The Virtual Era - Creative Collaboration
Published: 2020-10-13 01:23:23

The time where we interact through a screen more than in-person has come and it's extremely boring.

Although most of us can now work and tend to meetings in our underpants, we are starting to realize that working from home is not as much fun as we thought it would be.

Most of us have dreamed for a long time of working from home, it was almost a goal that we strived to accomplish. Only now that we have been given the opportunity, we have noticed what it truly feels like to no longer be a part of the office culture. No more walking into your colleges at the coffee machine or to quickly pop into your manager’s office for a chat. Not to mention the lunchtime shenanigans and Ping-Pong games.

Let’s face it, going to the office had its benefits and some of our best ideas and breakthroughs would happen during lunchtime or the off-time between work, goofing off. Now I wash my clothes in my off-time between work and the ideas don’t get much brighter than my underpants.

Video conferencing is a long way from replacing in-person meetings. It is still very impersonal and lacks most of the benefits of in-person interactions.

On a video call you’re either staring up someone’s nose or they are sitting 2 meters away from the camera and you can barely hear them. Not to mention the connection, picture quality issues, and technical difficulties. Video calls are boring and overrated. It still takes too much time and effort to get a video call going. People are never ready for the call so the first 5min of most calls are "can you hear me?" messages after you have eventually downloaded another .exe file to join the call.

Eventually, you give up on the one guy, he's a “no show”, and the other “phoned in” because he could not get his mic working. Now it’s more or less just a conference call with bad audio.

On video calls, you often can’t see body language and hand gestures nicely not to mention facial and micro-expressions which form a large part of communication. This makes the perfect opportunity for miscommunication, normally in an environment where slight miscommunications can cost millions.

On the up-side, these frustrations are luckily creating an amazing opportunity for creative collaboration ideas.

I have heard of a company where everyone has an avatar in a maze type game that they need to navigate through to get to their next task/meeting with game areas in between. You can then bump into colleges and have a quick chat, play a game, or walk into a meeting room and start whiteboarding ideas and then off you go through the maze to your next objective.

With virtual work environments popping up where co-workers can collaborate and with VR technology on the rise, these problems are being solved in very creative ways.  I am extremely excited to see what future virtual collaboration technologies will hold.

I might be a little optimistic but hope that we will soon see a world where our gaming and working worlds will merge and we will have a virtual life where we manage a little avatar like a sims character, go to work, drive around, have fun with friends and basically live a virtual life in a virtual world.