Our experience with working from home in VR
What did we use the glasses for?
We mainly use the Oculus Quest 2 for meetings with the team. We start off the week with a VR meeting and continue to use VR for our daily starts. In addition, we use the glasses for team building activities, like paintball or Beat Saber.
Advantages
The fun part of VR headsets, is the feeling that you're all standing in the same room together. This is ideal to kick-start our week or day. You can easily chit-chat with one another and you can hear other people talk in the distance when 'walking' through the room. You can also choose various meeting rooms for this headset. One day you can meet each other at a space center while you meet at the highest mountain top in the Himalayas the next day. With these headsets, you can go anywhere!
A meeting in VR is very interactive. You can draw, use sticky notes, and even customize your favorite meeting room. We are a lot more focused than in meetings behind our laptop. This is because you won't get distracted by open tabs or incoming emails. You immerse completely, so the meetings are a lot more productive.
Disadvantages
Still, there are a couple of disadvantages to VR meetings. For example, the headsets are pretty heavy, which may cause a headache. The weight of the headset mainly rests on your face, so we sometimes get out of a meeting with red pressure marks on your cheeks.
The battery also runs out pretty quickly. It's useful to charge the headset as much as possible, since it sometimes happens that the headset runs out of battery while in a meeting.
For 1-on-1 conversations, we still mainly use our laptops. It's difficult to quickly show something via desktop sharing in VR. This is why we tend to do these conversations via the laptop. It's just a little easier.
Team building
VR headsets are ideal to meet up for a paintball battle. The perfect team building activity, live from your living room.
We also received credit to purchase a game. After trying a few demos, we chose the game Beat Saber. The name says it all. To the beat of the music, you have to smash through blocks using your lightsaber. A super fun game that has a singleplayer mode and a 'party' mode. We all compete together and see who can get highest score. Playing a VR game after a long day of work feels great, like a real outlet.
