We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11413252 and marked it off-topic.

Someone should convince companies to let workers work remotely. Hell, I live on the peninsula and just don't want to commute to sf 5 days a week and most startups (definitely including every YC startup I've spoken to) demand you be in the office 5 days / week. So even being in the same timezone and having the flexibility to shift planned remote days and come to the office with a day's notice isn't good enough.

edit: and before I forget... Why doesn't everyone on the peninsula want to spend 10-15 hours / week commuting to sf? So strange. There's only one possible explanation: engineering shortage!

It does seem like VR is the missing piece. When you can work in Google's VR campus and live with your family back in Knoxville* I suspect property prices in Silicon Valley will come down a bit.

* where your kids can $0.80 autonomous cab ride to their grandparents 20 miles away, or $20 to put them on the same cab ride with a licensed babysitter. Things gon' change.

More generally, presence is the missing piece. VR is one possible solution to that, if you can solve the motion-sickness issues. Holographics (if real-time holos ever reach commercial viability...there's some interesting research on it now) is another possible solution. Perhaps there are other possibilities that people haven't found yet. Wrap around screens, like the Google Liquid Galaxy display? Projectors?

But someone needs to invent a way for office workers to feel like they can have an impromptu conversation, casually, with a coworker thousands of miles away before remote work really takes off.

To me, VR is presence. The metaverse has existed since the first network was turned on. It's the sensation of presence in the metaverse that people are referring to when they say "VR".

Oh yeah but that gets in the way of daily sit-ups or "bring your dog to work day"

But it doesn't have elevators, so you can pitch some random rich guy and get off with $ 1e7 .

No this would require them to practice what they preach, big no no.