- Okay. My face is probably like, just like so red.
- Spatial is an application
that can work across mixed reality.
There's augmented reality components,
you can jump in via the browser or your VR headset,
but essentially it puts you into like a fully simulated,
shared space environment.
And you get to interact
with other colleagues and their avatars.
Just a really neat way to sort of showcase the future
of work, and what's possible right now.
I started working at Mashable only a few months prior
to the start of the pandemic,
so because of that,
I really never had a chance to meet a lot of my colleagues.
I immediately thought to myself like,
"Wouldn't this be a great way for me to like,
I don't know, meet my colleagues
and like do the work with them?
Can we maybe work for a month solely in virtual reality?"
Okay.
- Okay I'm going in.
I'd only worked with Alex for a few months
before the pandemic hit
and then I'd never met Joseph in person,
so I was excited to actually be able to see them,
even if it's, you know, not their actual selves.
Anything was better than a computer screen at that point.
I hope I joined the right room.
- When we first started our meetings in Spatial,
I was very fearful.
I was worried that Brenda and Alex would be like,
"Who is this kook? Why is he making us do this?
This is such an unnecessary part of our workflow."
And then I worried it would also be distracting.
- I found a baseball bat.
- There's an option in your dashboard called "stuff."
It's just this huge library of objects you can pick from.
While we were just chatting and discussing things for work,
Alex would be just arranging all these objects
and playing with them.
And I never took that as a sign of,
"Oh, he's not paying attention."
I took that as a sign of,
"He's actually really engaged and present."
And I know even for Brenda,
she had wanted so badly to play around with the objects
to help focus, but she was worried it would be rude,
so she actually would just focus on Alex's behavior.
And it sort of grounded all of us in a way,
and it added levity.
- Hold on, I found a pizza.
- What?
- The biggest learning curve was just mainly getting used
to the controllers in general,
because I'm somebody that never used the Quest 2.
After one or two tries, it sort of just becomes instinctual.
You just figure out what to do.
How do I scroll...oh, okay.
- I found it pretty natural to acclimate just to that stuff.
You know, I figured out how to make it do
what I wanted it to do pretty quickly.
It's not some VR quote, unquote
experience about riding a roller coaster,
you know, shooting aliens or whatever.
It's meant to replicate the experience
of sitting in a room with your coworkers.
- Yeah. Like, what would you want us to?
Yeah. What do you want us to say?
I'm sorry, what'd you say, Alex?
- Nothing, don't worry about it.
- Sorry, I was thinking out loud.
The advantage that I thought
this had over something like Zoom or Google Meet
was that if I want to address someone,
I can turn and look at them.
And then that,
I thought was one of the more transformative things
about it compared to the way,
the other ways we've been doing
this stuff for the past year.
- Meeting in VR
means that you don't have to be camera ready.
So, I didn't have to do my hair or my makeup,
or even worry about what I looked like.
I didn't realize I had an issue of like,
worrying about that until the pandemic happened
and we all had to chat on video.
But with Spatial,
I didn't have to build in that time
to look ready and presentable.
- Occasionally, every now and then, while we were talking
I would just close my eyes for 10 or 15 seconds.
Just like, no, I'm just, I'm sitting back.
I'm listening, I've got my eyes closed.
And you can't do that when you're talking
to someone in real life, because it's very rude.
But in VR, they can't tell.
And that's great.
The issue I've always had with VR
is an issue I still have with VR after doing this,
is that I just don't like being forced into a situation
where I am not aware of what's happening physically,
immediately around me,
because I'm wearing this headset that's encompassing...
all of my senses are being occupied by this thing.
- I'm stuck. I'm literally stuck.
Oh man, I must have just hit the coffee that was on my desk.
Whoopsies.
The other thing about the headset specifically,
until it is something that is as easy to wear
as like my glasses,
I don't think that it would be something
that would appeal to a lot of people.
- Whatever the future of home VR is,
or home AR, or whatever, needs to be thinner and lighter.
It needs to be something that doesn't
remove you from your physical surroundings
like it does now.
- I would do it maybe like once every couple of weeks
for certain things, like maybe if I wanted
to have like a really goofy get together,
bonding meeting, yes. I think it would be helpful.
- Even in the best circumstances,
it's just not the same
as sitting in your chair in front of your laptop.
- I personally took for granted the connectivity of things
like Google Calendar and that integrated into Slack.
And whenever you have a meeting,
you get the pop-up and you just click the link,
and you're already in your meeting.
I think until we're able to do that with VR,
the process of putting on the headset,
logging in and then click on the app,
and then finding the room, it's just a process.
- The promise of it was much more tantalizing
than the reality of what it turned out to be.
But I think in general, mostly what Spatial's
served to do for the three of us
was facilitate conversations,
and it helped me bond with the both of them.
It allowed us to talk about things
you wouldn't talk about in a meeting.
And as a result, we were able to sometimes get pieces
out of it that wouldn't have been suggested
or even discussed in the first place.
Okay.
- Yeah. We're good.
- Yeah, we're good. I'm good.
- Okay.
- And it's Friday.
- Bye.