Ever see a couple at dinner, each on their phone and ignoring the other? It’s easy to dismiss this behavior, but in fact it’s a sign of the times. Social behavior is an arbitrary set of standards that govern interactions, and if you open a new medium for that interaction, you can enable a new social behavior. Facebook recently launched an app (“Tuned”) for couples, designed to let them share memories, music, and moods, which surely demonstrates this point. Online life is “in”.
Given that, it’s interesting to speculate on whether things like this are a precursor to a future that virtualizes us, meaning that places us inside an online community that not only eliminates familiar concepts like physical meeting, but also creates virtual equivalents, or even concepts that step beyond what we’ve developed for a physical-centric world. The current youth, and in fact people into their 20s, evolved their critical social behaviors in an online world. Could we all learn to accept a virtual world, at least for business collaboration, and if so, how might it happen? Here’s a possibility; it’s all a game.
Over the last four or five decades, there have been countless studies conducted on the value of business videoconferencing. The ones that actually tried to get answers (as opposed to trying to generate sales) generally found that there was little or no value to video in pairwise business relationships. As the number of people involved grows, the value increases quickly, to the point where at around five people in a conference, the absence of video stalls most progress. Yet video-call applications like Facetime are among the most popular. Socially, at least, we like to see each other, and it may be that past research on videoconferencing was simply imperfect, extending one dimension of a multidimensional problem.
Sociologists probably love this kind of stuff, but it could be important for us all, and not just because a virus creates a flood of working from home. Bringing a lot of people together to do something is expensive, and it tends to foster concentration of population in cities, lengthening commutes as people try to flee the crowds, and increasing pollution. Not to mention the cost of real estate. If we could all work virtually, wouldn’t it create better lives? But can we do that; are we wired to be more social, in the old physical sense, than we think?
Here’s a fundamental truth. Our visual sense is the most powerful of all our senses. We can assimilate more information faster by “looking” than through any other means. Visual terms dot our conversations, even where the meaning isn’t directly visual. “I see” means “I understand”. We establish connections with people by seeing them. A visually impaired friend once told me that the biggest thing they had to get over after losing sight was the feeling of loneliness. It’s not that they were really alone, or even thought they were, but that the lack of that visual connection made them feel that way. “Out of sight, out of mind” in a different sense.
What does this mean for remote work? I’ve blogged about the technology elements that could improve work-from-home productivity, and about project management techniques to promote efficient WFH, but would these strategies hit the wall at some point if everyone stayed home all the time? Could we extend the workplace into the virtual dimension more efficiently, increasing the time period when workers could tolerate it and be productive? Better video, bigger monitors? I don’t think that would do it, because the virtual experience video creates is still a flat and insipid version of reality. So perhaps we have to dodge reality to solve the problem, which is where gaming comes in.
A couple of my gamer friends tell me that the ultimate answer to establishing a virtual workplace that’s truly productive and immersive is MMPG, which stands for “massive multi-player games”. Everyone gets a character/avatar, and everyone inhabits a virtual reality complete with scenery. The more real the interactions in that virtual reality are, the more likely it is that it feels real. Think “Second Life”, but with a wrinkle that within that virtual world, there’s virtual work.
Twenty years ago, about the time “Second Life” came out, we were just seeing the potential for creating virtual worlds. It was clear even then that it’s not just a matter of creating a “virtual world”, external to ourselves. We had to be a part of that world. You had to have virtual-reality goggles that shifted their virtual view as you turned your head and moved, and you had to “see” your hands and feet, be able to pick up something and put it somewhere, or pat a friend on the back. Immersion in an alternate reality is critical for making that alternate real. Augmented or virtual reality has to embrace us, and all that we expect to interact with, including people and facilities.
AR/VR can obviously allow us to create any kind of virtual reality. We can use the tools to create fantasy or science fiction, but you could also use it to mirror the real world, while at the same time fixing real-world issues that might interfere with your enjoyment or with worker productivity. I don’t know whether there’s any research that shows that a virtual conference of avatars sitting on top of Everest would be as productive as a conference in a virtual conference room, but I suspect that it wouldn’t be. We need to craft the virtual environment for the task, which is work and not climbing. What would the ultimate virtual workplace look like? It might be fun to find out.
We also have to craft the people, or at least the avatars that represent them. There’s nothing wrong with having your virtual alter ego aligned with your self-image and not reality, if you don’t take it too far. I’m an average-height guy, a bit gray, and certainly I don’t appear physically threatening. Might I like to be six-foot-two, three hundred pounds of muscle? That’s not happening in real life, but an avatar that represents me in a virtual world could certainly have those attributes. I could look like I want to look, no matter whether I’d bothered to comb my hair or shave that morning. My surroundings could look like the abode of a king, even if I hadn’t cleaned my home office. You can’t go crazy here and develop a couple heads or the body of a horse, but a little ego-preening wouldn’t hurt.
It might actually help. Half those I webconference with these days won’t enable video, so whatever value video has to establish personal connection is lost. In old studies on virtual work, people would hang coats on the cameras because they didn’t want to be virtually viewed. Would they be prepared to connect via an avatar, particularly an avatar that was a kind of perfect self? If that avatar could reflect their movements and expressions, could others in the conference make an avatar connection as easily as a personal connection? If that avatar is a virtual person that effectively represents the real person beyond, isn’t that enough?
This might be just the sort of thing we need to consider for work-from-home. Might COVID have presented a hard, business-centric, justification for artificial reality? Could we build, as some stories have suggested, an enormous computer game that becomes reality? No more offices, no desks or cubicles, no videoconferences. Well, maybe virtual forms of those things. It’s easier to move avatars than humans, to decorate virtual conference rooms, after all. Could we become so accustomed to this sort of thing that we could adapt business practices to optimize its unique capabilities?
This sort of thing could have a major impact on another area that the virus has stressed—education. Reports show that over 40% of public-school students haven’t attended any online classes at all. Of those who have, the majority of students aren’t happy with remote learning, with some saying that they get perhaps a half hour to an hour of useful instruction in a (virtual) school day. If we had virtual classrooms and avatars (with proper control to ensure nobody picked or did anything disruptive) could we make a virtual school as effective as a real one, or perhaps even more “real?”
We actually have the tools to do everything needed to create a truly virtual world, and work within it, even from the office. There are multiple open-source MMPG frameworks, and it wouldn’t be a major challenge to integrate traditional collaboration and web conferencing into one or several of them. Similarly, it wouldn’t be difficult to manage more complex collaborative relationships (the mashups and panels I’ve blogged about in the past). The tools are there.
What we’d need is a model, a framework, that would establish and police a virtual workplace. No weapons in the conference room, all programmer avatars must be fully dressed, rules that mirror those of the real world. We’d need policies to enforce the rules too, and mechanisms to punish those who won’t conform. Most of all, we’d need extraordinary security and identity management. All six-foot-plus superhero avatars look alike, so anyone adopting one could look like any of the others who did the same. Avatar impersonation could be a huge risk, as big or bigger than digitally manipulated video. All this is going to take money and time.
There’s no question that an experiment in virtual work wouldn’t be cheap; everyone would need a suitable VR/AR headset, a suitable PC, the software, and a means of reading movement and expression. Is that more expensive than equipping a real office, though? It seems to me that our recent experience is telling us that we need to think outside the box here. Maybe “think inside the game” is the answer.