VR in the workplace

More than half a decade since the first Oculus Rift VR headset was made available to the public, the world of VR has changed in many ways — some less predictable than others. In the meantime, the company itself has gone through immense changes; most notably, their acquisition by Facebook. 

Since then, Oculus has become Facebook’s flagship revolutionary reality-bending headset. The newest Oculus Quest model has been widely touted as one of the most innovative and successful products in the industry. And the fact that Oculus has been quick to provide plenty of improvements and updates (like advanced hand-tracking capabilities) to their product certainly hasn’t hurt its market outlook. 

The Future of VR

However, the use of VR has gone beyond anything that even the creators of Oculus could have predicted when they started their company. In the beginning, it was intended mostly as an important gaming novelty — one that was predicted to change the ways people interacted with their games. Plenty of industry experts also predicted it would change our approach to entertainment — with interactive virtual cinema experiences propping up in due time.

On the other hand — almost no one could have foreseen how the newest iteration of Oculus Quest could go beyond gaming and make a splash in our work life as well. 

Oculus in the Workplace

The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a paradigm shift in workplace organization. In a matter of weeks and months, all kinds of traditional and rigid corporate structures were forced to adapt to the new reality of tech-reliant remote work. 

And while the technology to facilitate this had already existed — as is evident from the meteoric rise of Zoom — the world’s corporate culture needed to catch up quickly. Soon enough, everybody got used to the idea of teleconferencing and working from home. 

But the sometimes depressing realities of constant working from home have allowed other technologies to enter the workplace — such as VR. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, Facebook was quick to point out how their Oculus Store apps would soon be enriched with collaborative and productive apps.

One of these was an amazing cross-platform and multi-user meeting app called Spatial, while the other was a VR workspace app designed to reduce distractions called Immersion. It will allow Quest users to work across multiple computer screens simultaneously, and even share the virtual screens and space with their coworkers. 

These aren’t the only types of software designed to help remote workers cope with adjusting to the post-COVID19 workspace; however, the concept of virtual reality clearly has the biggest disruptive capabilities when it comes to cloud-based remote work. 

This technology has the potential to create a completely office-like environment in the virtual cloud, which each remote worker could access — having the next best thing to a physical office with their coworkers. 

And the need for remote workers powered by the latest contemporary technologies is only growing — which is why NerdCloud and its team of professional developers are keeping a close eye on what Oculus Quest and similar VR devices could mean for the future of the virtual workspace.