of the most brilliant minds in extended reality for a year, but that’s beside the point. Let’s get weird.
I’ll speak briefly on the book because it is very Silicon Valley and we hear enough of that every day, but one of the most successful entrepreneurs and investors of the past quarter-century has knowledge bombs for all of us. Thiel, early on in the book, talks about definite optimism and indefinite optimism. The former describes having plans for what you’re putting your money into and the latter describes putting money into things because you don’t know what they’re making money from. We’re putting money into Miro because it allows us to whiteboard for Zoom, but we really should be putting money into tech that allows us to be the same space.
1. Ready Player One : How Close Are We?
2. Augmented Reality — with React-Native
3. Five Augmented Reality Uses That Solve Real-Life Problems
4. Virtual Reality Headsets: What are the Options? Which is Right For You?
Fortnite, a game I don’t play, was the last experience that led me to the conclusions that I’ve come to. Travis Scott ruled Fortnite this week. The concert? Travis Scott was on the moon!!! People went to the concert together over Discord and had a good time. Coachella was a last year thing 💁🏽♀️
There has never been a better time to suspend our reality. What better time to do so than when the government (out of necessity) suspends it? The stream I watched was one of the most entertaining things I have watched in a long time. Two friends apart, but sharing moments changing outfits in VR, a bird asking for cheese in robot English, and their trusty virtual Sherpa. It was the very definition of weird, but the streamer and his friend’s willingness to accept that world made it feel like a real experience. A big part of that was their willingness to accept that they were in a wacky world and crossing paths that they had never come by. The crazy thing about VR is that our brains convince themselves that we’ll fall off a plank or a skyscraper is we have the headsets on. That is proof of concept for the immersion that we need to create a future workspace without the office.
The problems of not having the office and the problems of VR align pretty well in my head. Tomorrow, I might just list those out. Today, I might go to sleep.
