The Office of the Future: Virtual, Portable, and Global

Abstract

Virtual Reality has the potential to change the way we work. We envision the future office worker to be able to work productively everywhere solely using portable standard input devices and immersive head-mounted displays. Virtual Reality has the potential to enable this, by allowing users to create working environments of their choice and by relieving them from physical world limitations such as constrained space or noisy environments. In this article, we investigate opportunities and challenges for realizing this vision and discuss implications from recent findings of text entry in virtual reality as a core office task.Much of the hype around Virtual Reality (VR) has focused on immersive gaming and entertainment, and considerable progress has been made in those directions in recent years. The underpinning thesis in this article, however, is that recent VR research progress allows us to also reimagine the office work of the future 1 . Raskar et al. imagined novel use cases for office work based on projection-based Augmented Reality, allowing local office workers with remote groups. Immersive head-mounted displays build upon this idea without the need for instrumentation of the environment with projectorcamera systems and, hence, enable novel office experiences on the go. VR office based on immersive head-mounted displays (HMDs) open up a novel design space with exciting new opportunities for immersive, flexible and fluid office work.Despite the rapid rise of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, the traditional workstation and laptop setups still dominate today's office work. Users type text on full-sized physical QWERTY keyboards and use a mouse or trackpad to select and manipulate on-screen objects. Common activities such as typing, editing text, changing

ReconViguRation: Reconfiguring Physical Keyboards in Virtual Reality

“…The biggest advantage of standard physical keyboards is that they are actually available as virtually every PC and laptop is already equipped with a physical keyboard. Instead of asking users to remove keyboards during VR use to make space for dedicated VR input devices, it might make more sense to flexibly integrate the keyboard into the VR experience, at least for scenarios such as office work [29]. Keyboards provide haptic feedback that can be used in many ways, for example for virtual keys, sliders, or to simulate reactive surfaces such as the case of whack-a-mole.…”

“…In addition, we are interested in studying if our approach is also working for other type of keyboards. For instance, using a laptop keyboard can be very interesting to explore because we potentially see many people travel with only their laptop and a mobile HMD, a view that is also shared by others [20,29]. Laptop keyboards have different form factor and key design which is likely to open up possibilities for additional design exploration, for instance by allowing gestures by swiping across the physical keys [83].…”

Breaking the Screen: Interaction Across Touchscreen Boundaries in Virtual Reality for Mobile Knowledge Workers

“…Recent prior work has begun exploring how to support knowledge work using MR [39,44,81,96]. Early work investigated the use of projection systems to extend physical office environments for interaction with physical documents (e.g., [54,88,94,122]).…”

“…Such a display is suited for displaying different views of information (or layers) that are semantically connected by their 2D location. On the other hand, we use a very limited input space: While most referred prior work span all the angular range of the display as an input space, we only use the interaction space on or near the tablet in order to support interaction in constrained physical spaces [39,71].…”

“…Recent progress in virtual reality (VR) technology makes it possible to provide knowledge workers with a portable virtual office. This office can provide many potential advantages for mobile work, such as 1) providing a well-illuminated, private environment with wide display areas regardless of the physical surroundings; 2) enabling a virtual recreation of a consistent spatial workspace; and 3) relieving the user of physical limitations, using large and even distant displays while the user is remaining seated and the hands are resting on a table [39,81].…”