That said, when I try my hardest to think objectively about the future of work, I think VR is going to be everywhere.
Workers going into factories will become exceedingly rare. The cost of humans is high both from a safety and headcount perspective, and more and more of manufacturing pipelines are becoming automated end-to-end. Service repairs will likely happen remotely and only require humans to be onsite if absolutely necessary in the future. It's good for business.
There is a ton on "dark factories" to be found online. Also, there are many startups that have significant traction which are bridging these two worlds via AR:
When it comes to knowledge work, I think anywhere where you have to work with visuals will become a predominant VR stomping ground. If you need to be working with 3D models (lots of engineering + manufacturing) or flat UIs (being able to point and pan and modify is more natural with hand gestures), VR will likely win out. I also think VR will create a space for completely new ways of constructing software architecture. This could be a bridge to creating architectures visually for the first time (want to define a service that automagically becomes a kubernetes service and node on the backend? create a box here and give it some parameters!). The interactivity of this kind of build feels very natural, and it's how we actually already do things in a more limited 2d context. My guess is the killer feature here with VR is the immersiveness allowing for better synchronous collboration.
I could be totally wrong about this stuff, but I think a lot of our lives will change with VR. There are some serious hurdles we need to get over, most notably form factor, weight, and nausea. I feel like these are solvable problems, but honestly that's mostly a hunch more than anything. Would love to hear from others who know more than me!
