Maybe with enough presence remote would become even more commonplace. A man can dream.
1) Writing on virtual whiteboard in VR just doesn't feel right, there's no tactile feedback. It's doable but doesn't beat a real whiteboard (nothing beats a real whiteboard)
2) Observe people working at a whiteboard. It's predominantly an asynchronous one to many form of communication. Multiple people writing on the same board at the same time isn't how we communicate with each other.
The best in class tool I've found to date is Microsoft's Whiteboard app running on their 84" Surface Hub. Anyone who has the budget I highly recommend taking a look at it.
The app itself is free on windows 10.
To be fair, people said that in 2007 about virtual keyboards.
There's no possible such affordance in virtual space. You're literally writing in air.
But it doesn't feel that it's hitting a button (because the button it's virtual), and people then had made this point repeatedly (e.g. in favor of Blackberry).
Chalkboards are actually a great way to communicate and collaborate in small groups, and have been for a long time one of the main forms of communication in professional mathematics and some other technical fields.
The chalkboard is a very democratic medium, because anyone can more-or-less produce the same output, it is easy to add notes over / adjacent to other people’s writing (including formulas, diagrams, ...), and the possibilities are very free and open-ended. This stands in contrast to fancy typography and bespoke technical diagrams, which are often slow to produce, difficult to modify, and require great expertise to do well.
Using a chalkboard well as a collaborative thinking tool takes practice though.
And it is true that this is the way many people use whiteboards, as a kind of presentation tool rather than a thinking tool. But that is largely down to lack of practice with the chalkboard/whiteboard as a personal, one-on-one, or small group tool.
There are plenty of people who successfully use white boards as a tool for routine technical conversations in small groups, with multiple participants writing on the same board.
“Not everyone is writing literally simultaneously” would be a vacuous and uninteresting statement, so I’ll give the previous poster the benefit of the doubt that he/she was saying something more substantial. No kind of conversation involves every interlocutor literally simultaneously talking/writing in the same space at the same time: that would just be a cacophony of monologues, not a conversation at all.
What this means in practice is that we have a lot of software that makes it easy to bring a group of strangers in to pseudonoymously vandalize a whiteboard by drawing dicks on it - a true "cacophony of monologues." See also: most comment threads.
That doesn’t mean people collaborating won’t be taking turns as a practical matter, enforced by social convention.
Well, the main benefit of writing on a whiteboard is for you to draw your thoughts and for others to see what you wrote/drew. Not to get tactile feedback.
Besides it would be trivial to actually write on a whiteboard on your office while wearing a VR headset and have it be seen by others in VR space in different offices/countries (thus getting the "tactile feedback" as well).
Sometimes I'm hesitant to start scribbling on the drawing space because I don't have the social queues to not step on someone else's thoughts. Maybe this Whiteboard app solves that?