>What confuses me on point 2 is that I think we're going to have to basically invent new paradigms for "window management". The thing I'm picturing is doing a PowerPoint presentation in VR. We'd have people jostling for the best view, and whatever "immersive" metaphor for presenting is likely to be clunkier than a classic Zoom call where the slides are just walked through on one big window.
As someone who has given a couple presentations in VR (and spent ~400 hours coding/working in VR), there's a lot to be done here. Some very basic examples of value-adds are:
- You (or your audience) can manipulate the presentation "viewport" to any size and/or replicate it wherever each viewer prefers in their own space (e.g. you can sit down on your couch and watch the presentation on a big screen, or have it as a "second monitor" next to something else, or treat it Hololens-pinned style and have the screen follow you around in your vision while you're working on something with your hands). IME, it's much nicer than effectively giving yourself a limited vertical screen monitor when you split screen a meeting/presentation on Zoom.
- Streaming a replicated presentation video (like a powerpoint) to each individual person instead of streaming a singular one over a Zoom call lets viewers refer back to / rewind to previous slides without disturbing others' views.
- Having a large view of a presentation yourself means you can also take notes directly on that presentation in real time, circle/underline text, draw arrows between concepts, whatever you need to help yourself remember what the speaker said later. I helped beta an app (that unfortunately shut down) for taking notes in the margins of videos in VR which would probably be a perfect use-case for things like presentations/classes. You could play back or scrub through the video later to see your notes in time.
- Obvious, but any presentation about a 3D _thing_ will benefit from being displayed in a 3D space. I'd much rather see a new Tesla in front of me than look at a 2D image of it, or see the scale of a new roller coaster, statue, building plan, etc. In "physical presense" situations like this, there's also a value-add over the real thing because you don't have to "jostle for the best view" -- you can just phase through (or not even see) other viewers and always have a front-row seat (and teleport around if you want more angles). For smaller objects, being able to manipulate the scale of the object (especially without also affecting the scale other people are seeing it at) is a nice QoL, too.
- For meetings and things with audience participation, it's way more intuitive in a 3D space to split up into groups (and e.g. only be able to see/hear people near you) by just... walking over to a group and joining in. I can't imagine doing something like small group icebreakers in a company's Zoom presentation.
There's probably a lot of new paradigms and workflows to emerge when the VR space is a little more mature, as well. I've been out of it for a few months now (moved and haven't re-set-up base stations) and I tried to limit my value-adds to just presentations, but I'm excited to see where it goes in the productivity realm.