I've been covering video conferencing since the late 1980s, when AT&T called me to see a very early implementation at Apple. It failed spectacularly. A decade later, I've also seen the efforts of Intel and HP fail.
The latest wave of video development was fueled by the pandemic, when people were forced to work from home and video tools advanced more in two years than in the previous two decades.
As we look at the next big thing planned, the emergence of immersive virtual reality (VR) and metaverse collaboration tools, it's time to find out what's needed, what can be done, and if it will work. And it is essential to remember the needs of the employees themselves.
Commitment and ownership of employees
The most compelling argument for virtual meetings is that they eliminate travel. The advantage of time, without commuting, is obvious, as is the reduction in the risk of accidents, illnesses, imbalance between work and personal life and time (the need to take people to the same place takes more time than taking them to a call, especially if most are far away).
The downside is that remote employees face a lot of problems. Without strong management, they may not have well-defined goals or milestones. New remote employees have limited opportunities to build the relationships necessary to move forward. And remote workers reported that if they didn't already have relationships with coworkers, they couldn't create them. This lack of belonging, for lack of a better term, increases the risk of employee retention and can lead to hostile behavior towards the company, as the individual may decide that they are at a disadvantage compared to those who show up at the office. . .
If you want to have a sustainable remote or hybrid workforce, you need to give workers what they need to be successful, and tie that in with raises and promotions; provide managers with a higher level of comfort with the performance of remote employees; and give remote employees clear instructions on where they spend their time.
The overall effort should also be directed at helping an employee develop a deep relationship with their company and colleagues. That means virtual social events, connecting employees who have common work and personal partners, and collaborative partners that lead to stronger teams.
Team building efforts tend to fall off a cliff with remote workers, but the opposite should be true given their infinitely greater needs.
The future role of virtual reality
The market continues to push back on virtual reality (VR) headset options, with the biggest recent flop being 3D television, which had relatively lightweight and inexpensive headsets compared to other VR and augmented solutions. There are two ways to approach this, and they are not mutually exclusive. One is to remove the hull and use a different technology like "hard light" or LED walls. (The first isn't a thing yet, and the other is currently so expensive it's not viable.)
Another path, more likely in the short term, is to create helmets that have much broader applicability than current helmets. This means making them more attractive to use and providing compelling secondary use (such as watching videos for entertainment, privacy, and security). If I want to use a headset because it does something I want, aside from being useful for video conferencing, I'm more likely to try it for collaboration.
Right now, despite the hype, the Metaverse isn't real enough to be compelling. And headsets are closely tied to VR experiences that won't drive mass use. This leads to an imbalance between cost, appearance and utility. Some of the upcoming headphones are more eyeglass-like, possibly more attractive and cheaper, but they don't isolate the user well from their surroundings and lack optical features that can prevent motion sickness and reduce immersion.
Getting it right is key to establishing a permanent pivot between in-person and remote meetings rather than the temporary pivot we've seen due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For remote work to be as effective for businesses (and employees) as in-person meetings, any VR option must be better on a number of vectors. Hardware and software need to evolve for greater utility, and headsets need to become something people want to wear. We need to make sure that as helmets become more attractive, lighter and cheaper, they don't lose their ability to isolate the wearer from the world around them (if necessary) and protect them from transport damage and physical accidents.
The metaverse is not ready. And when it is, if the hardware and solutions that define it don't meet the broad needs of the employees who use it, it will fail and take many businesses down with it. The repeated inability to fully define the problem, let alone solve it, greatly reduces the likelihood that we will remain, as we seem to want, largely remote instead of hopping on planes, trains, or cars.
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