At the start of the pandemic I saw tools that reminded me of old social flash games I would play as a kid (habbo hotel, club penguin, Gaia online) where you had a kind of avatar you could move around a 2D cubicle farm, and the program would adjust the volume of other people as they moved closer/further from you. Thered always be voice enabled (unless you muted obviousl) but i think the idea was to lower the social cost of initializing voice communication

Neat idea, but personally I think the benefit of working remotely is asynchronous communication - I think we should encourage more forum-like communication rather than something like a ventrillo channel, though bringing back vent would be cool