No headaches. No eye-strain. Just heightened productivity!

Renji Bijoy

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Sep 10, 2018 · 4 min read

While working out of the Techstars Austin office, an alumni founder mentioned to me that she was jealous of how focused I am every day at work. She was referring to how, when even in a high-energy co-working environment, I’m able to simply put on my portable Oculus Go headset and instantly teleport to a distraction-free virtual world surrounded by the multiple virtual monitors spawned from my MacBook, as is our entire distributed team for over 8 hours every day.

The Benefits of Working in VR

1. Being free of distractions enables you to enter a mode of deep-work (a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time).
2. Portability enables you to work wherever you’d like (ie., couch, porch, airport, etc.) while still having your entire workstation with you (ie., multiple monitors, whiteboards, etc.).
3. Customization of your virtual workspace exactly to your specifications (and imagination) is possible since everything in VR is just virtual software (as opposed to physical objects).
4. Remote collaboration is orders of magnitude more effective when you’re sitting side-by-side with your remote team virtually. Sometimes chat and video-conferencing just don’t cut it when you need to screen-share (pair-program), or whiteboard together.
5. Time can be transcended (maybe…). Remote teams around the globe sleep at odd hours of the day in order to wake up with their remote team. VR users have claimed to reprogram their Circadian rhythms more effectively using artificial sunlight in the virtual world, also contributing to increased productivity with their remote team.

Best Practices to Retain Comfortability in VR

In order from most to least effective methods:

1. Adjust your headset straps correctly to fit your exact size (not too tight) so that the lenses are perfectly centered on your eyes, and the weight feels comfortably distributed.
2. Clean the headset lenses whenever there are smudges or dirt on it. This will remove any distortion from the image.
3. Sit in a comfortable posture to reduce back/body strain.
4. Position/stack monitors vertically in VR instead of horizontally. Your neck gets strained less when your head looks up/down, as opposed to left/right.
5. Dim your virtual screens in VR to reduce eye strain.
6. Take periodic breaks, just like with physical monitors. This also gives your wireless headset an opportunity to recharge its battery (safer than keeping the headset plugged in to a power source all day).
7. Adjust your room temperature to be a couple degrees cooler than usual. This will offset the heat coming from the headset.

The Future of VR Ergonomics

Software: Immersed Comfort Mode

One of the principles the Immersed team codes by is making software that works for you. The barrier to learning for users should be minimized, which is made possible by software augmenting a user’s experience to be more user-friendly. Similar to how one of our goals is to remove the need for using controllers altogether and instead enabling users to use their bare hands to manipulate the virtual world (by running our A.I./Computer-Vision software on your laptop webcam to detect your body, similar to an Xbox Kinect), the entire user-experience in the virtual productivity world needs to be optimized as well. For example, we could follow a user’s historical screen-brightness trends from their Mac to auto-inform optimal screen-brightness in VR, rather than having the user to manually adjust the brightness of each screen. Or, we could reduce necessary neck movement, range, & strain by increasing the user’s field of view sensitivity, making their monitors float into view, rather than expect the user to turn their head all the way to see a desired monitor.

Hardware: Project Half Dome

The team at Oculus is hard at work fixing the vergence-accommodation conflict with Project Half Dome. In today’s world, the screen’s focus plane in VR is at infinity, preventing your eyeballs from needing to converge when focusing on “closer” objects. This makes pixel-density an issue when focusing on “closer” objects that should have more detail. So as a solution, the Half Dome team at Oculus will use eye-tracking technology to detect pupillary convergence, and thus, adjusting the screen’s distance to the user’s eyes to increase/decrease apparent pixel-density. This will bring human eyes in VR closer to natural movement and functionality.

The Inevitable Future of Computing

The tech giants, Facebook (via Oculus), Google, Microsoft, Apple, MagicLeap, and others, are all pouring billions into the next generation of computing, whether it be Augmented, Virtual, or Mixed Reality. There’s no doubt that spatial computing will become the norm.

In the meantime, Immersed is working extremely hard every day to make working in a virtual world, not only as compelling as possible, but as comfortable as possible.

Sign up for Immersed here!

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