Microsoft Research thinks VR can revolutionize the way we work at office

When you mention VR, most of the people think it as a tool for immersive gaming and entertainment. Microsoft Research recently published a paper in which they talk about the potential of VR in work environment. They claim that VR office based on immersive head-mounted displays (HMDs) will enable immersive, flexible and fluid office work. VR based work environment can offer following advantages:

• Using VR head-mounted displays (HMDs), users can work in ideal environments of their liking: wide, well illuminated, private, and with a wide display area without outside disturbances.
• Users who travel frequently might like to keep their familiar work environment constant (for example, the number of monitors, their order and arrangement of the applications around them, the shape of the room, notes on a virtual whiteboard, etc.) A VR office allows everyday office interactions to transition from locations to temporal events. Interactions can be accessed by temporal events.
• HMDs are personal and enable users to work without privacy implicatiosn. Potential access to content can be controlled by the user.

Even though there are multiple benefits in using VR office, there are many challenges that needs to be addressed to make this a reality. Some of the challenges include field-of-view of current generation HMDs, stereoscopic image generation technology which causes vergence-accommodation conflicts, tethered nature of HMDs leading to nonmobile VR setup, text entry in VR environment and more. You can read the full whitepaper to learn more about VR office from the source link below.

Source: Arxiv via: WalkingCat