Coming into the high tech meeting space, I’m greeted by a molded plastic chair with a steel tube frame; a mass-produced and mass-stackable staple of offices and convention centers throughout the western world. It’s arranged with identical siblings in semi-circles around a central platform, a small raised stage with large projector screens to either side. Shrouded fluorescent lights hang from the drop ceiling on short stalks, and tall windows frame a distant picturesque landscape.

Or a modern cityscape. Or if we’re lucky, a starfield with a false-color nebula.

The whole scene has been conjured up in the metaverse, a digital fabrication perceived through the aid of a virtual reality headset. That backdrop, the parallax horizon known as a “skybox”, is the only feature showing a hint of imagination — everything else is composed of the same dry corporate schtick found anywhere and everywhere.

But here in the metaverse, “anywhere” should take on a different meaning; why mimic the worst of our physical (and budgetary) design constraints in blatant affectation when those conventions no longer apply? If I can go to any time and any place… Why would I want to be here?

While depressingly common, not all executive or academic venues share such a lack of creativity, or a misguided belief that so-called “digital twins” are required for projecting an air of professionalism and brand identity — and digi-twins do have their uses, when preservation of spatial layout is vital to operational training, navigation, or envisioning design and real estate for example. But those uses are about spaces, not the people in them.

Probably the next feature you’ll encounter in company-town VR is: a campfire.

Even in these pixelated facsimiles — flames recreated by visual and auditory effects and clever programming, no radiant heat or wafting scent of carbonizing lignin — there’s still an enticing pull, a beckoning call from a campfire. It adds its own voice to the conversation, a fluctuating energy that decreases the demand on others to constantly fill the space; an invitation to alternately reflect, share, or fall silent without awkwardness.

Humanity and fire have a long history, literally intermingled with our biology, and deeply embedded in our collective culture. Why they’re so often chosen as beacons in virtual placemaking is usually an instinctive selection rather than a calculated one, and bears a closer look: it’s all about gathering.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…”

In the modern workplace, gathering is — or should be — an intentional, conscientious, and respectful act. Time and attention are the gold-standard currency of synchronous labor, and anything which can be made asynchronous or converted to a broadcast saves everyone vast quantities of those precious scarce resources. Calling people together simply to disseminate information feels discourteous, hence the snide adage of implied waste: “This meeting could have been an email.”

Purposeful gathering then, justifiable meetings, are reserved either for sharing (and containing) sensitive details, or for participation: contribution, rumination, processing, a back-and-forth exploration that takes us somewhere new together. When the outcome is not predetermined, and we have opportunity to transform the topic, the material, each other, or all-of-the-above: this high sensory bandwidth, realtime co-cognition, relationship-building, and instantaneous feedback loop is a powerful tool. So much so that it’s one of the top two rationalizations provided for return-to-office mandates (together with productivity), albeit under a mistaken notion that physical co-presence is the only avenue to such engaged connectivity — but this debate is better covered elsewhere.

There’s a bigger problem, though: however lofty the aim and regardless of the medium, most organizations are bad at gathering. Existing meeting rituals, even the rare good ones, are shaped by the cage in which they were raised: an artificial forest of Aeron chairs bound by square walls, behind the shatter-proof glass of budgets and OSHA regulations, with only stationery supplies or the occasional serving of dry spaghetti and marshmallows for “enrichment activities”. Being raised in captivity has never been synonymous with creative liberty and inspiration, and these hilariously bad “corporate metaverse” stylings repeatedly re-create the worst of these environmental traits via immersive tech before inevitably abandoning them, citing (predictably) poor adoption and retention.

On the other side, a cadre of Virtual Natives can’t get enough of those same technologies, finding ever more inventive ways of applying them to their social and professional endeavors. So what’s the gap? Why is it deeply enticing — even magical — for some, and allergenic or downright revolting to others?

I was fortunate to spend a few years exploring this boundary from both sides using rigorous research. What we found was nothing like what we expected, and forced us to fundamentally rethink our approach.

A warm, timeless mediterranean twilight casts an exotic air over the world, seasoned by a subtle musical refrain. Architecture and decor clearly designate this as some kind of street market; the humble stalls are untended, but feel as though the hawkers have only just stepped away and could return at any moment. Other plazas and buildings are visible floating in the distance, hanging unreachable in the gloaming emptiness.

Dominating the plaza is a raised fire pit set in a concentric terrace, its flames presided over by an unmistakable, larger-than-life djinn. The Roman-style oil lamp of legend glitters with inviting magic underneath it, but little else in the scene shows any sign of life or motion: everything is still, and expectant.

A small sign bears limited instructions in front of the imposing centerpiece, but the “game” is obvious and tempting: an unguarded stall on the right hand houses three bins of simple, fist-sized totems, beneath a plank emblazoned with the words “Choose Your Fate!” Fellow travelers quickly find their way to the bins and select either a smooth round violet orb, a flat green cube, or a spiky metallic red star. One by one they offer their treasures to the genie’s fire, where they burst into dramatic clouds of smoke and change the color of the flames and glowing light to match the sacrificial objects.

Each participant is greeted with a secret question visible only to them, corresponding to the “intensity” of their selection; it is their choice whether to share the prompt or its answer. Silly, heartwarming, scary, mundane, and eminently human conversation — and connection — abounds in the resulting chaotic self-organized theater.

The ingredients for rapidly-deepening rapport are abundant: vulnerability and curiosity, stoked by the fear-suspending qualities of play. Complete strangers become friends, teams become tight, and lasting memories are added to our shared story in this now emotionally permeated world.

None of our experiments featured desks, whiteboards, or conference-room easel pads. Neither are those tools and trappings “work” in their own right, but means toward an end: to create, share, refine, and apply ideas. Mimicking those same interfaces isn’t appropriate in virtual settings, where reading is difficult, input is imprecise, and every moment and action more physically demanding. We needed new tools for the same objectives, with respect for the capabilities and limitations of the medium.

The work of the Genie Game is a typical ice-breaker scenario, traditionally conducted with a stack of cards dispensing random conversation starters. We kept the premise, and envisioned a new process and setting — and in so doing hit on an important insight, repeatedly borne out in all our surveys and data analyses.

No matter the activity, whether team dynamics, ideation, problem solving, prioritization, etc., the single highest predictor of success and satisfaction was: emotional presence.

Emotional investment is the key to imbuing the ephemeral with a sense of value: objects acquire meaning, landscapes form the grounding plane for evolving stories, and people accumulate a common history—all foundations of resilient culture. Helping people feel authentically present requires more than embodiment, it needs a narrative element to reflect a sense of self, and to connect that self with others.

Connected people make collaboration happen.

We regularly had to call “time” at the Genie’s maidan, and pull everyone back to the schedule — though many have since returned, bringing co-workers and other groups to share their experience. Something was born during our visits there; the memory of place and people is strong, and the connections genuine and lasting.

Realizing the deeper potential of virtual presence technologies will not be about re-creating the familiar, or even emulating the specific. Moving “what we currently do” straight into the metaverse isn’t enough of a reason to don a headset, and fails to add value or respect people’s needs. Work must be reimagined at its fundamentals: what are you really trying to accomplish, and — when VR is an appropriate option — what’s the best way to do that?

Give place and purpose for people to explore themselves and each other first, and then build on that foundation. The supposed “killer app” everyone’s searching for is: you.

Try doing that over email.

We sat down with adventuresome metanauts at Accenture to talk about MURAL’s exploration of collaborative frontiers of XR and what we’ve learned so far. The Q&A session showed some keen insights and points of consideration we thought worth sharing — enjoy!

This was a written Q&A conducted asynchronously via mural during a presentation and discussion. Both presenters’ answers are provided here for a more complete picture, and may include some redundancies.

Theory

Q. What is the future of collaboration in VR? What are some new dynamics that we will need to consider when collaborating in VR?

Erika: The big goal for all of the XR industry right now is seamless mixed-reality. You throw on your Apple/Google/Meta/Microsoft/whoever eyeglasses and can then instantly use hand tracking gestures to pull up content in AR, swipe over and send it to your screen, summon a coworker to appear in your home office with you… So VR is just a quick and easy way to start exploring the tip of the iceberg on all that, but the way you need to be thinking of XR is the seamless integration of the spectrum of options into your life and work, and how that would change things; where you live, do you drive to work, do you pick a more remote city, how does this change your hiring options when you can hire globally but work locally… it’s like going from land-lines to text messages, there will be entire new avenues of what XR does that not only enhances how we want to live and work, but will actually give net-new options.

ptom: We could do hours on this question alone. In short, “connection + creativity + process = collaboration”. Connection and Creativity are VR super powers, with infinite control over the space and activity, and ability to bring people together from anywhere at any time. The “process” portion is key to making that interaction a thoughtful collaboration, and that’s the intersection we find the most promising and where we’re focusing our initial experiments.

Q. Why Gaming thinking? Do people not join if it’s not a game / what’s the value of gamifying everything?

ptom: “Game” here is a functional definition for types of ritual (repeated activities) which include a space with boundaries, rules, artifacts, and goals, and a process which creates, opens, explores, and closes that “world”. Meetings are such a game, but which are frequently ill-defined on one or more of those points, leading to frustration and an ineffective use of time and energy. The “games” of collaboration in VR take advantage of the development and learning from games-for-play as a plentiful resource, as we develop games-for-work that bring people onto common ground with a shared mindset, goal, and the process/tools for evolving toward that goal.

Erika: Gamification is just the closest word; we’re not turning everything into a “game”, but we’re using the principles of teaming, sport, and cooperative engagement to bake the rules, routines, structure, and guidance of what a formalized process (i.e. a game) has that can be brought into the activities of facilitation and collaboration. If the development of the experience isn’t treated with the same end-to-end care that a game or sport would be if you were translating one from one medium to the other, we’ll miss out on the medium of VR enhancing the experience by allowing for too much flexibility without the coherent thinking of the rules, routines, structures, etc. After all, a game is just a process that is meant to be fun :)

Q. What have you found to be most effective in promoting collaboration via gamification and VR, or metaverse as a channel to audiences that feel like these are just for ‘child’s play’?

Erika: Leading with the activity and the outcome of what the “activity (game for work)” is and does, and then how VR is a medium for it as a vehicle, not a destination. We’re basically doing for collaboration and facilitation what Spreadsheets did for math — we want you do be able to do the professional, collaborative things you would do anyways, only now in the Future of Work, you can do it “here in VR” to and bridge the gap between co-location and hybrid work.

ptom: Much of what makes this successful starts with context, both in and surrounding VR:

• Safe experiences in appropriate doses.
• Intentionality of small, purposeful activities: clear objectives, boundaries, rules, and processes (less is more).
• Integration with traditional workflows: VR as augmentation rather than replacement.

People

Q. How are we making these collaboration spaces inclusive environments for people less comfortable with tech, with accessibility needs, or not having access to the gear?

ptom: The best practices for accessibility and inclusivity are still emerging — we’re staying close to that research, but there’s still more to learn. What we know so far is that VR has the potential to be a good “equalizer” across accessibility, ethnic, and socioeconomic boundaries if used correctly. We’re designing for shared-access with non-VR participants as well.

Erika: We specifically are keeping those points (less tech comfort, accessibility, access to gear) at the top of our lists on what we can help solve, very much taking the “inclusion-first” angle because collaboration in VR actually helps people feel & act more equal, so it could be a huge enabler of access to the conversation for people who, for many reasons, maybe didn’t in real world meetings, zoom/teams meetings, etc. It has massive potential to be a huge equalizer.

Q. Who is the “who” in your focus groups? What are the future needs of parents of young kids, women (who are asked to do a larger percentage of domestic work during WFH), and people of colour who face other barriers in VR collab?

Erika: The literal “who” is MURAL employees — however, the group and focus is also emphatically diverse and includes the considerations of everyone’s real-world obligations and diversity that they bring to the table, including working parents, people with english as a second (or third) language, geographic and cultural differences, different neurodivergencies, all of that is at the forefront of having these spaces be a viable, attractive, and durable alternative for any historically disadvantaged population who want VR to be a benefit and equalizer. We can’t solve it all, but it is a top priority and product design principle we have.

ptom: Our focus groups are starting with professional imagination workers and collaboration designers, which is the general target audience for MURAL’s Collaboration Intelligence tools. This covers a large spectrum of people within a specific type of work, but the groups have been relatively small to start; we have a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, and are focused on continually expanding the representative population with each activity and exercise.

Practice

Q. Does MURAL in VR mean using a VR headset?

ptom: Web users should be able to participate as well, in order to integrate the solution with additional platforms and existing tools. But for the best experience with the new technology, a headset of some sort will be required — that technology is quickly evolving and may eventually be a pair of glasses, contacts, or implants (for the truly adventurous/dedicated).

Erika: VR, AR, MR, whatever the industry brings us, we want to first prioritize democratic co-presence via these technologies, so if there is some upcoming high-tech AR eyeglass that would allow you to work with your team in a total passthrough, we’d love to make MURAL one of the things that you’re able to do there. We’re constrained by the hardware advancements of the big providers, but we want to be the go-to solution for presence XR based collaboration.

Q. Can people collab from web in VR too?

Erika: We hope to have options for this, including people having access to their mural content on their computer and in VR at the same time, and also using the available API options so that 2D video feeds can appear in VR for people on a computer, and VR avatars can appear on the computer — this is a LONG TERM goal, but one we don’t want to neglect. Part of what MURAL has to wait on is all the other platforms and providers that form this chain, from Meta to other apps, to APIs and SDKs, etc, this is a totally new space that is the wild west :)

Q. 1. Will MURAL be its own app in VR and will it be available for access in the Oculus Quest 2?
Q. 2. When will we be able to use MURAL in the Oculus [Quest]?
Q. 3. …and if no Oculus, just in the metaverse?

ptom: Oculus and Meta are a convenient accelerator for our initial prototyping, but are not intended to be the boundaries of our presence in the metaverse at large. We intend to be present and accessible across technologies and platforms as they continue to evolve. The shape of the solution is still changing rapidly, so timelines are in flux. For beta access to our applications and events, contact Steve Schofield <steves@mural.co>.

Erika: A question without a direct answer: “yes” but moving murals into VR is a secondary priority as a PART of the collaboration space — we do NOT want to ship a poor experience of just accessing MURAL through the Oculus (or any VR) browser — we want it to be just as good as IRL, with all the magical benefits of what VR can do to break the laws of reality and physics.

So yes, it will be an app on the Quest store for both the consumer and pro models, and much more than just a view of your mural content. It will be a fully-realized virtual space of spaces.

Bonus

Q. What are the sustainability implications of VR?

Erika: We don’t have 1st party hard-data on this, but the impact on air quality by not driving to work, not flying to meetings, not having to invest the money and carbon in what’s added by a typical “work retreat” or even daily commuting is a major part of what VR can offer. If we can get 90% of the interpersonal goodness from a large VR gathering, with a fraction of a fraction of the carbon footprint of commutes, dozens of flights, etc, that’s a massive change — not to mention people who can’t travel (or don’t want to travel) for caretaking, personal, or neurodivergent needs, this can be a game changer. See also “The environmental impact of the metaverse” (VentureBeat)

ptom: ↑ Ditto.

Q. When would it be best to use Horizon? When would it be best to use Altspace?

ptom: There are many, many platforms in different stages of exploration and evolution. We’re dedicated to collaboration wherever it takes us, but initially that means looking for places where we can partner with existing efforts that accelerate our learning. Meta’s a convenient and effective partnership/vehicle, so that’s where we are for now with the expectation of expanding as we go.

Erika: For us, the usage of Horizon Worlds has more to do with the support of Meta and the ability to be a part of the future of enterprise VR. We use Horizon Worlds for our prototyping not just for the technical feats it can do, but for the access to people, as we need to be able to bring in participants with little to no experience and teach them to onboard, build, facilitate, and collaborate in an unfamiliar paradigm. Being partners with Meta lets us do that in Horizon quicker, but any enthusiastic VR world builder could use whatever app they have access to; we’re mostly focused on testing our processes and methodology, eventually we hope that people on any platform can access what we make in the long run!

Steve: There’s a big difference here under the hood. Using AltSpace means relying on Unity devs to build custom environments and collab games and shipping them “over the wall” — the “old way”. Horizon worlds enables cross-functional teams to collaborate in real time, literally building, live play-testing and iterating the experience together. This serves to both de-risk the process and enable positive engagement throughout.

On Your Marks…

We’re just starting to figure out the possibilities of these new presence technologies and the shape of the emerging metaverse. The social and economic implications are huge, and even though the tech is still a long way from living up to its promise, we’re forging ahead to find out what it can do, and how it can be used to bring people together. Thanks for taking a moment to share these first steps with us.

Watch this space. ;)

Who We Are

MURAL

The XR team at MURAL is part of the Ventures group responsible for our Collaborative Intelligence initiative: making collaboration intentional and effective by cultivating spaces, compiling guided methods from luminaries (and the Luma Institute), and providing development and insight tools to level up your creative teamwork.

Erika Flowers

Digital Service Expert at NASA, fiction author, and co-founder of Practical by Design.

Paul Tomlinson (ptom)

Creative Scientist at MURAL, TIME Magazine and WSJ featured XR productivity pioneer, and author of “Working from Orbit”.

Designing for Collaboration in VR was originally published in MURAL XR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It wasn’t Inception, or Star Trek, or any number of science fiction tropes. But we really did find a way of conjuring a psychic landscape in a virtual setting, and used it to make changes in the mind.

It was an experiment applying psychotherapies in VR: visualize, navigate, transform, and — most importantly — heal. The therapeutic effects remained strong more than a year later, after a single thirty-minute session.

A quick disclaimer: although built on sound and established principles, this was as exploratory as it was experimental, and used a small sample size (one) rather than a rigorously designed and controlled study. The person was already familiar with therapy outside of VR, and this process and these results may not be the same for everyone.

Content warning: the therapy transcript deals with child abuse as discussed in a clinical setting; respectful, redacted to be appropriate for sharing and without graphic or sensationalized elements, but it may still be uncomfortable for some. You may wish to skip to “The Science”.

If you or someone you know are at risk of child abuse, please visit ChildHelpHotline.org to find help. For adult survivors, visit HAVOCA.org.

The Story

The following is a transcript of the experimental session. Events and essential dialog here are accurate, though not verbatim. Additional context and narrative flow have been reconstructed from notes and journal entries in order to present a clearer sense of the experience, without altering the essential facts or order of events. Contents have also been edited for privacy, brevity, and appropriate audiences, and are shared with the permission of all parties.

We stepped into a shared dream world, brought to life in Virtual Reality through simple artwork in MultiBrush. Strokes of textured paint and lighting effects hang in the air; crude but effective, evocative.

“How do you call them?”

“When I meditate, I think of a campfire and they come.” And so they set about painting a campfire into being.

Not a typical fire of wood-ember and smoke, this one was made of elongated electrified crystals floating vertically above the floor of the clearing. All around was obscured by a black mist, a bare hint of mountainous silhouette in the distance. A flat bench divided light from dark, marking the edge of the crystalline firelight and the encroaching vapor.

A giant pair of glistening red lips took shape where a face would be, if it belonged to someone sitting on the bench. No other details were visible, and none were required — this was a familiar “part”, an aspect of the subconscious psyche and one of “them” which the fireside setting was meant to attract. This part represented a caregiver-antagonist and one of the artist’s first recovered sense-memories and associated trauma.

“Why did you make this?”

“To know if it was working. The campfire feels right, and this is the first part that came to mind. It feels frightening and familiar — but not overwhelming. I feel more aware and in-control in this space.”

“Lips” sat silently, quietly malevolent, as a stone archway was brought into being. Drawing each stone took time, with limited copying and pasting; the artistic process, inexpert though it may have been, was as much a therapy as the resulting tableau. The artist grew to the size of a giant, turning the comfortable clearing into a shoebox diorama and bringing the heights of the arch into reach. Taking time to create also meant taking time to process, to decide the fit and feel of the design, and prevent emotional overwhelm from what came next.

Multiple layers of thick, black, oil-slick paint hung from the ten-foot-tall archway in a sibylline curtain. The artist, now back to their normal size, sat cross-legged on the floor and stared at their creation, tears of deep apprehension on their cheeks.

“Some young part of me is terrified of this.”

“This” was a representation of a mental block, a ceiling in the therapeutic process beyond which they had not been able to progress: every time a self-guided therapy session moved toward this unknown topic their mind would slip off of it, distracted by something — anything — else. Or, perplexingly, they would fall asleep; the subconscious mind protecting itself from reliving the underlying trauma which had at some point completely overcome them. That same protective subconscious now accepted this digital facsimile as a representation of its guarded secret: memory wrapped in meditation and imagination, given form, and made truly visible for the first time.

“What would help that part feel safe?”

They thought for a moment, and after a pause: “A shield.”

And so a shield was conjured, iconographic and stereotypical, with two thick arm bands on the back. They picked it up, holding it on their left arm between them and the dark curtain, and the terror subsided. It was not yet safe to move forward, but it was no longer unbearable to sit in its presence.

“Why is that part afraid?”

“It thinks I can’t handle it, that I’m too young and unprotected. Too fragile. It thinks I’m a child, maybe at most eight years old.” Traumatic memory is often frozen to some apparent age, unable to move forward and integrate with additional lived experience. This perceived-age impasse is common in the “parts” paradigm of Internal Family Systems Therapy, and approaches for dealing with it are well established: “I’m letting it see me as I am now, older and stronger. It’s surprised, and cautiously agrees to let me move forward.”

The shield was laid aside with care and deliberate movement. After a brief contemplation they drew another iconic form: a large heart placed on the floor next to the shield, an offering of openness, of resilient love and understanding; of forgiveness.

It was now safe to approach the arch, and in the magic of VR this was done with perfect simplicity: stand up and walk over to it, moving across the physical room and the simulated environment simultaneously. The body was in a large open space prepared for this experiment, but the eyes peered through a marvelous technological window into a parallel world of their own making: an externalized representation of their own mind.

They stepped into the curtain.

It was made of multiple sheets, and they paused between them, halfway through the arch. We knew there was nothing on the other side because it hadn’t been built yet; but nobody knew what would happen when they got there, what this critical threshold represented.

They took a deep breath and moved through the curtain, sitting cross-legged on the floor on the other side. A featureless plane extended only a little way before falling off into the same persistent darkness of the nighttime setting. They waited in the emptiness for inspiration; they had been allowed to come here, and fully expected a revelation.

The wait was not long: a sense memory unfolded in their mind, reliving an event decades in the past. “Sense” memories are a visceral record of literal sensation: sight, sound, smell, and so on — particularly touch, this time. Recall is different from episodic memory, which is abstracted into details and facts with limited “cinematic” replay most of the time. Sense memories can be incredibly intense, running parallel to or totally supplanting corresponding senses during recall; these are frequently the basis for flashbacks.

The artist began to paint again, a small lozenge-shaped bundle not much more than a swaddled blob, representing a very young child still in diapers. They later described the triggered episode as “fear of impending abuse, and an act of resistance — much more than just ‘not yielding’, the impression is of actively fighting back.” But those small, feeble attempts are overpowered and restrained.

The ensuing abuse was present in the newly recalled memory as well, but treated as unimportant — glossed over as largely inconsequential to the issue being explored. Physical pain is temporary, while emotional wounds are long lasting; trauma can manifest in surprising ways, oriented around unexpected details. In this instance, the hurt came not from the assault, but from an unbridled rage in response to it.

“I was furious. I was not a passive witness; I was capable of expressing myself, and I was denied my voice. Denied the right to have a say over my own situation…That denial, that utter disregard for my right of self determination and safety, created a bottled rage I could not release.

“I had said no, as firmly and physically as I could, and they continued anyway.”

They picked up the small bundle and placed it within their chest, feeling along with it. Then wrote NO! in the air, giving voice to that stifled resistance, accompanied by a flurry of angry blue spikes emanating from the combined bodies of child and artist. More tears were allowed to flow.

Healing was remarkable and uncomplicated: the memory had been witnessed and validated. The origin of the rage was now untangled, and no longer threatening explosive anger — what the subconscious had feared would overwhelm the rest of the Self. The symbolism of that healing was also uncomplicated, but amazing to watch unfold.

The artist picked up the bundle and walked back through the curtain, laying it to rest in the heart they’d created earlier. They erased the black curtain in the arch with a wave of their controller — the location and artifacts of the remembered anguish on the other side now visible but stripped of any malice. To complete the scene, they changed the lighting: the sun rose in this place, serene, peaceful, and whole.

And there they sat, next to the recovered child, the discarded shield, and their floating crystal campfire. The sense of safe vulnerability, openness, and peace which comes from such a healing episode is nothing short of profound.

A year later the effects of this short session are holding strong, demonstrating real transformation beyond simple cathartic release. The anger remains completely abated, even without follow-up sessions or specific therapeutic reinforcement. They’ve continued to progress in their healing journey, and welcome the opportunity to use virtual reality for therapy again in the future.

The Science

This experiment was conducted by combining Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) and Psychodrama techniques within MultiBrush on a stock Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headset.

IFS has been around since the 1980s, envisioning the mind as a multiplicity of “parts” with specific roles and relationships, and dialoguing with them. It’s often used to identify traumatic episodes from one’s past, negotiate with those subconscious elements which maladaptively “protect” against coming into contact with them, and resolve and integrate the conflicted parts back into an immutable Self.

Psychodrama uses no prescribed framework, by contrast. It’s an experiential technique for re-creating representative “tableaus” — a kind of psychologically oriented participatory theater, or dramatic reenactment (hence “psycho-” + “drama”), originally developed in the 1920s. A tableau can be constructed with actors playing roles, or through the use of props or abstract objects, which then rehearse the desired scene (commonly a relived event). Under the direction of the client-protagonist it’s a vehicle to explore, evaluate, and resolve identified emotions or behaviors, even revise personal history.

The premise of this particular exercise came from a conversation with the client (“the artist”) about the mental block they were encountering while using IFS: an inability to access a trauma or memory related to their own undesired behavior which occasionally (and unpleasantly) surprised them — manifesting as a disproportionate and irrational anger whenever they felt they were being ignored or denied. If they couldn’t reach the core of the problem, they couldn’t adequately resolve it, and the behavior continued.

Externalizing the mind’s inner processes through Psychodrama is a fairly common use case, and provides a physical anchor with which the client can then interact. Doing this with the roles inherent to IFS is no different, and the client would direct the proxies playing those Parts the same as any other tableau. This is where we hit a snag, and found an opportunity:

Not only was it the middle of the pandemic with all nonessential businesses on lock-down, the client was under quarantine with possible COVID symptoms after close contact (which later turned out to be some other seasonal virus, thankfully). But they did have a virtual reality headset; was that something we could use to conduct the therapy remotely? This therapy relies heavily on a sense of presence and shared space, and they’d found VR excelled in recreating that sense.

We didn’t have enough qualified people who also had headsets, unfortunately; would it work to use props instead? And where does one get “props” for VR? Could we draw from an existing asset library, or make them using simple modeling or artistic tools?

Somewhere in this conversation, someone remembered a brilliant scene from Terry Pratchett’s “Witches Abroad” novel in his Discworld series. Granny, a witch with a knack for psychology, causes the villain’s voodoo doll to backfire by using their own belief against them — if manipulation of the doll propagated effects to the witch, then the witch’s actions could affect the doll in kind.

While not relating to any kind of voodoo, witchcraft, or British humour, could this same premise apply to the virtual props? What if we re-created a model of the hard shell around this impenetrable memory, and since it was only a computer generated illusion, just walked through it? Would the mind reflect the action it observed, and grant access to to the juicy center it believed had been breached? Like the movie “Inception”, could we create a locked safe the psyche would fill with secrets for us? It would only work to the degree that the “hard shell” was accepted by the subconscious as a stand-in, but we already know how to make something similar happen in other contexts.

And the experiment worked brilliantly — the mental block was brought to life, overcome, and its hidden psychological trauma identified and resolved. The client negotiated with their subconscious for permission, rather than attempt the “brute force” solution of storming through the virtual artwork, but either way it was accepted in its role. From the perspective of the subconscious these illusory representations were “real”, authentic instances of its own inner workings which could be perceived, maneuvered, and transformed.

The artwork did not have to be especially detailed, creative, or accurate to be effective. The very flexible brain responded strongly to the very convincing visual stimuli — not that these things were real, physical objects indistinguishable from the material world, but at least that they had a sense of presence, scale, relative position, and emotional tenor. The human tendency to connect and identify with story, when fed a recognizable version of its own story, was fully invested in the substance of the experience.

Most powerfully of all: it was able to rewrite itself in the process, and find peace where fear and bitterness had reigned.

For further reading on trauma, healing, and the context of these therapies, see also:

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
• Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving
• Internal Family Systems Therapy
• Psychodrama: Advances in Theory and Practice

The Future

There’s every reason to think that this technology will adapt well to mental health fields, just like phones and video conferencing have already done. But what makes this experience unique and potentially significant is not just porting existing modes of human interaction (i.e., sitting and talking) to a new medium, but also the creativity and collaboration: the ability to invite other people into your mind. With such inexpensive and flexible control of the virtual environment, an infinite range of expression is possible: create as many settings or tableaus as you want, and easily duplicate, remix, and share them with others.

These could be translated into guided methods for broader audiences, or realtime sessions facilitated regardless of distance: artists remotely joining therapists and clients to help recreate imagined scenery. Asset libraries of pre-designed ambience, characters, props, scripts, even soundtracks, can be leveraged to further increase accessibility.

Those kinds of features will come with time — for now, as with the early days of VR itself (which one might argue we’re still in the middle of), the next step for fitting psychotherapies to the technology is to figure out the rules and parameters. Determine what makes psychologically oriented virtual- or augmented-reality experiences more or less engaging, safe, malleable, productive, and effective — similar to the defining characteristic of “presence” for VR generally. How elastic or resilient are those variables? How well do they work across different cultures and life circumstances, and what underlying principles govern them even in their differences?

In short, it needs a lot more science. The best way to do more science is to get more people involved, especially cross-disciplinary participation, all designing and executing experiments and studies and gathering data (a LOT of data). Some of that will happen organically; our experiment was far from the first, and in the year since this took place multiple books have been written, studies launched, grants proposed, etc.:

• Nine NHS trusts trial VR psychological therapy
• VRx: How Virtual Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine
• Lancet Study Reveals Benefits of OxfordVR Psychotherapy
• …

What if you want to be involved, or try this for yourself right now?

When it comes to therapeutic applications, that’s going to be a matter of personal comfort, privacy, and safety; probably best to work with an established therapist, and suggest the new tech to them directly — see how they recommend incorporating it into treatment, and if they’re willing to try new things with it. If you work or have contacts in the mental health field or related educational programs, send this article around — poke holes in it, see where you can do better, build on and expand our collective wisdom.

As for VR? Grab yourself a headset and dive in—explore the power of immersive storytelling, make and share art, meditate, and find ways to connect with others. Make the new technology a part of your toolbox, push the state of the art forward, and see where it can take you.

And where we can take each other. 🔚

Paul Tomlinson is a professional technologist, physics hobbyist, and virtual reality enthusiast with a background in behavioral psychology. He lives in Maine with his wife, children, pets, and way too many VR headsets.

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/paultomlinson/
• Twitter: @ptom27
• Discord: ptom#2646

Affiliate links are used in this article.

I recently had a chance to interview Rohildev Nattukallingal about Nimo, an Android computer built into a chunky pair of glasses with an integrated virtual display — 6 of them, in fact.

Wired magazine did a piece about them back in March, which prompted me to reach out to Rohil in the first place. They do a decent job of covering what it is (so you should read about it over there), but I wanted to know more about the evolution of the technology, various design and engineering trade-offs, and how it was going to be positioned in the evolving XR market. Based on that conversation, I think it’s also important to review what the Nimo is not, and level expectations accordingly.

Nimo is not virtual reality. In fact, to the degree that it’s XR (eXtended Reality), it’s only by virtue of the semi-transparent display in the glasses which mixes your physical surroundings with a 720p video overlay (which also creates some challenges around clarity, contrast, and readability they’re working very hard to address). That overlay is additive, making the combined area brighter, similar to the technology in Microsoft’s HoloLens. It’s also non-stereoscopic in the current generation, meaning the image presented to both eyes is identical and perceived as flat rather than with varying depth or multiple planes. As a result the device has comfortable eye relief at an infinite perceptual focus and a wider field of view, as well as trading the computational overhead of 3-dimensional interfaces for longer battery life and a smaller form-factor.

There are no cameras on board, no hand tracking, or other tethered controls: input is by keyboard and mouse over BlueTooth, using your phone as a touch-pad, or tapping some buttons on the glasses’ stem. Navigation amongst the six virtual screens is accomplished by moving your head to look around, utilizing 3DoF tracking similar to most cell phones accelerometers or gyroscopic sensors. It does not work as a primary display for other devices, although there are plans to make it work with laptops or other portable computing to act as an extension so you don’t have to give up your multi-monitor workstation when leaving the desk.

It’s a small portable Android computer, running standard 2D Android applications (of which there are thousands readily available) for quick computing on the go: more real estate than a phone, but less power than a laptop, occupying a productivity space similar to netbooks or tablets. The notable development is all about the form factor, and the convenience and privacy it affords. Coupled with something like the Tap (or a Twiddler, for hardcore users), Nimo’s aim is to enable convenient casual computing at a ubiquitous level.

It’s a niche development but an important one: moving existing productivity tasks into a virtualized interface, and further normalizing wearable computing. For people with the luxury to select “just the right amount” of computer power and interface richness for a given situation, this could be quite useful — I love the idea of keeping another copy of my second brain handy with a larger viewable area than afforded by a phone — or a journal, word processor, or collaborative canvas, etc. Not all XR requires 3D to augment human intelligence; ready access to the many cognitive force-multipliers we’ve already created is superpower enough.

One last interesting development to note, the Kickstarter for the new VITURE One glasses recently opened as well (and immediately megafunded), which looks to have a more mature technology and production pipeline but also a very different intent: 3D displays, but no head tracking of any kind (not even 3DoF), so there’s no looking around. The glasses require tethering to additional devices to be useful — though one of those is also readily available, with an entertainment focus, and comes with the bonus of shifting weight out of the device for longer wearable comfort. The products fill similar but ultimately distinct use cases, and most importantly they both represent evolutions in those respective fields toward a more omnipresent access to the otherwise invisible informational world embedded in our lives.

Working From Orbit - Paul Tomlinson

I float in space, surrounded on all sides by a grand view of the Milky Way Galaxy. A movie-theater-sized screen hangs before me, gently curved, everything at the perfect viewing distance. Eight different panes glitter with code, facets of a technological jewel granting views into the brain of a system responsible for moving tens of millions of dollars a day. A communications console canted like a drafting table at my fingertips holds a workshop of quick-fire exchanges with my colleagues, my meeting calendar, various API references, and camera feeds of the “real” world. To my left, abutting the mammoth array of code, a two-story tall portrait display shows the specifications for the task at hand atop an ever-present Spotify playlist. I crank the tunes and get into my flow.

But this isn’t an excerpt from some Ernest Cline novel—this is my every-day experience. This week, I’ll spend 40–50 hours in Virtual Reality, like I did last week and every (work) week for the last 2½ years. It’s not just fun and games — there are plenty of those, along with exercise, meditation, creativity, socializing, etc. — but for this article, I’m only focusing on (and counting) the work.

Yes, really: 8–10 hours a day strapped in. I’ve encountered a fair amount of skepticism about both the technology and the general premise, many nit-picks about the software, or how it fails to match some preconception about how things “should” work. Reddit in particular is full of naysayers, to whom I will rebut:

People saying: “It can’t be done,” are always being interrupted by somebody doing it. — Puck

The technological timeline is replete with supposedly doomed-to-fail notions and novelties that went on to wild success. Most were not born “fully formed”, and required several generations to grow and adapt as we grew and adapted to them. And no, this isn’t for everybody, not yet — but not only is it possible now, it’s the only way I use my work computer anymore.

My work is not VR related, either; it’s regular old programming, information systems development, and office stuff I just happen to do in VR. The strategy and tools apply to any computer and communications work right now and will apply to nearly everything in the future. “Working remotely” takes on entirely new dimensions when the distance from the beach to low-Earth-orbit is a single click.

Why am I telling you this, and why should you care?

To answer the second question, look at the Personal Computer boom of the 1980s: diehard computer geeks of the day saw incredible potential in the tools, and while they (we) spent a lot of time goofing off with the technology itself, still helped shape that state of the art into something useful to the general population. Not everyone was on board with the clunky beige boxes and the soothing squeal of a modem handshake at the time, yet in 2021 fully half the world carries a sleek pocket computer connected to the Information Superhighway.

Right now, Virtual Reality is at its “1980’s beige noise machine” stage: a geek cynosure and a consumer novelty. What’s coming will look very different from what’s here; nevertheless, the DNA is already taking shape and it’s not going to take another 40 years to change the world.

On that first question: I’ve been a full-time VR worker since April 2019, spending in the neighborhood of 4,500 hours banging away at real work on virtual screens. It’s not a stretch to say I’m in the top few percent of VR users on the planet; I’ve spent much time watching developments in the field and extrapolating future possibilities. I don’t insist on my version of the future, but I hope what I’ve seen is worth sharing.

I’m not going to cover everything — simply give a taste of how I make it work for me, and get people thinking, talking about, and pursuing the possibilities.

Define “Virtual”… 🤔

In common use “Virtual Reality” refers to a headset worn by the user, presenting them with a three-dimensional computer-generated environment. It’s the same kind of interactivity and visual feedback available in modern video games or simulators, only more engaging due to the sense of scale, presence, and all-encompassing field of view.

The cool kids have added several new companion phrases for how simulated content might blend with the physical environment, such as “Mixed Reality” (MR) or “Augmented Reality” (AR), with the umbrella term “Extended Reality” (XR) covering everything. For the sake of this article, we’ll stick with “VR”.

This is only the latest iteration in a long line of “virtual” environs and abstractions, a logical evolutionary step. Books are fantastic examples of conceptual environments: models of real or fictional actors, events, settings, and ideas—but static, frozen in time. Theater is a better illustration, a manufactured (virtual) scenario presented to an audience as a dynamic shared experience.

Technology has refined and distributed these shared experiences throughout history. Live theater evolved to movies, then television, then dynamic/responsive video (i.e., games): from stage to silver screen to LCD. It’s the same with music or audio performances: live presentation gave rise to the phonograph and its successors — home stereos, boom boxes, and the walkman moving it ever closer to the “user”.

We’ve had virtual audio strapped to our heads for over 100 years, and have finally reached a point where consumer-grade virtual visual can join it. Those visuals bring with them the illusion of space and scale and make it easy to translate physical actions into contextually rich commands. The dynamic, responsive, and immersive experience coopts our senses into perceiving the simulated environment as our inhabited space: our Virtual Reality.

Interacting with computer-generated worlds can be an engaging, magical experience — but is by definition immaterial unless there’s something to connect those actions to non-virtual outcomes. Sometimes that’s advantageous, like heavy equipment training, or rehearsing medical procedures. Inherently immaterial activities, those whose only product is communication, or a digital artifact, make no such trade-off — which brings us to computer work in an information economy, AKA “my office.”

The Setup

It’s using a computer, but… in VR. There are several reasons for doing so which I’ll cover later, however, I want a disclaimer to set expectations: in the current “beige-box” stage, work is still work, meetings are still meetings, and what makes this valuable has everything to do with comfort, productivity, and cost (plus my utterly nerdy fascination). Most everything takes place via traditional software common to any office environment: Google products, Zoom, Slack, spreadsheets, word processors, IDEs, etc.

I use a regular laptop, reasonably powerful but not a gaming PC, and well below “VR Ready” specs. The computer doesn’t generate the virtual environment, it only runs the regular office software with one important addition: a small agent program, Immersed, which encodes screen contents as video streams and beams them to the headset via WiFi.

My current headset is an Oculus Quest version 2 (starting at $300 at the time of writing), which receives those video streams and renders them as displays inside an environment of its own making. Wireless and standalone, it runs its software without the aid of a PC (most of the time), trading higher-end performance and graphics for freedom of movement and the convenience of setting up anywhere. The trip from video encoding on the PC, over the WiFi, and display in the headset averages about 3ms for me, using a 5ghz access point that’s several years old. 0.003 seconds is well below human perception, making it effectively instantaneous.

Layout

These days I use a three-screen setup (I have other saved layouts on standby for different kinds of work/focus): my Main work display, a Reference screen in a portrait orientation where I keep details and materials on the active task (and a Spotify window for cranking tunes), and a smaller landscape display with Communications, calendar, code documentation, and so forth.

One of those displays corresponds to the laptop’s physical screen, and the other two are purely virtual — 75% of my pixels are conjured into being via behind-the-scenes wizardry. The laptop thinks they’re real, applications work fine, but the only way to see them is in the headset where they’re brought to life. I could add more — Immersed supports up to five such virtual displays — but I use a screen-content manager as well (also confusingly called “virtual desktops”) which allows these three displays to act like fifteen. My visual field and attention are maxed out as it is.

The resolution of these very large displays is surprisingly average—1080p (Reference, Communication) and 4k (Main). This makes the dot pitch unimpressive by the numbers, though still more than twenty-five times that of a roadside billboard display. Higher resolutions are available, but this is my calculated trade-off between pixel parity (more on that below), computer performance, and latency. Applications are tuned for readability and crispness, emphasizing information density over anti-aliasing or smoothness. The result is a character count of 511x129 on my Main screen when writing code: 66,000 characters is a LOT of code, easily the equivalent of four to six typical IDE windows in width (and enough to show the entire text of this article 1½ times, all at once).

Input is via standard keyboard and mouse (or trackball, in my case)—floating per-application interfaces, or waving my hands around a la Minority Report, aren’t a thing yet (for which I’m frankly grateful, doing that all day would be exhausting). Other tools work well, such as voice recognition or graphics tablets, but aren’t suited to programming. I touch type so it doesn’t matter that I can’t see my keyboard, but there are options for bringing it into the environment by using a virtual overlay, or (soon) opening a “portal” by way of the headset’s tracking cameras to see a video of your surroundings (FaceBook’s own Horizon Workrooms uses this feature right now).

Since all I need is a keyboard, mouse, and a place to park myself, I’ve completely ditched the traditional desk. I can use a floor setup for part of the day and mix it up with a standing arrangement for the rest. I adjust as needed for comfort, efficiency for the current task (reading email or research vs writing code, for example), or can reclaim the entire space if I need an exercise or meditation break, want to visualize some problem solving, or a round of golf breaks out.

Tips

A few quick pointers before I talk about the experience, roughly in order of importance/utility:

1. Find the sweet spot for your eyes. Adjust the IPD and lens alignment: left, right, up, down, distance, and tilt. Work at it one eye at a time, and walk it in. Pixels are not evenly distributed — the highest density is right in the middle of the sweet spot, mimicking the acuity of the fovea.
2. If you need corrective lenses, get lens inserts: it’s superior to wearing glasses, and I find it better than wearing contacts. For horrible astigmatic myopia like mine (-7.5), it was cheaper than most pairs of glasses I’ve had, and a totally reasonable expense since I use them all day for work.
3. CLEAN your lenses. No matter what you’re looking through, make sure you can SEE through it! This applies to the lenses both in and out of the headset — the tracking cameras need a consistent view of the world, and that means no smears or smudges.
4. While you’re at it, clean the headset too: a regular antimicrobial wipe-down will keep things healthy and pleasant. An impermeable contact surface also helps (polyurethane or silicone interfaces, for example).
5. Aim for pixel parity: a virtual screen is a picture of a picture, meaning the headset’s resolution and pixel density are the limiting factors. The closer a virtually rendered screen’s pixel density is to the headset’s, the sharper the picture will be. The Quest 2 is 1832x1920/eye (Vive Focus 3 is 2448²/eye) — displays can be larger than that, but will look best if the maximum visible portion is closest to 1:1.
6. Don’t bother emulating physical screen configurations! Virtual displays can be any size and any place, not just imitations of their physical counterparts. Walls, theaters, backdrops, tabletops, wrap-arounds—all kinds of possibilities.
7. “Large & far” is more comfortable than “small & close” for an equivalent field of view — it takes the same amount of visual space, but is far more relaxed for the eyes owing to the difference in convergence point.
8. Ergonomics still apply: avoid prolonged neck turning, head tilting, or other static positions. Place things to encourage occasional movement without holding any one posture overlong.
9. Good WiFi matters: maximize bandwidth and minimize hops. A clear 5ghz channel will give you 866mbps, and if possible should be directly between the headset and the computer—or at a minimum have the computer hard-wired to the router.
10. Read (or watch) the manual. Know how everything works, and work with it — the patience to get your environment perfectly tuned pays exceptional dividends.

The Experience

Screenshots don’t do it justice. Videos fail to capture the scale and grandeur of the experience. These pictures are a poor illustration of what I see in the headset—low resolution, compressed field-of-view, lacking depth and scale. The low display down front? That’s the size of an executive desk. The code is like an IMAX® theater—I can’t even see all of it at once.

What’s it like to actually use? In a word: comfortable. Given a few more words, I’d choose productive and effective. I can resize, reposition, add, or remove as much screen space as I need. I never have to squint or lean forward, crane my neck, hunt for an application window I just had open, or struggle to find a place for something. Many trade-offs and compromises from the past no longer apply — I put my apps in convenient locations I can see at a glance, and without getting in my way. I move myself and my gaze enough throughout the day that I’m not stiff at the end of it and experience less eye strain than I ever did with a bunch of desk-bound LCDs.

Complete control over my visual environment is like using noise-canceling headphones for my eyes. I can choose the levels of color energy and busyness best suited to whatever I’m focusing on, usually minimizing contrast the same way you would with a bias light for TVs. I’ll float in a nebula while looking at code in a dark IDE, chill out on Olympus in a sunset cloudscape while composing slides for a presentation, or overlook a tropical lagoon while grinding through email. Anything I’m doing, I’m doing with complete focus in a perfectly matched atmosphere.

I tend to prefer simple 360-degree photos over more elaborate environments out of practical consideration: my displays are larger than will fit in any reasonable facsimile of an indoor setting — it doesn’t really work to cram a movie theater into a café. There are plenty of those environments from which to choose, and I expect the collection will keep growing as the system continues to mature (eventually incorporating real-world Augmented Reality elements). An alpine chalet with a crackling fireplace as snow gently falls outside? Check. A hipster coffee salon? Covered — a popular place for hanging out with other users. Or an open-walled wooden lodge with a variety of times and weather available, a grand corporate plaza with a waterfall, etc., etc. Outside of managing performance, there are no limits on what kind of environments are possible.

I’ve found it useful to play around with those environments, too: in the coffee shop setting I overlaid a piece of artwork on the wall with one of my screens, turning it into a TV for a more realistic ambience. In the plaza, I re-created a lecture hall by using one display as a stand-in for the projector showing my slides, another as my lectern-mounted laptop with speaker notes, and a “talk timer” display in the front row. By practicing my presentation for a semi-annual company retreat (pre-COVID) and ironing out the flow I earned one of the highest speaker review scores of the entire week—it went exactly as rehearsed in a near-identical real-world setup.

This kind of comfort and productivity isn’t automatic or accidental, it’s something I consciously refine to maximize the human side of my work equation. It’s also not limitless; I’ve traded one set of compromises for another, optimizing for a different set of concerns more in line with my needs. I worked up to my full-time schedule, became accustomed to the weight and fit of the headset, manage the temperature and airflow of my office as needed, and regularly clean the contact surfaces. I take periodic breaks to hydrate, stretch my legs, and recharge myself.

I’ve lightly accessorized the headset too: replaced the stock facial foam with more thickly padded polyurethane-leather ($30), changed the head strap for a halo mount ($50), and added prescription lenses to eliminate the need for glasses or contact lenses ($70), altogether increasing the cost 50% over the base price of the Quest 2 (not that I paid the base price — I ordered a model with higher storage capacity, and this is only my latest headset). I treat the entire rig as a business expense/investment and am not disappointed.

There have been some delightful surprises on the application side, too. Using regular software in that virtual environment is still like using that regular software, albeit with a lot more elbow room. There are a few notable exceptions though — the ones that really benefit from the increased real estate are those involving visual communications: when “seeing the big picture” is no longer metaphorical, and you can make out the fine details at the same time (forest + trees). A stand-out example is the very aptly named MURAL, which when given an entire wall (or movie screen) can be a sublime experience in creativity and shared comprehension.

Some old-school tools are similarly supercharged: an eight-way (or more) tmux/vim split with multiple files, terminals, unit tests, and logs, creates a massive kind of working memory — maintaining end-to-end context in otherwise sprawling complexity.

Apart Together: the Shared Experience

Meetings are best in person, in VR, in MURAL, and in Zoom — in that order. As a remote worker of several years, “in person” is a rarity for me — so I use VR to preserve the feeling of shared presence, of inhabiting a place with other people, especially when good spatial audio is used. Hand tracking enables meaningful gestures and animated expression, despite the avatars cartoonish appearance — somehow it all “just works”, your brain accepts that these people you know are embodied through these virtual puppets, and you get on with communicating instead of quibbling about missing realism (which will be a welcome improvement as it becomes available but doesn’t stop this from working right now).

I’m calling out MURAL again because of an important finding from VR collaboration: sometimes being in the same place and looking at the same stuff is a good way to meet, and remains the standard in conference rooms across the globe — but the term “Death by PowerPoint” was not coined ex nihilo. Countering PowerPoint prison by giving each person their own view of shared content, under their own control, is a big step depending on the content. If it’s still slides, all you’ve done is invent “meeting TiVo” — Google Docs is an improvement, though still confined by its linearity. MURAL’s working canvas, on the other hand, invites people to browse ideas and their connections seemingly effortlessly, jumping forward, back, and around as needed: context turns seeing into understanding. The best measures of this are the kinds of questions asked, the conversations sparked, and the palpable engagement “in the room”.

The important finding is how that works: people in the Immersed software can join the same space and choose whether to share their screens with each other. I can sit right next to someone and we each have our own giant screens completely invisible to the other — no obstructions to the conversation. Shared space for communication, local independent space for productivity. It’s kind of like hanging out with everyone and their imaginary friends (screens) and removes any distraction from the collaboration process. It’s a real trip to experience, and incredibly freeing.

For meeting with those not in VR, or if I have a video call that needs input rather than passive attendance, I’ll frequently use a virtual webcam to attend by avatar. It’s sufficiently demonstrative for most team meetings, and the crew has gotten used to me showing up as a digital facsimile. I’ll surface from VR and use a physical webcam for anything sensitive or personal, however.

A special note about Horizon Workrooms, since that’s new and big on the scene: they’ve done an excellent job of creating a high-end virtual meeting room that feels and acts “like the real thing.”

It has a ton of promise, but… I don’t really care for the promise it’s making. 100% of what you can do in Workrooms is feasible in a physical setting, although it would be really expensive (lots of smart hardware all over the place). But that’s the thing: it’s imitating life within a tool that doesn’t share the same limitations, so as a VR veteran I find it bland and claustrophobic. That’s going to be really good for newcomers or casual users because the skeuomorphism is familiar, making it easy to immediately orient oneself and begin working together — and that illustrates a challenge in design vocabulary. While the familiar can provide a safe and comfortable starting point, the real power of VR requires training users for potentially unfamiliar use cases. Also, if you can be anywhere, why would you want to be in a meeting room, virtual-Lake Tahoe notwithstanding?

Exploring VR collaboration in any depth will require a separate article (probably a series of them). The field is shifting rapidly, and there are many options and considerations — check out the “See Also” section in the Appendix for good references to people currently exploring this. What I would say, in addition to the above, is that while VR isn’t perfect, combined with the accessibility and quality-of-life benefits of Working From Anywhere it remains my number-one choice (and if I were in-the-office or otherwise colocated? I would still use the headset at my desk to turn my cubicle into a cavernous expanse).

OK, but, like… why?

Why go through all that effort? Other than the nerdy novelty and megafan hyperbole, what’s the point?

Technology is all about force multiplication: do more with the same or less effort (or cost), or do new activities or forms of work not otherwise possible. For new strategies to be useful and adopted they need to tip the balance of some scale. For some users, megafan street cred is enough — but there are several other measurable advantages (these are a few things I’ve identified; your mileage may vary).

Cost: even with my higher-capacity headset and accessories, my entire outlay is easily competitive with a conventional multi-monitor configuration.

Focus: my increase in productivity in a distraction-free environment, measured as total output, work quality, or duration of time on task, ranges from 20%-100% above baseline. Compartmentalization is another major part of that focus — remote workers know it’s important to have a physically separate space in which to work, a boundary to prevent professional obligations from bleeding too much into personal life. Confining the space to an otherwise invisible slice of the metaverse keeps it well partitioned — removing the headset or quitting the app is all it takes to fully disengage.

Flexibility: the range of adaptability provides options not otherwise practical or possible. Screens can be ergonomically (re)positioned for a variety of postures and spaces, making a cramped dorm room as comfortable as a corner office. Access to my entire workplace from a hotel means I don’t sacrifice performance when on the road (less applicable these days, but sure to show up again in the future).

Accessibility: the visual nature of this configuration favors sighted persons, but despite that exclusivity, it provides computer usability improvements for those with visual deficits by making things as large as one needs, or managing contrast and lighting. Non-traditional seating or desk (or bed) configurations are welcome, accommodating people with a variety of mobility or physical challenges. In my personal experience, a few months after going full-time-VR I broke multiple bones in my foot, with no weight-bearing for four months and major elevation requirements for the first two. I didn’t fit at my desk, and for weeks I had to elevate my foot high enough that the recliner in the living room was my only option. Out I went with the laptop, headset, and full command of my multi-display setup in all its versatile glory (incidentally, for anyone with weight-bearing restrictions from lower leg injuries, I highly recommend a hands-free crutch — it was an enormous help during my convalescence).

Accessibility in VR is still developing, and will eventually come to include a much wider set of features: color and other vision adaptations, motion attenuation or magnification for motor and neuromuscular challenges, navigation and memory aids (for both virtual and physical environments, by way of AR), neurodiverse management tools, etc. The opportunity to so completely mediate sensory experiences and modulate physical controls will open a range of inclusivity surpassing the most advanced technologies currently available. This inclusivity is about more than biological and neurological adaptation, too: many socio-economic barriers lessen or disappear once in VR (though electricity, bandwidth, and headset are major investments in many or most parts of the world; there’s more work to do on that front).

Why NOT

There are some caveats to all of this, and that may make it less suitable for some people or circumstances.

You lose situational awareness with your visual field occluded (obviously), and if you’re using headphones at the same time that cognitive cocoon of isolation could be problematic or even risky — it only makes sense in an otherwise safe and secure setting. Then there are physical demands of wearing the hardware for long periods: getting into the optical “sweet spot”, establishing proper balance and weight distribution (and building musculature), maintaining temperature, cleaning and caring for equipment, and so on.

To call the current breed of productivity tools quirky or idiosyncratic would understate how clunky and fiddly they can be. I’m willing to put up with a lot to make this work: tolerating instability, jumping through frustrating hoops to get everything configured just so, scouring for obscure tools or adjustments, and pampering my carefully assembled house of cards so nothing can knock it over. This field is rapidly changing, full of alpha and beta products, each requiring frequent adaptation as they introduce new conventions — it’s not enough to be familiar with VR, each product in the chain requires learning how they approach the concept.

Even as standard conventions and stable, best-in-class products emerge, not everyone needs this much screen space, has appropriate material to make good use of it, or can afford to be oblivious to the outside world. Conversely, for some it’s not good enough — lacking in resolution, bandwidth, features, hardware quality, physical form factor, etc. Or there may be objections on principle or political grounds, such as FaceBook’s ties to Oculus hardware (FB offers a business-class version of the headset without their account requirements, but at a much higher price for the same hardware — though still not so expensive as the Vive Focus 3, which also runs this software).

I see enough promise in the current technology to be worthwhile. The patience to wring every ounce of capability from my tools bears fruit in my daily work, and I’m happy to keep using everything I have right now. But this is all about what is — the future, what may be, is far more exciting. Most of the above, both good and bad, won’t matter as future developments will be solving different problems in far different ways.

The Future

Successful consumer technologies generally tend toward smaller, lighter, faster, and more ubiquitous — VR has been no exception, and there’s every reason to believe the trend will continue. New breakthroughs, features, and form factors will emerge and integrate as seamlessly with daily life as other technologies on which we’ve come to rely. We will inhabit a world of commingled illusion, the simulated and substantial blending together by varying degrees.

Realism will increase (perhaps to hyperrealism) and our ability to perceive and interact with simulated objects and settings will be indistinguishable to our senses. Acting in simulated contexts will have physical consequences as systems interpret and project actions into the world — telepresence will take a quantum leap, removing limitations of time and distance. Transcending today’s drone piloting, remote surgery, etc., we will see through remote eyes and work through remote hands anywhere.

That’s obviously some distance into the future, and that “successful” prerequisite is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this presumption. I’ve talked a lot about the specifics of my current setup and experience, but looking that far out will require shifting to the abstract. The tools will be shaped by their use along the way — what are we going to do with them? A good way to answer this is to look at what we have been doing with them, and see if we can figure out why; if we understand the intent we might be able to project the destination.

Going back to the definition of “virtual”, the driving force in its evolution has been a kind of communal neuroprosthesis — which is just a fancy made-up way of saying “a shared mind.” Humans have been augmenting memory by distributing it to one another, combining ideas (processing power) for problem-solving, and in essence crowdsourcing civilization itself. Along the way, we added entertainment value through those same channels, but the core tenet remains: externalize aspects of cognition and exchange them with our neighbors. I’m not going to try to explore the value, politics, and economics of what we share, but the sharing itself is key.

Inventing better ways of getting working knowledge from one person or group to another can increase the resilience and capacity of those groups — likewise for motivation, directed attention, etc. Enriching that transmission with better-suited techniques and technologies is naturally rewarded with faster and more potent exchange: increased fidelity and reduced barriers to entry make it easier to get things in/out of our collective heads.

“Increased fidelity” doesn’t just mean verisimilitude: making things seem more “real” has its place, but isn’t everything when it comes to literally sharing ideas. For that, we need alignment with natural thought processes: communicating the same way we think, losing less in translation. And it turns out, one of the best ways humans think is with space.

Memory Palaces, or the method of loci, is perhaps the most effective mnemonic device ever created. Dr. Lynne Kelly has proposed that pre-literate cultures maintained their encyclopedic knowledge by combining a similar approach with physical, ceremonial settings: using and shaping their surroundings to aid the memorization process. But this extends well beyond strong memories and tribal lore — we readily do versions of this today in our personal spaces, often as a means improving or delegating executive functions: we put things in places as a prompt to take action, we accumulate related tasks and materials together to prepare over time, plan future activities, and so on. We use the very environment around us to think:

Reliance on and off-loading of mental storage and work to such external devices massively boosts the storage capacity and complexity of information while effectively guiding individuals’ behavior toward their goals. Those goals can exist at much further distances across space and time than was the case using just the internal mental means of representing information.

Barkley, Russell A. Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved. Guilford, 2020, p. 112

VR and its eventual successors give us access to vastly more complex means of “off-loading mental storage and work” by providing infinite malleable space, and assigning more meaning and capability to the actions we take within it. That meaning will be rich and potent: practitioners of sign languages, such as ASL, already imbue their personal space with all kinds of nuance, demonstrating relationships, temporality, distance, magnitude, and other aspects through the physical placement and expression of word forms incidental to the actual words. Space itself takes on meaning through indexing, a kind of spatial pronoun.

Our very psyches will become entwined with the worlds we shape, using lessons from psychodrama et al to bind subconscious meaning to externalized objects and elements. We will walk through our own minds and consciously sculpt ourselves.

Interleaving all of this with our physical environments and enabling truly shared experiences will lead to a kind of collaborative cognition: thinking together.

If that’s where we’re headed, then the green field, blue ocean opportunity right now is human-centric information theory development — using neuroscience to combine spatial navigation and cognition as a starting point, and building from there to shape the terrain and guide the creation of language, tools, and systems to bring that vision to life.

As I said before, I don’t insist on my version of the future — but I do love the idea of using technology to cultivate mutual understanding, unify people, and propel their creativity.

Appendix

Disclosure

I receive no compensation or sponsorship related to the products, services, or entities mentioned herein, nor use affiliate links.

Frequent Questions and Skepticisms

Are you an Immersed employee (or a shill)? No. I’m just a geek who uses their stuff to do my stuff — they’re nice folks though, and have built a decent community. I recommend stopping by their Discord sometime. I wrote this article independently, without compensation, and agreed to let Immersed host it on their blog.

This will never be mainstream. Is that a question? That doesn’t seem like a question. It’s perhaps somewhat short-sighted and overlooks the growing number of contributors to the field as well as Immersed’s own success in their most recent fundraising. I do agree that “this” will probably not be mainstream in its current incarnation, but it’s the foundation of what it will become, and that will be mainstream.

Nobody needs that much space. Yeah, and 640K ought to be enough for anyone. Me? I do highly contextual work, with multiple work orders and their histories open, supporting reference documentation, API specifications, several areas of code (and calls in the stack), tests, logs, databases, and GUIs — plus Slack, Spotify, clock, calendar, and camera feeds. I tend to only look at 25% of that at once, but everything is within a comfortable glance without tabbing between windows. Protecting that context and augmenting my working memory maintains my flow.

Motion sickness: Yes, VR-induced nausea is a real thing. And no, of the many people who have demoed my rig none have become nauseated. Well-tracked VR in a stationary setting (or at least one where visual and vestibular systems remain in agreement) eliminates most potential of simulator-sickness. High frame rates and low lag take care of most everything else.

Is it disorienting? In the context of changing environments, or taking the headset off after long work sessions, no — there’s no disorientation. Adapting to the new environment is immediate, like moving between rooms, and since the focal length in the headset matches regular human vision there’s no acclimating or adjustment. Though I will say, taking it off to find that night has fallen can be a touch startling, but hyperfocal nerds at their computers have always had to deal with that.

Why use Oculus hardware vs others? Specifically, with more capable headsets out there, why settle for what’s largely considered an expensive toy?

• Foremost, capability — it runs the productivity software I like, and there are very few that do that.
• Convenience — it’s readily available, easy to work with, and versatile (portability, configuration, interoperability, etc.).
• Cost — it’s by far the most affordable headset in its class, and while I have a tendency to be lavish with my gadgetry I’m still a cheapskate: I love a good deal and a favorably skewed cost/benefit ratio even more.
• Critical mass — Oculus’s large market share means ease of replacement, available accessories, software library, and longevity for the product’s service life. They’re going to hang around to make more, and I won’t be stuck with something useless.

Other Programs

A short list of other VR programs I use by category.

Productivity: I’ve looked at almost everything out there, and always come back to Immersed as the most capable for my needs. Not that there isn’t value in the competition, and it’s encouraging that so many people are working in this space, but so far it’s been the best for me. The fine folks over at Five by Five did an amazing write-up on their experience in product selection that mirrors many of my own findings.

Collaboration

• BigScreen
• Walkabout Mini Golf (or TopGolf)
• MultiBrush (OSS successor to TiltBrush)

Meditation

• Calm Place
• Supernatural
• MultiBrush

Exercise

• Supernatural
• Beatsaber
• Pistol Whip
• Synth Riders
• The Thrill of the Fight

Creativity

• Gravity Sketch
• MultiBrush

Entertainment

• Too many to list, but: Onward is my number-1 jam, followed by BigScreen

See Also

• XR for work
  - https://www.youtube.com/c/XR4WORK
  - https://www.facebook.com/groups/xr4work
• Five by Five:
  - https://www.vrfor.work
  - https://fivebyfiveglobal.com