It's a shame everybody's using videoconferencing right now. It's... awful. Really bad. The room you're in has to be silent and empty or you distract everybody else, the quality is terrible, you can't collaborate in any way but voice and maybe a shared whiteboard.

It has all the bad bits about staying home with all the bad bits of being stuck at work in a boring meeting. Whereas if we could all actually buy VR headsets now, we could meet in VR. Which is so so much better.

In VR, nobody cares if your dog is licking its balls behind you, or if your kids are fighting, or your spouse is murdering aliens. Wearing clothes? Sure, if you want. Or not. But conversely you can actually interact with your co-meetingers.

Share a space with them, wave your arms like crazy, build stuff, draw stuff, even set up a virtual meeting table with a projector if you're really missing the office that much. And all with bandwidth a tiny fraction of even shit video.

And with VR, you can simulate wasting your life sitting in a metal tube for hours with annoying strangers just to spend an hour in a room with people you could have just sent an email to. But in VR, you murder far less of the planet in the process. It's win win win baby!

Shame we can't get the damn headsets right now. Oh well.

The real benefits of VR are not being properly exploited right now. Partly because people can't control them, but also because it doesn't occur to them. So you should start now and get ahead of the curve. So here's my guide to Productive VR Meetings. In case we ever have any.

1. You can totally play music as well. Nobody can tell you are. Your microphone won't pick it up. If you want to play Initial-D europop while Bob is droning on about project goals, nobody will tell you not to.

2. You can mute your mic. And nobody can see your face, so if you want to sing along to Initial-D eurobeat while Bob is droning on - you can do that too. Just be careful about nodding your head to the beat - they can see that.

3. Put down your controller before you scratch parts of your anatomy. Or dancing. Or stroking the cat. Not because stroking the cat is inherently offensive, but because it looks like you're doing something else.

4. You can put YouTube videos inside VR. And you can watch them instead. Nobody can tell. Just put them over Bob's face, and it'll look like you're listening to him. Just nod every now and then.

5. Set up a voice recognition program to transcribe the meeting for you in subtitles. That way you can read it later at 4x the speed. Much more efficient.

6. Set up a realtime search program for your name. If someone says your name, have it pop up a big warning. Then you can minimise the YouTube and turn off the eurobeat, check the transcript for the last 10 seconds, and respond to the question as if you've been paying attention.

7. Write a script to sit between your actual head motions, and the ones you send over the internet. That way you can hit a button, take the headset off, interact with your family, then put the headset back on, hit the button, and it's like a brief network glitch.

8. Modify the script so instead of just freezing the HMD position when you take it off, it nods away on a loop, or tilts its head to the side like it's paying attention. If you need raw data for this, stick the HMD on your dog and record it while you tell it what you're doing.

9. Intercept the 3D audio stream so you can tell who's talking. Move the transmitted head orientation so it points at that person. And nods and tilts. Meanwhile you can get on with watching your Initial-D YouTube episodes (there's a lot of them to catch up on).

10. Finally, if the bot monitoring the transcript DOES see your name mentioned, have it send a reset signal to the router and call you on your cellphone. This gives you plenty of time to stop what you were up to, get back to your desk, put the HMD back on, read the transcript,

and prepare a plausible answer, starting with "sorry Bob, that was a great question and I was about to reply and then it looks like the VPN got overloaded. So the answer is..."