Over the last few weeks, we met our global teams for the first time in VR to develop a workshop agenda. We used the application Engage to see each other with avatars that had our actual faces in a room equipped with whiteboards. Our task was to develop a workshop agenda for the e-scooter company Tier. Specifically, we were tasked with deciding who should be invited to the workshop, developing a “How might we” question based on possible pain points, and planning how to go through each phase of the Design Thinking model.
I liked that we, as a group, could see each other and talk and move like we do in real life. We were able to talk freely, just like being in a real meeting room, and we were able to understand each other’s emotions through the avatars’ movements and body language. We could also attach sticky notes to a whiteboard. Talking to a chatbot (which looked like an actual person in the meeting and helped us brainstorm ideas) and asking questions both to the bot and to each other in the group was a lot of fun.
However, there were also many things I disliked. First, it feels different talking to people in Engage than it does in real life. Weird and unnatural-looking avatars with wrong faces or invisible arms were a big issue in our session. Also, we weren’t able to use the meeting room like a real room because of Engage’s low resolution. You couldn’t even read what was written on the sticky notes from just one meter away, which really disrupted our brainstorming. Because of this lower resolution, it was also exhausting to wear the headset for the entire one hour-long session.
In the end, it was a very enjoyable and immersive experience to create such an agenda in VR, but we are all looking forward to meeting each other next month in Milledgeville face-to-face in a real room.
