My love, Krystle, gave me an Oculus 2 VR headset for my birthday. I had experienced one previously, but to have your own set is something else entirely. In particular, I was excited to play The Thrill of the Fight as a means to get a good cardiovascular routine into my workouts. There are a few reasons for this:
- Personally, I need a good competition that’s safe in order to enjoy and pursue the endeavor. My reluctance to getting hit increases with age as does sharing the stinky sweat of a community gym (not to mention the COVID breeding grounds they seem to be these days). Maybe haptic suits and/or a flipped VR experience where we go full Holodeck can one day simulate the sensations, but for now, I’m immersed.
- I’ve lived a reasonably active life filled with a lot of outdoor imaginative play with friends or alone. I played a lot of structured sports and the ones I was good at, I played A LOT. I have to do a lot of movement to get a sweat going, but I’ve got to be mindful of how I achieve it given youth knee damage from Osgood Schlatter, age and a right knee surgery, as well as interest vs. boredom.
The immersion is powerful, therefore taking care of the boredom part. I can quit on a match the moment I feel discomfort, and I’m not messing up someone else’s workout in the process. The competition is perfect–just enough to keep me pushing in ways I wouldn’t if you simply take the gear off and say move around like you were with it on! If it weren’t for a support beam in the middle of my two-car garage, I’d have a full ring to “fight” in.
Aside from the obvious “cool,” and “it helps me exercise” benefits, I cannot help but wonder about the future of virtual reality this experience portends, especially with remote work and learning. In a future post, I will delve into my personal retreat from teaching as a consequence of technology, the pandemic, and a variety of political factors. For now, I’ll just focus on the work part and save my commentary on what this means from a teaching and learning standpoint vs. capitalistic enterprise.
On Work
Could VR help alleviate emergent Zoom fatigue? Standford professor Jeremy Bailenson points out four (4) reasons why any form of videoconferencing is wiping us out and thankfully offers solutions:
- Eye-contact is too much online – Solution: Reduce the screen size of the app containing the call. This comes down to the intensity of eye contact generally, and the way the medium of the camera/video-screen presentation puts a premium on the remaining non-verbal cues otherwise left out from the screen. With a wide screen, at least move the call to half of the screen. If smaller, then it’s better as you can work less hard on anxiety-sourced behaviors.
- Viewing your reflection in real time is anxiety-producing (or mania-producing) – Solution: Many services make this default, so the burden is on users to hide their self view (after you check to make sure you’re not a cat). For me, I like performing and checking my performance, but resent how my talent for this medium is co-opted as an essential work-place/social skill. More over, as a social scientist, I pride myself on trying to be aware of social constructions so as to live as free of them as possible. In this way, we are all being asked to turn our homes into mini television production studios. This is cost-prohibitive to say the least, but counter to social development.
- Fixed conference positions reduces mobility essential for our brains to function at peak – My solution: If you have heard of Brain Rules, the idea that moving our bodies is essential for helping our brains move shows why our videoconferencing is–at times–dreadful. I’ve been lucky to be active pretty much my entire life, but during the inactive times, my excitement for life and ideas definitely dulled. My deepest bout of depression lacked any sort of physical exercise. Then, from a physics perspective, I cannot help but think by moving faster, I’m living longer by slowing down time ever so slightly. Or maybe I’m just draining my life-force faster.
- The cameras make us anxious – Solution: when possible, go audio only AND turn away from the screen. This too has its issues, but they are related to learning access better saved for the aforementioned future post.
The Current Future Outlook
Joel Garcia rightly points out the cost-prohibitive nature to a more widespread adoption of VR in the coming months, but in the coming years? The pandemic shattered the notion we all must commute to a physical location for the economy to more or less continue to function. It is clear there will be efforts to improve upon the way we remote, so my interest here is in contributing to commenting on where we are at and where I think we should go. Bernard Marr believes the next few years will integrate more of the senses than the current visual-dominant experience, further unleashing the power to meet at the office from home and do so with a fully representative avatar in place of awkward and unnatural webcam postures. For now, gaming is the dominant use and here you can get a glimpse of what’s to come in VR environmental engineering for further immersive experiences in that realm.
Having the latest neoliberal device that will become inextricable from and essential to living our lives is always an unknown. However, if you can afford VR equipment, and do not have it, you should consider getting ready for the way you will log into work in the future. Even if something else comes along before a particular route branches, remote work experiences will improve to be more fun. I can imagine having to get to the meeting via Minecraft, only to transition to a Star Trek Enterprise conference room, and then finish with a team squadron of X-Wings on the way out. What was the work task? Most likely just that–keeping us busy because our labor is too expensive, it’s cheaper to subsidize most of us with UBI and other experience jobs that pay nothing, but engage us in healthy ways. On the flip side, R&D can be shifted to the user base (if it isn’t already), acquiring massive data points to make better and new experiences for the few who still “work.” But like the future of learning, the future of work is a separate topic altogether.
For now, time to warm-up for my next “bout!”