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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

> If I'm on a Zoom call with 8 other people and the conversation shifts to something that doesn't concern me, I can bring up a code editor and continue hacking away at something without advertising that to my colleagues. But if I started in VR, I'm basically stuck there.

This is simultaneously a criticism and a big selling point

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Not for employees. In fact, I can't see a single reason why workers will want VR environments for remote work.

They can easily provide a feature where the employee could flip a switch and temporarily (semi?) hide herself, signaling that she is currently occupied with something else. Yes, in a Zoom setting, she doesn't have to broadcast that. But that's just cheating.

> They can easily provide a feature where the employee could flip a switch and temporarily (semi?) hide herself, signaling that she is currently occupied with something else.

That's like saying "you could just start doing something else" during an in-person meeting. We all decided that's not ok, so why would we be granted an exception in a VR setting ?

"We all decided that's not ok". And we also all decided it's ok to start doing something else in a Zoom meeting, because nobody will notice anyway?

Yes the whole point of VR is to command your entire attention the same way as if you were physically in a room. The pro-VR crowd (basically limited to anyone getting paid to work on it for Meta) thinks this will replicate the benefits of in-person work. Everyone else sees it as replicating the drawbacks of in-person work.

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