Editor Elsa Lam and her former architecture school classmates met for a virtual class reunion on Gather Town this spring.
Over the past year, many of us have been working almost exclusively from home, collaborating remotely with colleagues. After work, much of our socializing has been through screens, too. The novelty of this wore off long ago: even my three-year-old is sick of video calls.
Organizational behaviour researcher Andre Spicer, of the University of London, notes that Zoom fatigue has a neuroscientific basis. ?When we interact with another person through the screen, our brains have to work much harder,? he writes. ?We miss many of the other cues we?d have during a real-life conversation, like the smell of the room or some detail in our peripheral vision.? The compression of online space also contributes to the exhaustion. Ricocheting between a dozen meetings a day can produce a sense of whiplash. At an online conference I attended, one feature was a virtual networking space, which promised to pair attendees for two-minute conversations. I?m an extrovert who loves networking in real-life, but I recoiled from the prospect of being instantly paired with a stranger.
In real life, physical space helps us negotiate these interactions. At our offices, we walk between meeting rooms, stopping for a coffee en route. We suss out a conference crowd before deciding who we want to introduce ourselves to.
In a bid to recreate this feeling, an increasing number of virtual tools...