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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

If the tech giants are truly ready to embrace permanent wfh for a large % of their employees I think we could see a land rush of innovation around wfh collaboration tools on the horizon, including some AR/VR applications. That is what I'm most excited about.

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I suspect the main thing we'll get, tech-wise, if WFH expands substantially, is more and more normalized spying.

*"productivity tracking"

*Coding APM

not just that. remember what they say about work home balance or separation? it's only going to get worse for here.

we are already having people's kids and family on conference calls...

Comments like these continually make me happy that my place of work does no such monitoring and trusts employees to be productive.

Someone shared with me an article [0] that some company is doing some of their meetings in Red Dead Redemption 2, around a campfire. While I don't believe it to be more than hype right now, it fired up my imagination. I think it has a nice ring to it, staying under the starry night, putting some meat on the fire, talking to the people in my team.

Then I got to thinking 5 - 10 years in the future when maybe VR Tech is going to be cheaper and more ergonomic, with Unreal 5 [1] coming up and who knows what the engines a decade from now will look like, how awesome would it be to work from home and have the daily meeting in some amazing virtual space.

No point to my post really, only that work conditions are hopefully going to be more playful in the future.

[0] https://mashable.com/article/red-dead-redemption-2-coronavir...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw

Similar concept. I had a business professor in university who, for an assignment, made us take one of our classes through secondlife

https://secondlife.com/

Was a very eye opening experience for many students.

Wow, had no idea that thing is still around. I remember giving it a spin more than fifteen years ago. :)

Something design specifically for the work environment: https://www.sococo.com/

I hang out with one friend in GTA 5. I make a private server for our clan, and we just drive around and talk.

Don't we have everything already? We have email, audio and video calls, chat including groups and file transfer. Wfh doesn't have an unsolved problem to innovate over does it? It's human behaviour and communication skills that are lacking, not the tech imo...

Probably more QoL improvements than drastic change. Getting the tech out of the way to optimize actually using it.

Hadn't thought about this before - but you're spot on, some serious investment in innovating in this area could massively improve the whole remote working experience. Here's hoping!

My work from home has been screen share and audio, not video. I'm really glad there isn't video. I don't know what I would get out of VR vs screen sharing.

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