[frbr]

This is where it gets interesting, because many of the things you've mentioned are things that we're spending a lot of time on thinking through.

At the moment Spot has "headphones mode" which signals to others that you prefer not to be interrupted. It also temporarily mutes notifications and other things, just like putting on real headphones in real life would. We're very conscious of these things, and coming from UI/UX research I believe it's paying attention to these fine details that add up to a great product overall.

[remram]

If I have to step into that virtual space and put my headphones on/off it is probably not in sync most of the time. Most people won't consistently remember/spend time letting your app know what social clues to give to other people. This is the entire advantage of those clues.

And if I do spend the time, why not put me in the "available for chat" Discord room or similar? What's the advantage of turning those explicit status settings back into subtle social clues in a virtual 3D world, other than making things complicated for coworkers?

[frbr]

An interesting hypothesis. Maybe the deeper question is, does the virtual world really need to reflect the physical world in a very accurate way, or does it suffice to represent a subset of that? And then, how accurate does it have to be? Does it map 1:1 or are there indirections that would work well to convey meaningful information and trigger actions that make sense?

I guess many important clues get provided implicitly. For some reason you want to mute notifications for a while, so you do that, and your avatar reflects it, but it may not be necessary to truly be in headphones mode whenever you happen to be wearing headphones, or vice-versa.

Our goal is to simplify things and avoid artificial complexity wherever possible.

[remram]

Did you consider that a tree list that people call "rooms" might be a sufficient subset already?