Depending on the mood of the day, Jeff Weiser settles down to work in a Parisian café, in a mysterious cave or from space, overlooking the Earth, thanks to a virtual reality helmet, like thousands of other people. of the office immersed in the metaverse.
This parallel universe, accessible through augmented or virtual reality glasses (AR or VR), is science fiction for the overwhelming majority of humanity. But the metaverse already exists on a daily basis for some, beyond gamers and technology enthusiasts.
He works up to 35 hours a week with a helmet on his head
Like Jeff, founder of a translation startup, who works 25 to 35 hours a week with an Oculus headset on his eyes from his home in Cincinnati, Ohio. He uses “Immersed”, a VR application that allows you to display several screens (computers, telephones, etc.) in the setting of your choice.
“We are better focused,” he explains, referring to the ubiquitous distractions at home. “And in terms of ergonomics, it’s perfect. The screens are at the right height and I can easily extend them if needed”. He taps on his keyboard without seeing it and speaks, apparently, in a vacuum. But in his virtual world, he interacts with the avatars of his colleagues (some live in Ireland and Argentina) and even sometimes with strangers, in “public” mode.
The pandemic has given a boost to teleworking technologies, which make it possible to abolish geographical barriers and to work in remote teams. Accenture, for example, bought 60,000 VR headsets for remote training. For start-ups in this niche, the Holy Grail is to succeed in replicating the ease of interaction in a real office.
On the Teamflow platform, this translates into a virtual office on their screen, in the form of a game board, where employees move the “pawn” that represents them. They can thus “approach” a colleague, and if this person has connected their microphone, they hear each other immediately, without having to make a phone call or type a message.
But there is no VR, because “the helmets are not ready for the moment”, estimates Florent Crivello, the founder of this software. It assures “to build the metaverse of work”, by applying the principle of “remanence”. “It is an essential characteristic of the metaverse. It means that the world has an existence that is separate from your presence in the world”.
For example, Teamflow users who “write” on a “whiteboard” in a room find it identical when they return there the next day. About 1,000 people use this application daily.
Immersed, for its part, says it has tens of thousands of followers, following a difficult period at the end of 2019, when the company almost disappeared. “We had hit rock bottom. I told my seven employees, in tears, that they had to look for work elsewhere,” says Renji Bijoy, the founder. “They all decided to stay and code for free.”
But health restrictions have revived investor interest in this vision of teleworking. And the VR app took off, like others, thanks to the impetus given by Meta (Facebook), the social media giant which also owns Oculus headsets and recently decided to focus on the metaverse.
“We’re trying to build a world where anyone can put on a pair of glasses and feel like they’re teleporting into their virtual office,” summarizes Renji Bijoy. The missing link? Technical improvements, of course, but above all “photorealistic” avatars that represent us as we are thanks to cameras and sensors, instead of the current cartoon images.
“We’re not that far off,” says the boss. “It’s not going to take five years, it’s going to be much faster.” In the meantime, some pioneers of VR work prefer to remain anonymous, lest this way of life be misunderstood or misinterpreted.
Like this New York graphic designer, who worked six hours a day with his Quest 2 (Oculus) headset on his eyes, reinforced with better quality straps to make it more comfortable. During the pandemic, “my productivity had doubled,” he says. To the point of forgetting to take breaks. “Routine tests showed I had a vitamin D deficiency, certainly exacerbated by time spent in VR.” Today, he hesitates to get back to it: “I don’t think it’s healthy to replace reality with virtual reality”.
