Honestly after being in cubicles, and then experiencing an 'open office' where it's just rows of desks crammed up against each other... I don't understand all the complaints about cubicles. I love them now. Open office is a horrible regression.
But do you at least have a desk of your own? I agree that open offices are worse than cubes, but there is even a worse system where even desks are unassigned -- supposedly to encourage interaction across groups.
I think it entirely depends on whether workers get out ahead of the curve and embrace them and own the VR environments.
If people stop and consider VR desktops might be a serious improvement over the current open office hell.
You can be relatively impervious to visual and audio distractions not of your own design.
They will probably allow even more work from home as the technology of avatar visuals improve enough that people feel like high bandwidth personal communication between people is possible and comfortable.
The darkside is that VR and AR have very high ability to monitor your moment to moment attention.
They have very high ability to completely control your environment without your input.
If management controls that, it will be an evil thing.
Either a heaven or a hell, depends on workers taking ownership.
I like to stay positive but given how little backbone workers have shown in being herded into open offices, I'm not sure how it will go.
Right now VR environments are still "barf machines". Some people are working on handling the balance problem, but it will be more than just messing with the inner ear.
Instead we might get something like the ball from Lawnmower Man. Heh. Or complete neural bypasses like in Matrix etc.
They will probably allow even more work from home as the technology of avatar visuals improve enough that people feel like high bandwidth personal communication between people is possible and comfortable.
You'd really have to capture facial expressions and body language for that work work well.
Not sure how doable that is with avatars instead of 3d video, and not sure how you'd get the video to not lose anything while editing out the VR goggles.
