[I strongly endorse the vision of the author of this interesting piece from The New Yorker for a practical and user-friendly technology that uses spatial presence to create a digital version of environments that enhance “immersive single-tasking” work (and I’d add creativity). As he notes five years after first exploring the topic, we’re not there yet but we’re getting closer. –Matthew]
[Image: Credit: Illustration by Ben Denzer; Source photographs in animated gif in the original story by Paul Denzer; Stephanie Denzer; Kathleen White; Lily Offit; Akshay Almelkar]
Can Virtual Reality Fix the Workplace?
The struggle to create a digital alternative to the analog office.
By Cal Newport
December 6, 2021
Not long ago, I decided to try to write an article in a virtual world. This was not the first time I had this idea. In the spring of 2016, a student in the computer-science department at Georgetown University set up an HTC Vive virtual-reality rig in a conference room and offered to give demonstrations. I volunteered and was impressed by the experience. He started me in a mad scientist’s laboratory, cluttered with equipment and whizzing gadgets. I crouched down, looked under a desk, and inspected the pipes connecting a sink to the wall. The next demo featured an underwater world. At some point, a whale swam overhead. I remember being startled when I looked up to see it so close and apparently so large—my first moment of convincing virtual presence.
The timing of this demo was fortuitous. Earlier that year, I had published a book,“Deep Work,” that was a mix between a manifesto and an instruction manual on the importance of undistracted focus. During this period, I was thinking quite a bit about ways to enhance concentration; this explains why, soon after my experience with the Vive, I wrote a speculative essay about how virtual reality could aid creativity: “Imagine, for example, that when it comes time to . . . tackle a new chapter in your science fiction novel you can place yourself in a quiet room in a space station with a rotating view of the galaxy twinkling outside your window.” A captivating virtual environment, I argued, would help us resist the “addictive appeal of inboxes and feeds” and potentially access “massive amounts of deep work-fueled productivity.” I even gave this concept a suitably techno-optimistic label: immersive single-tasking.
My excitement level was high, but my options to act were limited. The system that the student had demonstrated was expensive and required the virtual-reality headset to be tethered to a powerful computer. The setup was also complicated: the student had to place and calibrate infrared sensors around the room. As a young professor with small kids at home, I lacked both discretionary time and income, and it didn’t seem practical to become involved in experiments in virtual productivity.
Then the technology improved. Last May, I wrote an article for The New Yorker about the power of novel environments to improve concentration. I reported on Peter Benchley’s escaping the distractions of his attractive carriage house in Pennington, New Jersey, to instead work on “Jaws” in the back office of a nearby furnace shop, and Maya Angelou’s retreating to hotel rooms, where she would remove the artwork from the walls. Describing these examples of analog immersion got me thinking again about the potential of digital tools to create the same kind of productive cocoon. A bit of Googling revealed that in the half decade since I wrote about this topic, virtual-reality systems have become significantly cheaper and more powerful. For less than three hundred dollars, you can now purchase an Oculus Quest 2, a fully self-contained headset that can be used right out of the box. Also, I was clearly not the only one thinking about applying virtual reality to the realm of work. The Oculus app store now boasts an entire section dedicated to productivity. It was finally within my reach to test whether immersive single-tasking had potential. So, a few weeks ago, I bought an Oculus, downloaded a popular productivity app called Immersed, put on the headset, and decided to go to work.
When you launch the Immersed app, you’re taken to one of several available virtual rooms. For my experiment, I choose a gable-roofed lodge with exposed wood beams and views of forested hillsides on all sides. This space is furnished with a combination of couches and wooden tables, which face rectangular fire pits that crackle when you get close. The feeling of immersion that the headset provides is startling. The room is presented in a wide field of view in stereoscopic 3-D that gives a convincing sense that some objects are farther away than others. As you move your head, the view shifts seamlessly to follow. From a technological perspective, these effects are hard-won. When I look out to the hills beyond my virtual lodge, I’m actually staring into an LCD panel, roughly the size of a standard smartphone, positioned just a few inches from my eyes. A pair of hybrid Fresnel lenses bends the light rays coming in from the display into parallel angles, easing fatigue and tricking my brain into perceiving the light as having originated from farther away. A collection of four outward-facing sensors on the exterior of the headset continually maps the room to help calculate where exactly my head is positioned in space. This information feeds into a powerful Qualcomm chip, known as the Snapdragon XR2, which re-renders the scene seventy-two times a second, altering the view presented to each eye to create a simulated stereo vision. All of this complexity must dovetail just right for me to forget, even if only for a few minutes, that I’m sitting on a worn chair in my office, next to a potted plant that I need to water and a desk cluttered with papers.
The signature feature of Immersed is the ability to replicate screens from your personal computer in the virtual environment. Using handheld controllers, you can reach out and grab a screen, move it to a different location, and stretch it to your desired size. For my experiment, I position a screen that is mirroring the word processor open on my laptop above a virtual table and expand it to the size of a large flat-panel television. Now it’s time to write. I bring my real laptop over to my chair. In my headset, I see its screen hovering in front of me. A soft rain begins to fall on the digital mountains. I take a moment to think of something appropriate to commemorate this first step into virtual productivity, eventually writing a sentence: “As I type the first draft of this article, I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room.” The key word here is “eventually,” as the literal first letters I type are: “Vzzs. K ]].”
With the headset on, I cannot see my keyboard and my fingers aren’t properly lined up. The Immersed app anticipates this issue and offers a clever solution: a mode in which you can teach the outward-facing sensors on your headset to recognize your hands and your real keyboard, providing a rendering of both inside the virtual world. As someone who was new to this technology, however, I struggled with the steps required by the calibration routine and ultimately gave up. The virtual keyboard wasn’t the only advanced feature that I failed to master. Immersed offers extreme flexibility for setting up displays. You can create several different virtual monitors, and, through the proper use of your controllers, you can push, pull, expand, tilt, and rotate each surface to an exact position. The subtle controller movements required for this manipulation eluded me. I eventually settled for crudely shoving my main screen until it landed in a reasonable position.
As I learned when I spoke Renji Bijoy, the founder and C.E.O. of the company that created Immersed, at least a third of the thousands of active monthly users on the app are software developers, and many more work in similar information-technology fields—a demographic that appreciates the type of advanced features I struggled to deploy. As he explained, these power users particularly enjoy the ability to add five different virtual screens in their Immersed environment, which is more than can be found in all but the most over-the-top real-world offices. In a demonstration video that I came across on YouTube, an Immersed user positions three large monitors in a semicircle around his seat, then adds a fourth above, angling downward from the ceiling, where he can see it when he tilts his head back. Immersed not only makes such environments possible, it also makes them portable. “Software engineers love to sit on their couch, or porch, or in their hotel, and have all their screens with them,” Bijoy said.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, multiple startups had been investigating the use of virtual reality to improve remote co-working. This plan makes sense: sharing a virtual whiteboard with three-dimensional avatars seems closer to in-person collaboration than a phone call or video conference. The problem, Bijoy explained, is the hassle involved in booting up a virtual-reality rig every time you needed to meet: “The friction was enough that people would just say, ‘Let’s jump on Zoom real quick. That would be quicker.’ ” Bijoy wants to instead persuade people that they should spend all of their workday in virtual reality, not just when they need to interact with other people. If you already have the headset on, it’s easy to virtually collaborate. The hard part, of course, is convincing people that, when it comes to their regular work, staring through Fresnel lenses at an LCD screen a few inches from their eyes is somehow superior to a normal computer on their normal desk. Providing the type of over-the-top virtual monitor setups that power users crave has turned out to be a good start. Returning to the original purpose of my experiment, I was heartened to learn that thousands of users are spending nontrivial amounts of time each day working in a virtual world, as this finding validates some of my predictions from 2016. It still, however, falls short of my full vision. The animating goal behind immersive single-tasking was to use technology to change the rhythm of work itself. I want to enter virtual environments not just to gain access to more computer screens but to escape the freneticism of the screens that I already have.
As I talked to Bijoy, I described to him my vision for an advanced version of an app like Immersed. In this vision, the virtual environment is separated into different spaces for different types of work. Perhaps you begin in something like a pleasant café, where multiple large monitors make it easier to check e-mails and update your calendar. But then, when it comes time to work deeply on something demanding, you move to a new space—perhaps a virtual recreation of E. B. White’s spartan writing shed, overlooking Allen Cove in Brooklin, Maine, or Captain Nemo’s study on the Nautilus—where you face only a single, floating screen, on which all you can do is write. Later, if you need to brainstorm, you can retreat to a simulated activity with no screens at all, such as wandering the empty halls of moma or tossing rocks into Walden Pond.
The idea wouldn’t be to spend your entire day in virtual environments. After checking your e-mail and Slack, or focussing on something deep, you might take off your helmet to meet with real people in a real conference room, or enjoy lunch with a colleague. I’m interested in broadening what’s possible during the periods in which you’re already alone and using technology to increase productivity. Virtual reality could take the overlapping onslaught of information that we currently squeeze into the limited real estate of a laptop monitor or smartphone display, and spread it back out, over both time and space, returning us to a more human rhythm of tackling one thing at a time, each in an environment that’s conducive to the effort. For certain élite slivers of the knowledge sector—Oxford dons enjoying ornate, dust-worn libraries, or artists retreating to the solitude of a studio—this type of cognitive breathing room is already possible, implemented in the real world at considerable expense. Virtual reality could make something like this richer experience of work more widely available. Bijoy listened politely to my pitch. He appreciated the idea but underscored its complexity. “We’re not there yet,” he concluded. But we’re certainly closer now than we were five years ago.
When I mentioned my virtual-reality experiment to people I know, several reacted with an instinctual discomfort. Perhaps they were reminded of a recent video, in which Mark Zuckerberg, performing with the mechanistic mannerisms of a cyborg running outdated software, introduces his vision for a virtual-reality “Metaverse.” In the video, he selects an outfit to wear from a virtual mannequin, then teleports to a space station where he plays cards with a robot and a human friend who is inexplicably floating face down. Not surprisingly, this pitch fell flat. Few seem eager to spend their free time in a Facebook-sponsored, evil nerd panopticon. And that video, of course, is just one layer in the thicker patina of silliness that covers so much of virtual-reality boosterism, with its emphasis on the fantastical and its easy dismissal of analog experience.
What differentiates immersive single-tasking from this more speculative futurism is its concentration on office productivity, a context that’s already inextricably cybernetic. The reality is that the way we currently toil, with our lives so mediated by the demands of cramped screens and incessant in-boxes, is undeniably unnatural. Is an experience like the app I described to Bijoy really any more artificial than checking e-mail a hundred times a day, or spending seven straight hours staring at Zoom? When it comes to knowledge work, we long ago stumbled into the digital wastes east of Eden. Now that we’re here, we should be open to whatever might help us regain some clarity.