Back in 2014, I was a freelance software consultant. I was doing some web and database development, and also helping my mother out with her consultancy doing da

Back in 2014, I was a freelance software consultant. I was doing some web and database development, and also helping my mother out with her consultancy doing database reports. We were traveling around the country, meeting with clients. My mom has some mobility issues due to some old, bad knee and foot injuries. She really should have been in a wheelchair, but most of these places didn't have access ramps or even elevators. So she often just sucked it up and walked the blocks and climbed the stairs. I was pretty dissatisfied with my work at the time. I was spending a lot of time arguing with an IT manager who thought he knew things about software development on one hand, or just writing boring-ass Crystal Reports on the other. Then this newfangled device came out called the Oculus Rift DK2. I also had a Leap Motion device that I had glued to the front of it. It was an exciting time, as decent enough VR to not make the majority of people sick or have headaches hadn't been available--and certainly not at a consumer price point--until then. I hacked around on some things, got a small amount of notoriety amongst other burgeoning VR developers at the time (I'd basically made the first JavaScript library for making VR-capable apps), and then one day I got a call from this company called AltspaceVR. They wanted me to interview for a job. We did it in Altspace. This was my first experience with VR chat. The person I talked to had an HTC Vive dev kit. We stood in a futuristic room and talked, face to face. And it just worked. It felt like actually talking to a person. The conversation was so easy, compared to 2D teleconferencing. I wasn't distracted by my own video feed, worried about how I looked or whether I was providing enough "camera contact". There was body language and a feeling of the bodily presence of the other person. It was immediately obvious that this was far superior than traditional teleconferencing. I had a brainwave about the future of work, meetings with clients without having to travel, my mom no longer destroying her knees, no longer having to fly around the country. And I could be involved on working on this future! If I just abandoned everyone I knew and moved to California. I asked the guy I was interviewing with if he really thought that was necessary. He said they really liked having everyone in the same room together. I asked him what were we doing, just now, talking to each other as if we were in the same room. He vacillated, admitted they weren't dogfooding their own product. And that's when I decided that I had to work in VR, had to work on productivity apps and not games, and had to dogfood it and stick to living on the East Coast. Now I'm the head of R&D at a foreign language training company, where I make a VR teleconferencing app for people to meet together in culturally-appropriate environs to practice their language skills.