Towards a Practical Virtual Office for Mobile Knowledge Workers
This work targets mobile knowledge workers facing suboptimal conditions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing VR and equipment concepts without introducing new methods.
The paper investigates the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to create mobile office environments for knowledge workers, addressing challenges like makeshift workspaces and physical distance by exploring opportunities for effective and ergonomic work using off-the-shelf equipment.
As more people work from home or during travel, new opportunities and challenges arise around mobile office work. On one hand, people may work at flexible hours, independent of traffic limitations, but on the other hand, they may need to work at makeshift spaces, with less than optimal working conditions and decoupled from co-workers. Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to change the way information workers work: it enables personal bespoke working environments even on the go and allows new collaboration approaches that can help mitigate the effects of physical distance. In this paper, we investigate opportunities and challenges for realizing a mobile VR offices environments and discuss implications from recent findings of mixing standard off-the-shelf equipment, such as tablets, laptops or desktops, with VR to enable effective, efficient, ergonomic, and rewarding mobile knowledge work. Further, we investigate the role of conceptual and physical spaces in a mobile VR office.