Diðrik Steinsson has a vision of a future where virtual reality headsets can provide a more ideal work environment. MureVR is creating VR workplace environments that are designed to eliminate stress and increase productivity with the help of environmental psychologists.
There’s been a trend within the tech industry to replace isolated offices with more open environments. MureVR’s website cautions that, “the benefits of an open collaborative workspace are paid with concentration difficulty and less privacy as well as increased level of stress. This is the problem we aim to solve.”
Diðrik talks about collaborating with environmental psychologists to create VR environments that reduce stress, use the best colors depending on what task is being done, and creating tailored spaces that address specific needs and aesthetics.
One open question is how much the social stigma and perceived isolation of wearing virtual reality goggles will play out within the corporate environment. One the one hand, it may actually decrease unnecessary disruptions and allow people to be more focused and productive. One the other hand, there are potential negative perceptions and impact of using virtual reality headsets within an environment and context in which you’re expected to be social and interact with your co-workers as a part of the helping each other and sharing knowledge.
That said, anyone who works in an open office can attest to how much headphones are used to socially isolate yourself from the chaos of your surroundings, and so perhaps wearing a VR headset would just be another level of making it that much more explicit.
Listen in to our conversation we explore using VR to take breaks and increase productivity within your virtual workplace environment.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.133] Didrik Steinsson: My name is Dietrich and I'm with a company called Mireille VR. We're making like a virtual reality office space. We're working with environmental corporate psychologists making like an office space that makes the user feel good. Like he has increased focus, comfort and productivity.
[00:00:32.002] Kent Bye: Wow, and so what type of insights are you getting from these corporate psychologists in terms of what makes an environment that makes people extra productive?
[00:00:40.408] Didrik Steinsson: Right now, there are only two kinds of office environments. It's like a normal standard closed environment, which you like enclose yourself in, you know, an office. And then there's this open space work environment. So both of these environments have their cons and pros, but the thing is that for years they have been like searching for something new, something that could possibly take the good from both and just like making an office environment that just is perfect in every single way. So that's what we're trying to do and that's what their study is bringing us. They know exactly what's good and bad about office environment. The environmental psychologists, they know what the overall surroundings of our environment, the place we live in, the place we want to be in. They know which things are good and which things are bad. We're basically drawing that. We're just taking everything that's good and trying to put it into virtual reality.
[00:01:41.136] Kent Bye: So what are some of those good and bad things for what makes a good work environment?
[00:01:45.358] Didrik Steinsson: There are certain colors and certain things in the environment that have good effect on you. For example, if you see the horizon and, you know, water and the sun and natural objects, there are certain colors that affect you in a positive way. So it's how things are organized around you. It's just a lot of stuff. And there are certain things that have a negative effect on you, like certain colors, like tall buildings surrounding you, like enclosed environments, stuff like that.
[00:02:14.035] Kent Bye: So even though you may work in an environment that has no office windows, that you can go into virtual reality and have some virtual sunlight.
[00:02:22.400] Didrik Steinsson: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, choosing the environment that you like, that's what we're aiming at. Making an environment that suits every single user.
[00:02:32.527] Kent Bye: And since you are building this, I'm curious if you're kind of eating your own dog food in the sense of like going into these virtual environments in order to work on the process of creating these virtual environments.
[00:02:45.153] Didrik Steinsson: We're doing that, but like motion sickness and there are a lot of things that, you know, have to go better with the device itself, the Rift. We're looking at the whole, you know, we haven't like decided like The Rift is promising and it's like, it's probably, it knows, not probably, it's the best thing we have. But the prototype I tested yesterday was just like, it's promising, it's really promising and it's like, it didn't feel a thing. So yeah, we'll probably be eating our own dog food with the new device.
[00:03:15.633] Kent Bye: Yeah, I guess that's one of the biggest limitations, is with the DK1, the resolution is probably too low to actually read text legibly. It gets a little bit better in DK2, but you can still see a little bit of the pixelation, and so with this new prototype, it does seem to be a lot higher resolution to be able to read text in that way.
[00:03:33.617] Didrik Steinsson: Just like John Carmack said yesterday when he was asked about productivity products for virtual reality, he gave it like a couple of years, like at least one or two years. For example, because of the resolution is not good enough. I think you have to have like 4K on each eye that you can work comfortably and you're having like kind of same thing that you couldn't be getting from your screen, like HD screen or something like that.
[00:04:00.790] Kent Bye: Wow, he said 4K per eye, rather than just 4K is what it takes to be able to read text in that way comfortably. Yeah, that's crazy.
[00:04:07.959] Didrik Steinsson: It's like, what is it, an 8K screen or something like that? The way things are moving right now, and what John Carmack said earlier yesterday, that virtual reality is basically changing the way that the screen manufacturers work. They're putting more into making screens that have higher resolution, more bitrate, everything about it. So regarding just seeing how fast things are moving right now, it doesn't worry me. I think it's going to be, we'll have the product ready when the consumer version launches. It's not going to be perfect, but that's just going to be because of the, you know, because of the device. So eventually when the screens get better, we'll still have the product there, but it's just going to be better because of the screens.
[00:04:56.284] Kent Bye: I guess one thing that comes to mind is that, you know, whenever you're working on a regular screen, you have the concept of eye strain, like looking at a computer screen for too long. What are the impacts of looking at a virtual reality screen for eight hours a day when it's just a few inches from your eyes?
[00:05:11.864] Didrik Steinsson: We've thought about that. That's the reason why for the beginning we just like, it's called break room. So when you get it, you can like take maybe a couple of hours each day in this environment just to get like charge your batteries, being in a soothing environment while you're working and at the time when you want to focus on something. I think everyone that has tried the Oculus Rift have experienced that strain. It's like you get tired, you get sweaty, but the Oculus team has to work on that. I think it's probably gonna work all right. I don't know how or if the Super Amoled screens have less effect. I don't know. I think it also comes with, you know, the brightness levels you choose and stuff like that, so I don't think it's a problem, you know, in the long run.
[00:06:00.933] Kent Bye: What's the longest that you've spent within Virtual Reality in one sitting? It's like one half an hour.
[00:06:08.705] Didrik Steinsson: I don't think it's long, but it was enough. It's just whether the device is built, you get really sweaty. It wasn't the eye strain, it was just like, you know, many different things that affected me. It's like, yeah, the bitrate, the motion blur, the everything we have now and like the development kits out there. So yeah, but I didn't get dizzy. It was just like, I was just tired.
[00:06:31.443] Kent Bye: Yeah, the longest that I've spent is probably about two and a half hours and that was in a Riftmax Theater interview with Gunter with like three or four other people. We were doing like this roundtable interview on his show Virtually Incorrect, a show about virtual reality and virtual reality. And the thing that I noticed is that I don't know if I would have been able to do that if it was just by myself, but because there was other people and there was all this social interaction, then it made it a lot easier to kind of just spend the longest time I've ever spent in the Rift, which was like two and a half hours straight. So I'm curious, if you're a VR, if there's going to be any sort of social component of, you know, when you're working, you're working alone, but sometimes you actually need to collaborate with other people. So what are some of the telepresence or collaborative features that you think about implementing?
[00:07:17.133] Didrik Steinsson: We started with a really big, crazy big idea. The original version of the Break Room product was supposed to be like a multi-cooperative environment where you could be in the environment of your choosing, but then you can actually meet an avatar of someone else. But he wouldn't be experiencing your environment, he would be experiencing his own ultimate work environment. And we were thinking about multi-conferencing, but we just scaled down. We've also been thinking about, because people want to interact with other people and they want to know what's going on around them. So we've been thinking about all kinds of things to make people more aware of their surroundings and placing cameras. You can switch the mic, for example, if you're working on a laptop you can switch the mic on the computer, on or off, just to check if someone is trying to talk to you. So you don't have to take the device off every time someone is trying to talk to you in your workplace. So if someone picks your shoulder, you can just turn the mic on. And then you can say, like, what? And the person can interact with you without having to take the whole thing off. Yeah, but the multi-user... Myself, I have a background in sales for telecommunication companies, so that's one of the things. That's how this idea got into my mind, because I just thought virtual reality is a great place for multi-conferencing and stuff like that.
[00:08:46.966] Kent Bye: One of the things that a lot of developers and just creative types like to do is to go to a cafe where there's lots of people and there's some chatter in the background and maybe they'll be listening to some music and maybe some white noise on top of that. I've heard it's kind of the ultimate soundscape is people talking with a little bit of white noise there just to kind of like help calm your mind down enough to be able to have that extra focus. But it's sort of a counterintuitive thing to have sort of people chattering, but yet people do it all the time to go to a cafe to really focus and get into a zone. And so have you thought about that and how to recreate that type of ambiance within your product that you're creating?
[00:09:26.978] Didrik Steinsson: We thought about making like, think about like calling it like the comfort zone. There's a certain part of our products which we'll not like make yet But it's also like something that we've been thinking about doing on the side It's kind of like a battery charger and it's like you go into an environment you put in the rift and You see a certain type of color. It depends on what kind of situation you're in. Are you stressed or just like tired, and then you put the right kind of noise into your ears, like brown noise, white noise, grey noise, stuff like that. Eventually we want to have it like a part of the product, you can choose your sound you want to have, because people are different, as different as we are many. The sound is, of course, like, I think sound is one of the key components of virtual reality, like Michael Abrams was saying, like, you know, it's a key component to make virtual reality work. Of course, sound effects and the theme of the environment has to be something that makes you calm down and keep focus. So, yeah, we're working with that as well, so.
[00:10:37.645] Kent Bye: Is there any insights from the corporate psychologist's perspective in terms of what type of sound is most optimal?
[00:10:44.777] Didrik Steinsson: Not that I, you know, it's more like the environmental psychologists. There are certain sounds in the nature that make people relax, like a little snorting noise in the wind, like flowing water, not like dripping, because that, you know, makes you pee. and some kinds of like nature sounds that have good effect on you but like white noise and these kinds of things like people talking it's most of the time it's because of the surroundings that you are in you know that's the distraction that's what we're making with Break Room Room like the visual surroundings your visual surroundings the environment you're working in is supposed to do what the noise in the cafe is normally doing because We have the tendency to be looking all around us, trying to think about something. But if the environment makes that effect, makes you actually calm and more focused, you don't need the chatter or the white noise.
[00:11:44.747] Kent Bye: You mentioned that, you know, if you get to a certain environment, then it can, you know, even though it's beautiful and in the nature, it may actually make you feel like you don't want to work. You know, if I imagine being next to a waterfall and in the middle of nature, maybe the last thing I want to do is sort of pull up a laptop and start working, but just enjoy that ambience. And so have you found that there's like this sort of crossover, like it's too beautiful in nature or if putting on the virtual reality set, it kind of creates that distance that you can kind of Dial it into 11 with the nature and it's not gonna like make it less productive.
[00:12:17.506] Didrik Steinsson: Yeah, that's like the That's a fine balance, you know, you have to that's why we're in like heavy research and development mode right now it's just and working with the environmental psychologists is it's a lot of work and Like these are factors that we have to of course we've been thinking about like, you know you have to actually should affect you in a way that is It would increase your productivity, not make it less. There are certain colors that you can input into the environment that they bring out the productivity side of you. So the environment shouldn't be too detailed, for example. And waterfalls and stuff like that, that doesn't add anything. It's more of like a streaming water.
[00:13:00.982] Kent Bye: And so you had mentioned that you had met some people here at the Oculus Connect conference that just happened that were in the same space. What were some of the takeaways that you got from interacting with other people?
[00:13:12.035] Didrik Steinsson: There are not many. There's some developers here that are working with environments, like taking 3D pictures. stuff like that and the whole panoramic 360 filming these kind of environments that's something like that we've been thinking about maybe like if someone really wants to work like at home but he can't he's on a move that we could like incorporate that environment and he could actually be working at home wherever he is like if that suits him you know it's if he thinks it's better than our environment it's like You know, I don't know. It's like just like got my mind going. It's like we haven't decided anything on it But it's I think it's you know related
[00:13:52.833] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it can provide?
[00:13:58.797] Didrik Steinsson: The ultimate potential in virtual reality? I think the productivity side of virtual reality and the educational sector, that's where it's going to really get interesting. We've all played games. For me, it's like, I don't know, there's nothing in the game side that makes me excited. I mean, I love to play games, and I'm going to play these games. I think there's more to virtual reality than that and I know it's really good that the focus is on the gaming side right now because it's gonna get attention and like people are talking about it and the gamers they're incredibly passionate but I think it's gonna end up somewhere like in different areas like on the productivity side and the like educational sectors. I think that's really exciting.
[00:14:44.955] Kent Bye: OK, great. Well, thank you. Thanks. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
