We worked in a VR office during lockdown to get over Zoom fatigue

I didn’t know the closest I’d get to bonding with my coworkers in 2020 would be by strapping a screen to my face. 

I never got to meet the bulk of them — you know, my East Coast work “family” — before lockdown life locked me into the Bay Area. Sure, there was the occasional weekly video chat. But that was really the extent of it. 

“We’ll fly you out for a visit in the New Year,” management told me. That was the plan and I was fine with that. 

Thing is, that New Year — the 2020 that will go down in infamy — brought with it a very unwelcome surprise. (Do I even need to spell it out?) 

Eventually, we all adjusted to our new socially distanced world. Zoom soon became a buzzword even grandmothers knew. Webcams were often out of stock online.  Life became one unending series of scheduled screen time.

Then the novelty wore off, the WFH fatigue set in, the cold winter months approached, and many wondered how we could continue on living and working this way. 

And when would it end?

That answer never came. But I got an idea around the time I reviewed the Oculus Quest 2 in October 2020. As part of the coverage for that device, I’d agreed to meet with Spatial, a company with offices in New York and San Francisco that’s focused on “transforming work” through mixed-reality. 

The promise of its tech? Be present in the virtual space as you work. The company offers a free tier, a “Pro” account with features including unlimited storage and live speech translation for $20 a month, and an “Enterprise” option for corporate clients. 

With a VR headset on, I could enter a number of meeting spaces, interact with the avatars of colleagues, pull up giant web browsers, view videos, search and pin images, play with miscellaneous objects, take voice notes, and even — gasp! — message via Slack. It was the unholiest of dystopian tech promises: Ditch your real body and plug into the machine. 

And I was all for it. 

I figured Spatial would be a great way to finally “meet” a few members of my team, break down the Zoom barrier, and bond. But first, I needed company approval, and I also needed two extra Quest 2 headsets. (Support for PC-connected VR headsets has since been launched.)

Sure, it seemed like a hard sell but I was up for it. If this was the future of remote work, why not give it a real-world test? Thankfully, the powers that be at Mashable agreed, and Spatial, graciously, arranged to send headsets to two of my colleagues.

The experiment was officially a go!

From November of 2020 through February of 2021, I would meet with Mashable Tech reporters Brenda Stolyar and Alex Perry within Spatial, often three times per week or more, and never for longer than an hour at a time. We’d discuss upcoming assignments, edits to pieces, our weekends, films, bingeworthy TV shows, video games, social anxieties, and really whatever else you’d normally chat about with colleagues in an office kitchen. We’d laugh and goof off. Alex, in particular, took a special liking to Spatial’s assortment of “Stuff” — a vast library of objects like giraffes, martini glasses, dogs, sunglasses — that he could resize and pose as he pleased. 

With our 3D avatars modeled after uploaded photo likenesses, these interactions took on a “real” feel. Fine, the eyes were expressionless, but the body language was still there. You could turn toward a person, direct your voice, gesticulate, and move around. It made work… fun. And it generated ideas for some great pieces that wouldn’t have come about in flatscreen Zoomland.

Of course there were hiccups: Parent company approval for Slack and Google Drive integration took over a month. And by the time we finally got it, our internal Slack channels had changed so we couldn’t find it in Spatial. And forget about Google Drive — there was no way to elegantly search through that shared work account.

So we largely ignored those two critical drivers of workday functions when in Spatial. Instead, we opted to keep our laptop’s volume loud enough to monitor those telltale notification dings. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked just fine.

There was also the daily matter of strapping a piece of not-quite-weightless hardware to one’s face, and ensuring that it was adequately charged to last through a meeting. That bit definitely got annoying, as Brenda can attest. It was never obnoxious enough to deter us from using Spatial but just irritating enough that we’d all grumble about it from time to time.

Look, the Quest 2 is a huge leap forward for the convenience of VR but it still has a ways to go. Maybe Apple, or Sony, or even a future version of the Quest will relieve that pain point and deliver an innocuous, lightweight headset as convenient as a pair of Ray-Bans. That day will surely come, and soon. But it’s not here now.

Still, meeting in Spatial was a worthwhile change from the humdrum WFH routines we’d found ourselves inhabiting like some torturous, looping Groundhog’s Day. I think that’s why we all embraced it so readily — it was a technological distraction, an alternate reality free of social distancing and masks. There was a freedom in that professional virtual playground but it never really moved past recess. And that’s due to the current limits of the tech. 

To really work, we needed virtual keyboards mapped to our physical ones to type with the speed and fluency we were accustomed to. We needed to pin our private Slacks to monitor our work days, and respond to colleagues and breaking news. We needed windows into the real world around us so we didn’t feel closed off. We needed the eyes and mouths of our avatars to move in sync with our real bodies. We needed that extra uncanny layer to convince us to stay and work for longer. 

All that said, when the experiment had wrapped and our daily meetings had ended, we all kind of missed it. It was like being a part of some secret world (and club) where you had superpowers and didn’t have to worry about washing or brushing your hair, beating your face (as the kids say), or wearing a Zoom-appropriate top (because we’re all wearing sweatpants below that screen). We were free from the demands of our physical bodies, and it was relaxing.

In the end, Spatial may not have replaced our need for Zoom or laptops, but it did bring the three of us closer. And, in a way, that was always one of the goals. It was mine, anyway.

Is Spatial a preview of what remote work will eventually look like? I think so, but the kinks, like efficient typing, need to be worked out first. And those headsets — both AR and VR, or XR — need to get much slimmer, with longer lasting batteries before they stay on our faces all day. Whether hardware like that’s three or five years away, I can’t say, but it’s definitely no longer the stuff of sci-fi dreams. 

You may not realize it, but the future of work is here already. It’s just a little cumbersome to wear at the moment.