Trying to drink while working in VR proves tricky. I tried it once, but accidentally waterboarded myself and had to stop for fear I would drown myself. Even if you do manage to grasp it safely, the base of the goggles will stop you from actually drinking unless you perform a dangerous manoeuvre, tilting your head far enough back for the liquid to dribble into your face.
Not that I needed a cup of coffee, because the Oculus Rift is perfectly shaped to prevent any and all use of cups, mugs and glasses while wearing it. I had headphones on, so I’m not totally sure, but I’m pretty certain my editor was openly laughing at me banging around the desk trying to find where I’d left my mouse without knocking over my coffee. The latter’s quite hard, and it gets even worse the first couple of times you lose the mouse. But it turns out that there’s a difference between being able to type without looking at the keyboard and being able to type without being able to see your own hands, even in your peripheral vision. I even have some evidence of that, based on the fact that I used a blank-keyed Das Keyboard for a few years. It’s surprisingly hard to find and use the mouse and keyboard. The first thing you notice about trying to do actual work in virtual reality is that a host of minor irritations caused by the fact that the real world aren’t there. The ability to look away from your screen and see the sun breaking over a pristine landscape, rather than grey clouds depositing grey rain over a grey industrial estate, is quite pleasant. That’s perhaps the best thing about doing your work in VR. If you have a dinky monitor, it can be quite cool to play your favourite game on a virtual 100” screen.īoth apps let you alter the surrounding environment as well, placing your virtual screen anywhere from a calming savanna to a crackling campfire. There are a few reasons you might want to do that, mostly around the ability to make that virtual desktop really, really big. Virtual Desktop is more stripped-back, with the sole focus of placing your desktop in front of you in a strange virtual space. Poised and ready for some real work in virtual reality. With a business hat on, I could also see it being useful for giving presentations to an audience dispersed geographically. It’s perfect for, for example, watching a movie “with” your partner on another continent, or playing PC games in front of an audience. BigScreen is a screen-sharing app, letting multiple users sit around a massive virtual display. Neither is designed to let a journalist work in a web-based CMS in virtual space (which it turns out is perhaps because that’s a bloody stupid thing to want to do). In the end, I decided to switch between two Oculus apps which give me a view of my own computer desktop, but in virtual space: BigScreen, by BigScreen, and Virtual Desktop, by Guy Godin. So my options for the bulk of my work were limited. If my job was manipulating 3D objects or visualising complex multidimensional datasets, then maybe I would have been better placed to make the most of transporting myself to a fully computer-generated world for hours on end. This is, I confess, not the best type of work to do in virtual reality. Like many people, the majority of my work involves a desktop computing environment and a text editor. I thought I’d come out the other side being able to answer questions like “is this the future?”.
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