Here is what I think is one good goal for practical collaboration using virtual reality: Participants should not care whether or not they are in virtual reality.
While working with other people on creating things, I should be able to seamlessly go back and forth between looking at a screen and being immersed in a virtual world. When I do that, there should not be any radical change in what I’m doing — only a change in my point of view.
There are several implications to this. For example, if I can use hand gestures to create and modify things in VR, I should be able to use the same hand gestures to create and modify those same sorts of things while looking into a computer monitor.
Reality and VR each give us a different — and complementary — set of powers. As we work together, we should be able to freely move back and forth between the two modes of viewing, depending on what is most useful at any given moment.