Gamers have done this stuff without wasting screen estate for decades. It's the office culture which tries to push video both ways, which creates a vastly different dynamic. It's crazy how researchers largely ignore these subcultures doing just fine.
I think online meetings I had 10 years ago, where we'd share a desktop but it was voice-only for all participants, were easier on everyone than the current Hollywood Squares presentation of most online meeting applications. Those are mentally and emotionally taxing in ways that gaming is not.
We do however spend many hours a day in audio chat, sharing screens discussing technical issues and possible solutions.
This is a vast contrast to how we used to collaborate before Covid, where we'd have long in person meetings, where most of the people in the room drifted off watching the birds out the window whilst a couple of egos would speak to what ever they through was important.
There seems to be an belief, especially in the VR world, that body language, even eye movement is what you have meetings for. This may be important in some domains, maybe sales, but for technical meetings, I don't need to see your eyes, I need to see your ideas... Lets face it, it's a meeting, not a date.
The joke here is, gamers are less tied to the screen than most video call participants feel or even are. That while one requires near-constant focus on the screen, and the other doesn't.
But in any case, when people are working remotely, the vast majority are using audio while they look at a screen, which underscores my point.
Our eyes are the only part of our brain exposed to light and air. It turns out that how we move and focus them affects the rest of brain function.
Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, has researched and spoken about this deeply and at length. Here are three podcast episodes where he dives in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObtW353d5i0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqCEOJSvgwA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze2pc6NwsHQ
I think all three points in these comments can be right: 1) we need alone time; 2) sharing physical space can help creativity; 3) virtual meetings can hurt it.
But we have to isolate the variables. Shared physical space for creative sessions doesn't have to mean open offices, and it doesn't have to mean eliminating solitude. We should also allow for different people responding differently to virtual meetings, shared space, etc, and remember to consider this statistically, as the scientists do. That is, we should try to segment the subjects of the study. Some will prefer screens more, some shared space.
The tech industry remains willfully and obtusely ignorant of the costs of virtualizing human interaction, because people sitting in a room together don't need much software, and nobody's going to build a unicorn on that.
As with long covid, the true and persistent costs of these changes -- virtualizing everything -- will only become apparent in the years to come.