Shortly after COVID started (but before I retired from the US Air Force in 2022), I was working in an office with a bunch of programmers. I myself was a server admin.

We were exploring ways for our squadron to stay connected, even though half the squadron was at home at any given time. We were doing split half-shifts during COVID. Half the squadron would come in for the first half of the day, then they would sanitize everything and go home. An hour later, the other half would come in and work the rest of the day.

Zero physical contact between shifts. So if anyone developed COVID symptoms, their entire shift would stay home for 2 weeks while the other half of the squadron came in full-time to keep operations running.

One of the proposed ideas was to have everyone join Gather. It's basically a top-down 8-bit style world like old JRPG games, except you could design your own virtual office workspace, then others could create avatars and be invited to the office you created.

They had proximity chat, so if you were close enough to an avatar, you could just talk through your mic and be heard by them. They also did zoom-style video meetings and Slack-style chat boards.

Plus it was basically a game, so you could get creative in how you designed your office space. You could have karaoke rooms, mini-games, etc. You could design the place to look like a dungeon, or a cyberpunk building. I knew one guy who built a whole labyrinth of offices so he had a private place to hide out and work when he needed a break from his office mates (without being caught logging off). Another guy built a massive outdoor garden to explore, for when he just needed to "get outside" during his shift.

We played around with it for a while, but the company eventually wanted to charge us to keep using it, and we couldn't justify the expense to higher leadership. In the military, every expense paid to a business needed a government contract written up and no one was willing to make and approve one for some random virtual workspace development company that no one has ever heard of before.

For the record, we mainly used Zoom and Slack during COVID, but we talked about moving off those programs when they started demanding government agencies pay for continued use. I know we already had contracts with Microsoft and we were already shifting a lot of resources over to Teams as our virtual workspace. I retired around that time, so I have no idea what happened with all that.

I'm enjoying retired life now, but I still think about Gather every now and then and how cool of an idea it was for a digital landscape.