Ergonomics of Office Work in a VR Environment: A State-of-the-art Literature Review

Paper in proceeding, 2022

Virtual Reality (VR) holds promise as a potential professional work tool – one such potential is to support office work tasks. VR is a simulated environment accessed via head-mounted displays and hand-controlled devices for interacting with the virtual interface. This paper aims to provide a state-of-the-art review of empirical research on VR-based office work, focusing on ergonomics. A structured literature database search and criteria-based exclusion led to a total of 5 papers addressing office work in a VR environment. The research on VR-based office work identifies potentials and drawbacks relevant to consider for future research and developments. The identified studies examine technical solutions, task performance, user experience and comfort when using VR-based solutions. The fast pace of technology development, e.g lighter headsets, increased field of vision and screen resolution, new controls, and the emerging plethora of new software may resolve many identified challenges, while perhaps introducing new problems.