At least when I think of what could be done with a virtual work environment, I imagine it being used to go beyond the limitations of a workstation. We’ve been stuck with the same peripherals for 50+ years, the same GUIs for 25 and we’ve been trying to balance sedentary office work with health for as long as we’ve had swivel chairs. VR allows you to be on your feet moving around and literally putting your hands into the computer while engaging with a truly 3D environment, if we can’t revolutionize work with those gimmes then we deserve our RSI and back pain.
While that sounds like it would work in theory, we've been experimenting with 3D interfaces for work for decades and... it just hasn't caught on. I used to have a 3D desktop application back in the day, where your character could walk through a virtual room to open up a browser, apps, etc. It was a gimmick. Nothing beats hitting cmd+space and three letters to start an app (besides having it open already / cmd-tabbing to it)
Sure some things would stay the same but what if I rephrased it and asked: if you had an infinite budget, what would your ideal office look like?
There have already been inklings of the new interfaces we could invent like Tilt Brush. We shouldn’t be thinking along the lines of how we could do easy things differently, we need to think how can we do hard things intuitively?
Edit: another consideration is that if we want to be less sedentary maybe it is worthwhile actually getting up and walking over to a filing cabinet in order to open a file browser. If it were an option it would probably be more effective than setting reminders to get up and move.
